Power generation through a perfect storm
How EthosEnergy’s ECOMAX® auto-tuning platform ensured 7FA gas turbine reliability during Winter Storm Uri and the Great Texas Freeze of February 2021
- Goals
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- Reduce Forced Outage Rate
- Increase reliability
- Increase Power Output
- Sectors
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- Power generation
- Asset
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- Heavy Gas Turbines
- Location
- East Texas, US
Building on Trust
Power generation in Texas – unlike in other parts of the US – wasn’t really set up to run during freezing temperatures. A lot of power plants weren’t hardened against extreme cold weather. They weren’t winterized. At least not to the extent of conditions seen in 2021.
As the temperature dropped dramatically, units began icing up. Instrumentation stopped working. Filters became clogged with ice. And, in a lot of cases, the air got so cold that gas turbines blew out, causing units to trip.
Once offline, without electric trace heating, many units were simply unable to restart until the winter storms had passed – eight or nine days later. So as demand spiked to record highs, power generation fell to record lows.
To make matters worse, there was no cavalry Texans could send for. Because of the regulatory framework, they had no backup. They couldn’t flip a switch to bring in power from Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, or New Mexico.
But some units did manage to weather the storm.
An unprecedented head-to-head
Our client is one of the leading independent power producers in the United States. It owns and operates a fleet of facilities representing over 26,000 megawatts of generation capacity nationwide.
One of those facilities is a 794 MW combined-cycle power plant in Texas. This natural gas-fired facility consists of four 7FA gas turbines, four heat-recovery steam generators, and two steam turbine generators. These are configured in two largely independent power blocks.
When the winter storms of 2021 hit, our client was using our ECOMAX® combustion optimization platform for one of the two power blocks. The other power block was using an auto-tuning solution provided by one of our competitors.
How would these two different auto-tuning solutions cope in the most challenging of circumstances? Would they both be able to perform when the heat was on (so to speak)?
The mother of all tests
Imagine you and your neighbor have different thermostats. Your neighbor’s thermostat works off historical average temperatures for the time and day of the year. This works fine when the temperature is more or less at that average, but not so well when it’s at an abnormally high or low level. Your thermostat, however, operates according to the actual temperature in your home.
This encapsulates the essential difference between our solution and the competitor's auto-tuner.
EthosEnergy’s ECOMAX® platform uses an empirical tuning model. Our algorithm reacts to the reality of the operating conditions. It makes decisions based on actual, real-world information. By contrast, the competitor's auto-tuning solution uses an ideal model-based methodology. It sets estimates based on what it thinks the situation should be according to the historical data.
It’s a difference that proved crucial when safety concerns in the state were so critical to power plants.
Thanks to our patented methodology for tuning combustion turbines, the units with ECOMAX® kept running. The competitor-tuned units did not. They tripped and were unable to restart until the crisis was over.
Optimizing for reliability prevents enormous losses
Normally, our clients’ units are optimized for power. But when the storms hit, all it took was a quick phone call to us and their control room was able to switch to optimize for reliability.
As a result, we helped our client contribute extremely valuable power to the grid and avoid significant operational loss.
During the storms, wholesale electricity prices shot up. With one of the plant’s power blocks down, our client was losing out on substantial amounts of revenue and the ability to generate much-needed power for the grid. But thanks to ECOMAX®, that generation and revenue loss at least didn’t double.
No need to convince our client which was the most reliable automated tuner. Within a month and a half, it had replaced the competitor's solution with ECOMAX®. And since then, we have installed it at another six of its facilities.
Because when conditions are extreme, only the best-in-class will do. And you never know when extreme weather will strike.
Key Results
- ECOMAX®-tuned gas turbines keep running where competitor's units fail
- Client able to quickly switch from optimizing for power to optimizing for reliability
- $4 million per hour in operational losses avoided
Sales
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