The world urgently needs to combat climate change — it’s a massive and unparalleled undertaking. Progress toward net zero carbon will be incremental, iterative and uneven. The path each region is taking and the time it will take differ widely. At the same time, the power grid must remain reliable for a world that depends ever more on electricity.
Advancements in digital sensing, control and communication, along with advancements in machine This transition of the world’s energy systems to a lower carbon and ultimately a net zero carbon future create challenges and opportunities for thermal power plants. As the Energy Transition takes place in the coming decades, it is essential that thermal power plants are able to support the world’s growing needs for electrical energy.
Power plants all over the world have recognized the power of TOMONI® to help them with the Energy Transition and to use its deep insights to unlock substantial cost savings, assist with decarbonization and increase income from ancillary services markets by implementing intelligent digital solutions.
Role Of Smarter Power Plants In The Energy Transition
Performance Improvement
Improved operating efficency uses less fuel, saving cost and avoiding CO2 release from fuel combustion.
TOMONI intelligent solutions reduce part load heat rate, improve combusion efficency and help manage total plant thermal performance degradation. Every one percent improvement in efficency of a 600 MW unit saves up to 2 million USD per year and avoids 12,000 tons per year of CO2.
Flexible Operation
Most renewable generation sources provide variable or intermittent output, requiring complementary balancing generation and rotating inertia to maintain stability of the grid. TOMONI intelligent solutions enable more flexible dispatch with faster startups, increased ramp rates and lower turndown, allowing renewable generation to provide more KWH to the grid.
O&M Optimization
Reduced KWH sales means O&M costs of thermal power plants must be reduced to sustain economic viability.
TOMONI intelligent solutions reduce fuel cost, shorten planned outages and provide flexibility to increase remote O&M support capabilities to reduce the need for an experienced, fully staffed on-site workforce all the time at each individual power plant.
Sustaining reliability with more challenging duty cycles
With reduced numbers of fully dispatchable generation plants on-line, reliability and predictability are critically important. In addition, it is essential to have the ability to get additional generation on-line quickly and reliably to support contingencies or large daily load swings. Complementing variable and intermittent generation sources also places severe duty cycles on the dispatchable generation. In most cases, more severe than their original design basis, with more startups and more load ramping. Thus sustaining reliability and predictability of these plants while reducing O&M costs requires new levels of life consumption analytics, predictive/prescriptive maintenance technologies and data-driven condition-based maintenance.
TOMONI intelligent solutions make power plants more intelligent, self-healing and fault tolerant and enable earlier and more rapid response to developing issues; improved startup and operating reliability; and shifts to condition-based maintenance. Utilizing the power of AI, TOMONI goes beyond what is humanly possible, analyzing all the data collected by today’s power plants to create powerful actionable insights to sustain and potentially improve their reliability.
Operating Cooperatively with Renewables and Energy Storage to Support the Grid
The Energy Transition is creating power systems with increasing penetration of renewables, distributed generation and energy storage. These power systems of the future are much more complex to operate effectively and efficiently than traditional power systems. Advancements in digital sensing, control and communication, along with advancements in machine learning and AI, are increasingly enabling optimal connections between physical equipment, digital systems and human activities. They will be needed more and more to connect and dynamically manage generation sources and loads.
TOMONI intelligent solutions make Smarter Power Plants that will work cooperatively with Smart Grids and Smart Cities to share information and leverage each others’ capabilities to simultaneously maximize reliability, economic returns and decarbonization.
