Improvement of Existing Power Plants to meet Environmental and Economic Market Conditions

摘要

Capacity increase, fuel price development, aging of installed fleet, market deregulation and environmental commitments are driving the investment decisions of nearly all European utilities. Therefore it is important to know all capabilities of existing steam power plants before deciding about new plants and upgrading of existing plants. ALSTOM Power Service developed methods to analyze total steam power plants with regard to increase of power output, efficiency increase, improvement of availability, maintenance cost reduction and reduction of emissions, especially of CO{sub}2. These methods -ECO|RAM and CO{sub}2Cut - are already used in several projects with very different boundary conditions. In all cases the plants were very well maintained and operated and improvement needs were not obvious. It was necessary to combine the operation and maintenance knowledge of the owner/operator and the design, maintenance and operation knowledge for all main components and systems of ALSTOM Power Service to jointly detect further improvement possibilities. Sensitivity analysis helps to understand the influence of different market scenarios on the ranking of the evaluated improvement potentials. Both methods are designed to separate the promising ideas/potentials in an early stage and concentrate the evaluation process on these potentials. In all projects improvement potentials were detected and several of these have been implemented already successfully. ECO|RAM delivers an investment plan showing costs, earnings, technical description and schedule for each potential; CO{sub}2Cut provides a catalogue of measures to reduce CO{sub}2 emissions. This catalogue is organized according to conventional economic decision criteria and the trading value of CO{sub}2-certificates. The references show that both methods can be used for all sizes of steam power plants regardless if they are used for electricity production only or as CHP.