Section C Ι Asset Optimisation & Environmental Protection

Thursday, 22 September 2016, 15:15-15:45h/C03

Plasma ignitor - Merit order improvement by reduced start-up costs

Gerhard Heinz, GE Power AG, Germany

The German and increasingly the European Energy Sector is relying on renewable energy. Photovoltaics and Wind Power are playing the most important role. Electrical energy produced from this Renewables is depending on weather conditions, is fluctuating and not be directly influenced by the grid operator.

As a consequence conventional coal-fired plants are operated today increasingly in medium to low load operation. Moreover, this result in an increased number of cold, warm and hot starts, associated with increased consumption of more expensive start-up fuels such as natural gas or oil. The related higher fuel costs spending needs to be earned during the remaining operating time on the grid.

These higher start-up fuel costs aggravate further the economic situation of conventional power plants. New developments of GE enable to start-up fossil power plants directly with coal. The system uses a plasma jet igniting the coal directly without the use of natural gas or oil. Successfully performed tests runs on large scale combustion rigs confirmed the reliable and secure direct ignition of various solid fuels.

The purpose of this plasma Ignitor solution is to faster start-up the power plant with significantly reduced startup costs from cold, warm or hot start conditions always reliably and without use of high-priced fuel such as oil or gas. Thus the economics of plant operation is improved. Furthermore, the plasma system allows lowering the stable firing minimum load in the low load range..

The plasma ignition system has been successfully tested for different solid fuels like biomass, lignite and hard coal and worked also impressive during the combustion of coal with low volatile matter content. The achieved development results and the potential commercial benefits in terms of improving the merit order of power plants are presented in the lecture.