Cooling the Hot Desert Wind: Turbine Inlet Cooling with Thermal Energy Storage (TES) Increases Net Power Plant Output 30%

摘要

A case study is presented of a large turbine inlet cooling (TIC) installation in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The application is a retrofit of TIC to ten existing, but relatively new, simple cycle combustion turbines (CTs). This 750 MW (nominal ISO rating) power plant is located in an electric utility power generation complex serving the capital city region of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The location, near the center of the Arabian Peninsula, exhibits extreme elevated temperatures, which have a severely adverse effect on turbine power output and efficiency. The TIC project accomplished dual goals: first, to maximize the power output of the turbine during periods ofpeakpower demand (and high value power), specifically for six hours per day, and, second, to do so at an installed capital cost that is far below that necessary to achieve the same capacity increase through the installation of additional conventional power plant capacity. The solution was the addition of turbine inlet cooling coils, an electric motor-driven packaged chilled water plant, and a stratified chilled water storage tank for "full shift" thermal energy storage (TES). On a peak design day (ambient air temperature of 50℃ [122℉]), the TIC system reduces the inlet air temperature to 13℃ (55℉). The installation achieves a 30% increase in the net on-peak power generation from all ten CTs. And it does so at a small fraction of the installation cost of the three additional 75 MW CT units that would otherwise be necessary to provide the equivalent net hot weather power output.