A real-time cost analysis tool for power plant operations supports owners' and operators' capital planning, operations training and decision making.
Power plants that often start, stop, cycle, two shift, and operate above a unit's rating impact the life of the unit and total associated unit operating costs. Intertek has developed a real-time operations code called COSTCOM that is specifically calibrated to display the maintenance, capital replacement, and wear-and-tear costs associated with these potentially damaging operations. Intertek has analyzed actual cycling costs for nearly 300 power generating plants. These have included conventional coal, oil, and gas fired units—ranging from 15 megawatts (MW) to 1300 MW in size, from subcritical drum type to supercritical once-through units— with turbine, boiler, and balance-of-plant components by varying manufacturers. Plant types include combined cycle and single cycle units' gas turbines; Heat Recovery Steam Generator (HRSG) units; and hydro, pumped-hydro, and nuclear units.
A clear conclusion from these analyses is that the financial costs associated with cycling operations are very high for most power plants. These costs should be displayed for the operators and maintenance personnel so they can help minimize and optimize these costs to meet market/plant conditions. Calculating these costs also allows for their recovery through negotiating informed power purchase agreements, contracting with the Independent System Operator (ISO), bidding into ancillary services markets, and (if possible) transferring costs to other utilities.
COSTCOM's algorithm follows these steps to measure damage on plant components:
The precise damage level is unit specific and dependent on design and unit operating practices. The true costs of cycling and high load operations are often not known or not well understood by utility operators because of the complex effects of these operations on additional capital and/or maintenance spending requirements, increased equivalent forced outage rate (EFOR), increased heat rate, and reduced life effects. Even when a unit is thought to be properly designed for cycling, there are external effects in the balance-of-plant design, water chemistry, etc., that make some units more susceptible to cyclic damage than others. Just as with heat rate testing, cycling units should be subjected to a thorough analysis of their cycling operations and the impact of these on costs in order to optimize operations and determine the true cost of each type of operation. Proper use of this knowledge can then result in significant savings and improved profitability.
Here are some of the features of COSTCOM:
Knowledge of the cost of each type of operation—e.g., hot starts, warm starts, cold starts, load follows, shutdowns, and trips—is essential. Accurate and, ideally, real-time knowledge of costs is critical to the competitive power business. With COSTCOM, plant operators are equipped with such knowledge, and can ensure each type of operation is performed optimally and with consideration of megawatt prices.
Fatma Faham is a senior project manager with Intertek's Asset Integrity Management Group and specializes in high energy piping systems. She has nine years of experience in the power industry and provides consulting on topics including life assessment of pressure vessels and piping, field inspections, plant operations and maintenance, and cost of cycling evaluations. Before joining Intertek, Fatma worked as a project engineer for a consultant firm and focused on metallurgical failure analysis, condition assessments and field inspections.
