Opputunities for heat rate improvement through repowering

Technical Report · Wed May 01 04:00:00 EDT 1996

OSTI ID:269591

Pace, S; Walters, A

Increased competition fostered by changes in legislation governing power generation entities has engendered a need to closely assess the economics of operating older-electric generating units. Decisions must be made as to whether these units should be retired and replaced with new, greenfield generation capacity, whether capacity should be purchased from other generation companies, or whether such units should be performance-upgraded by repowering in some way. The repowering alternative has merit when economic factors and environmental considerations show it to project the least cost of electricity over other choices. In addition to significant heat rate improvement, the chief advantages of repowering, include use of existing real estate and infrastructure, existing transmission facilities and staffing. Since the repowered plant usually emits less stack gas pollutants per unit of energy generated than the original plant, environmental benefits can also accrue. Various types of repowering options for improving the heat rate of steam electric plants are presented. These options includes boiler retirement (and replacement with combined cycle or atmospheric fluidized bed combustion boiler), hot or warm windbox repowering (the boiler is retained and a gas turbine topping cycle is added), feedwater heating repowering (the gas turbine exhaust heats feedwater), site repowering (only the site infrastructure is re-used as the site for a combined cycle), pressurized fluidized bed combustion repowering and gasification combined cycle repowering.

• Research Organization: Electric Power Research Inst., Palo Alto, CA (United States); Encor-America, Inc., Mountain View, CA (United States)
• OSTI ID: 269591
• Report Number(s): EPRI-TR--106529; CONF-960524--
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

20 FOSSIL-FUELED POWER PLANTS
FOSSIL-FUEL POWER PLANTS
HEAT RATE
MODIFICATIONS
OPTIMIZATION
RETROFITTING