Baffinland Iron Mine Iron mine Nunavut, Canada

Goals and
characteristics

The corporation Baffinland Iron Mines (BIM) operates an iron mine located on Baffin Island. Two power plants of 4.2 kV were set up to provide the sites with energy. The Cummins firm supplied 8 generators of 1.4 MW each for the mine and 6 generators for the port. These diesel generators meet, with the help of two high-voltage bridges per site, the electricity needs of all the facilities. They are the only source of energy in what is a very hostile environment where the temperature regularly drops to -55 °C in the winter.

Key elements of
the project

The reliability of the systems was crucial, and the redundancy of the control devices was essential. The system architecture included two sets of PLC with immediate backup, fail-safe communication cards, and two IPM per site. To reduce the risks and costs, a full test bench was designed in our workshop to run extensive tests of the automatic sequences. We have installed multiple communications networks on different protocols, including an interface.