Coal news and updates

Faced with excess electricity generation capacity and plunging prices for wholesale electricity, Italian utility A2A shut down its gas-fired Chivasso plant, near Turin, in 2014. Earlier this year, though, the plant was restarted. Market conditions have improved, but the main reason the plant was able to get up and running again was new cloud-based technology that helps it operate more efficiently, says Massimiliano Masi, A2A’s vice president of power generation and trading.

 

The GE hardware and software installed at the plant, Masi says, enables it to go from a dormant state to full operation in two hours or less, compared to three previously, thus improving its ability to respond to fluctuating demand brought on by increases in intermittent renewable energy on the grid. That’s a huge advantage, says Masi, “because transmission operators prefer plants that are able to reach full production in less time.”

GE released its digital power plant system for gas plants last fall and for coal plants in June. In new plants, GE’s technologies have increased the average efficiency (in terms of the available energy in the fuel that’s captured for electricity production) from 33 percent to 49 percent, the company says. For legacy coal plants, the efficiency improvements are more modest, while emissions of greenhouse gases can be reduced by 3 percent. Those gains come from optimizing fuel combustion, “tuning” the plant according to the properties of the coal being burned, and adjusting the oxygen flow in the boiler, and by reducing downtime due to equipment outages. GE is one of several big companies, including IBM, Siemens, and Schneider Electric, that now offer some form of digitization for big power plants, including both renewable and fossil fuel plants.

Source: Technology Review