The Internet of Things Could Keep Dirty Coal Plants in Business

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Disclaimer: I am presenting this as if it were LBN - title and direct quote, no commentary.

The Internet of Things Could Keep Dirty Coal Plants in Business

Digitization promises lower annual emissions but could increase them over plants’ lifetimes.

by Richard Martin
July 7, 2016

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.

Utilities have been looking at harnessing the “Internet of things” for a decade, says Tim Riordan, vice president of engineering services for American Electric Power, but only recently has the technology advanced enough to justify the investment. “The potential is huge,” says Riordan, whose company is deploying both IBM’s Maximo asset management platform and Siemens’s Prism system to monitor its fossil fuel plant performance. But he cautions that “to truly integrate all of this, to take it to a grand scale, is not going to be an insignificant effort.”

As at Chivasso, such technology could help determine how long aging fossil fuel plants can operate. Decisions on whether and when to retire plants for good “go all the way to senior leadership,” says Michael Reid, the general manager of technical programs for fossil and hydro operations at Duke Energy. Duke has retired or converted to natural gas 16 coal plants since 2011 and plans to shut down nine more by 2020. Digital technology can improve the efficiency, flexibility, and emissions profile of aging plants, Reid adds, but “substantial design changes are required to make significant gains in these areas.”

[tonyt53]

1. As an engineer that has spent time around coal-fired power plants, I can say that many changed

years ago. The time to bring up a boiler from a cold start to power production has to do with the time it takes to "stretch" the boiler. Those things grow as they heat, and once they are at operating size, they start raising the temperature to produce steam. The TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority), the people that powered the south, changed all of theirs to digital combustion controls in the 80's and 90's. the reason Duke, and TVA are switching to natural gas power production is simple - economics. They can make 35%-38% more profit by converting production to natural gas.

[kristopher]

2. The trend is toward smaller, distributed generation.

This article is focused on a minor ripple in the trend line. The increase in efficiency that is highlighted will not be enough to maintain long term profitability for thermal generation that cannot be called upon within at most a couple of minutes from a dead start. Since the physical size of the turbine shaft is a major factor in determining the response time, the days of the large baseload-sized units are coming to an end.