COSTCOM and Cycling Operation Costs

Cycling operations can be damaging to fossil power plants, adding large costs due to increased equipment wear and adverse heat rate effects. Intertek can help reduce these costs.

These costs can amount to significant increases in maintenance and capital expenses for generation units. Intertek can greatly reduced these costs by proper operations tuning and operator training provided by COSTCOM®.

COSTCOM is a Windows™-based automated plant damage and cost monitoring software that is designed to be easily added to the current generation of power plant data acquisition and control systems (DACS). COSTCOM computes plant wide damage accumulation rates and dollar costs for specific types of base load and cycling operation. This is done by drawing real-time measurements from the DACS system and computing actual stress increases and damage accumulation. This approach draws on Intertek's cost of cycling analysis that derives dollar costs for defined load transients.

COSTCOM can be applied to fossil, hydro, and gas turbine combined cycle power plants. The plant-wide damage and calibrated costs are then sent to plant management and on to the dispatch center as they occur in real time. This uses the plant data acquisition system, plant historical data, and a small PC-based (Windows XP) system. The code is available for installation at plants at which Intertek has previously performed a cost of cycling analysis, or can be estimated based on plant test data and a benchmark to similar units.

COSTCOM determines the cost impacts of increasing ramp rates, MW load transient ranges, and shortened startup times. By using COSTCOM, operators can learn how to control cycling operations in order to optimize operations and reduce costs.

A demonstration disc for this software is available by request, contact Intertek for more information.

Contact us to see how Intertek can help your organization with COSTCOM and Cycling Operation Costs.