GESA has been building and maintaining sewage treatment plants and other facilities for decades now. At best, it is simple at first glance. This is because the “art of sewage treatment” lies in the interdisciplinary interaction of chemistry, mechanics, construction, mechanical and electrical engineering, as well as increasingly in the implementation of sustainability requirements and, ideally, even a positive energy balance.
“You have to be able to say no sometimes,” says Thomas Cordes, authorised signatory who has been with GESA for 21 years. “At the end of the project, everybody has to have earned money – including all the subcontractors. You need a clear plan across all trades in project management, and ideally a lot of experience. And something else is needed: resilience, a thick skin and the willingness to talk a lot.”
Consistency and resilience are therefore the success factors in combination with a constant eye on the calculated budget and costs. Experience of course helps a lot. Projects such as a sewage treatment plant quickly add up to millions and dozens of partners have to be coordinated. Many employees these days come from all over the world, making communication a real challenge. “A yes does not always mean ‘Yes, understood.’ This is why you have to ensure that the work result and process have really been understood,” emphasises the experienced project manager Cordes. “It’s better to be a nuisance than to find out afterwards that there was an expensive and time-consuming ‘misunderstanding’.” A sewage treatment plant is a surprisingly complex project. The wastewater must be cleaned of all kinds of impurities safely and around the clock. Physical, chemical and biological processes are combined here. Filters are used, as are bacteria that are kept “alive”. The resulting digester gases are used to generate electricity through CHP units (combined heat and power plants) or to heat the premises. Modern wastewater treatment plants are already virtually self-sufficient in this respect today. Despite this, emergency power systems, colloquially known as “emergency generators”, ensure that enough electricity is ready to guarantee water treatment even in an emergency.
International tenders for the equipment, which are neutral in terms of manufacturers, mean that different manufacturers with very different concepts, logics and control modules are to be used. A central task of GESA is to “interconnect” all modules and render them controllable by means of one switching station. This requires having the machines, measurements, electrical engineering and software well under control, programming many interfaces and, of course, not neglecting IT security. This is because sewage treatment plants can also be targets of cybercrime or terrorism.
“Requirements that are becoming ever more stringent with regard to climate protection, new technologies and the digital transformation with all its possibilities ensure that our tasks do not become boring – quite the opposite actually. The job is quite demanding, but it’s a lot of fun. In that sense – all clear!” is how the 54-year-old sums it up.
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