Abstracts - VGB PowerTech Journal 8/2008
Efficient and Eco-friendly Power Generation at Vattenfall Europe in the Current Setting of Political and Regulatory Requirements
Klaus Pitschke
In the period until 2020 more than 40% of today's installed power plant capacity has to be upgraded or replaced. There will be no reliable energy supply system without conventional fuels. Only a well-balanced mix of energies will be effective in managing unilateral dependencies, bottlenecks in supply or extreme price trends in the long run. Vattenfall uses highly efficient technologies to meet the future challenges.
Energy Storage, a Condition for Integrating Natural Energy Sources into the Electrical Grid
Werner Leonhard
Sustainable energy supply with an electrical grid requires renewable sources of energy like hydro-power, wind and solar energy. Since the outputs supplied by these energies are fluctuating, this does not correspond to grid load. Therefore, large deviations between power input and demand are inevitable. The balance has to be made up for by controllable capacity. Possibilities to feed in energy are presented. The generation of renewables-based hydrogen is a possible variant in view of CO2 hydration.
Challenges to Power Plant Control Systems Through Increasing Dynamical Demands on the Process Engineering
Marcus Kurth and Frieder Greiner
Growing demands on the electrical power system as well as on an economical and ecological operation of conventional thermal power plant units require improved control behaviour. To achieve the dynamic requirements, energy storages of the power plant process are exploited deterministically to exhaust the plant process in an optimal manner. Apart from process engineering resulting from these demands further new challenges emerge on the control system and on the applied control concepts.
Innovative Auxiliary Power Supply Concepts for Power Plants
Uwe Schulz and Wolfgang Pfeifer
Requirements for high availability of power plant and damage caused by short-circuits in coupling, generator and auxiliaries transformers, call for new concepts of linking auxiliary supply transformers to generator connections to satisfy the expectations of operators with respect to no-break electricity and district heating supply. The application of short-circuit current limiters not only provides protection of electrical equipment, such as generators, main generator lead and auxiliaries transformers, against mechanical and thermal stress during short-circuits, but also eliminates the necessity of placing the auxiliary transformers nearby the main generator lead, thus interactive effects in case of fire are prevented.
Control System with Large Availability for the Waste Incineration Plant Frankfurt-Nordweststadt
Rainer Keune and Bernd Schug
Increased breakdowns of modern control systems of power plants have provoked operators to take measures to promote a standard of control systems with large availability and reliability. The VGB Technical Committee “Electrical Engineering, C&I and IT” has developed the VGB Guideline 170 A1 “Measures for the avoidance and handling of instrumentation and control equipment failures”. This guideline deals with the question how preventive or additional measures can help to avoid breakdowns. The waste incineration plant Frankfurt-Nordweststadt is taken as an example to demonstrate how the requirements of the “VGB Guideline 170 A1” were put into practice when designing control technology.
IEC 61850 - Integrating Substation Automation into the Power Plant Control System
Jörg Orth
The new communication standard IEC 61850 has been developed in the substation automation domain and was released 2004 as a worldwide standard. Meanwhile IEC 61850 is already established in many substation automation markets. The paper discusses the implementation of IEC 61850 integrating process control and substation automation into one consistent system in a power plant.
Reducing Auxiliary Power Requirements by Converting Actuators to Frequency Control
Michael Lüpke
Reducing auxiliary power load by installing intelligent frequency converters for controlling speed of pumps and fans is interesting from an economic viewpoint and furthermore technically viable. Technical basic conditions, general parameters and operational pre-conditions have to be taken into account when retrofitting frequency converter systems.
Innovative and Reliable Solutions for Instrumentation & Control Systems in Nuclear Power Plants
Patrick Weber, Heinz-Josef Prehler and Ulrich Tödter
The electrical and instrumentation and control (I&C) systems installed have a major impact on the safety and availability of nuclear power plants. High-performance, qualified products such as the TELEPERM XS safety I&C system are now state-of-the-art-products, with the second generation already implemented in plants. Another example for this sector is the RodPilot, a system used to actuate control rods in PWR.
Standardization of Networks Technologies and EPL Field Bus Implementation
Stéphane Potier and Emma Cameron
Alstom's ALSPA Controplant DCS system is dedicated to the power generation market. Besides of Modbus TCP, Alstom has chosen Ethernet Powerlink for the field network of its control system. Its most important feature is the redundancy technology that Alstom brought to the standard, allowing this highly deterministic network to reach the necessary level of availability to control the process of a power plant. With the field bus on Powerlink, the architecture of Alstom´s system is now completely based on proven and standard Ethernet technologies.
Solid Fundamentals for Wind Power Plants
Mathias Steck
The quality of the wind turbine foundation is an important factor for the overall stability of the whole construction over the lifetime of 20 years. Execution deficiencies might result in costly damage during turbine operation. Standstill periods required for reconstruction work lead to additional losses due to production downtimes. With the increasing utilisation of the foundation structure it is therefore increasingly important that all parties involved in the project - wind turbine manufacturer, project site manager, designer, assayer, contractor and operator – pull and act responsibly together.
Continuous Focus on Quality and Safety in the C&I systems
Robert Hvelplund
C&I systems can have decisive influence on the production availability in the existing power plants. The power plants must be operated more and more economically. The number of operators in the control room is reduced. In order to adjust the complexity of the entire production portfolio, the C&I systems are complicated to a large extent. All the C&I systems are computer-controlled and thus considerably influenced by the fast electronics development - a development driven by the office technology and the consumer market. This development puts pressure on the power plant planners, the power plant operators as well as the suppliers of C&I systems. The presentation shows examples in the form of a model of the service life of a power plant, where it is crucial to give quality the highest priority to guarantee operation safety and availability. The examples relate to the planner, operator and supplier.
Safe and Reliable 24 V DC Sensor and Actuator Circuits
Monika Hennessen
Despite the importance of field control and data acquisition, careful planning of power distribution to and protection of the 24 V DC sensor/actuator field is sometimes neglected. Selectivity and limitation of power are playing a major role in deliberately securing the field level. A further aspect is the "holistic" approach with systematic planning of current supply and distribution of over current protection as well as integrated fault reporting and directly responding from the power plant control room.
Current Developments of Maintenance in Power Plants from the Viewpoint of an Insurer
Rüdiger Beauvais and Martin Valk
Due to cost saving pressure, operators are forced to optimise maintenance of the production plants by means of up to date risk management methods. The present article discusses consequences of such strategies from an insurer's point of view. For identification of potential effects upon loss potentials, a 10 year period of claims data from the German Machinery Breakdown insurance portfolio has been analysed. In addition, insurer's experiences with Non-OEMs will be discussed and German maintenance practices will be briefly compared with other countries' approaches.