To push this along - in the 1960s I was working in Roma, Qld. On one occasion (1964?) I got a tour of the power station (later replaced and now, I am pretty certain on the Eastern Australia Grid Network). This power station was in the middle of town between the railway on one side and a street parallel to and, I think one or two blocks from the main drag.
At the time, the power station was a virtual museum showing the development of electricity in Roma. Again, from memory, there were three spark ignition motor/alternator sets side by side, the smallest a four cylinder around 300hp and standing about 2m high, the middle one a bit longer, being a six of 500hp, and the third also a six, a bit higher and about 650hp. All of these were installed from about 1925 to 1940, and were designed to operate on producer gas produced on site from the scrap wood that went along with the active land clearing then in progress. (some of this wood also went to heat homes).
End on to these three were two identical 1,000hp straight eight diesels installed in the 1950s as power demand increased and the grid extended a bit out of town. Most of the time these were the only engines used, the others (all were apparently serviceable) only being used in the case of one of the diesels being out of service for maintenance. All of the sets ran at hundreds of rpm, and were direct coupled to the alternators, which, on the largest sets were about 2.4m in diameter.
The interesting point was that when I was there, all of them were running on unprocessed natural gas direct from a sub-commercial gas discovery a few miles out of town. For ignition, the diesels used a small quantity of crude oil filtered but otherwise unprocessed, also from a subcommercial well (Richmond No.1) close to town.
John
JDNSW
1986 110 County 3.9 diesel
1970 2a 109 2.25 petrol
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