Natural Gas Tech Breakthrough Will Boost Renewable Power

May 25, 2011

A big obstacle to large-scale integration of renewable power from solar and wind sources into the grid is intermittency – those periods when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. GE Energy has taken a major step forward in addressing that issue with its new FlexEfficiency* 50 Combined Cycle Power Plant, the result of a more than $500 million R&D investment, being announced today at an event in Paris.

The way that natural gas turbines work to support renewable energy in a power grid is simple: when a period of intermittency begins, the gas turbine is capable of firing up quickly to continue supplying power to the system without interruption. In designing the FlexEfficiency 50, GE drew from its jet engine expertise to engineer a plant that can ramp up at twice the rate of today’s industry benchmarks – and just as quickly and efficiently, ramp down again when the renewable sources come back online. That ability to ramp down quickly is what makes the new technology flexible – and when combined with high efficiency, it results in big cost savings and emissions reductions.

Check out the infographic and schematic below to see how the FlexEfficiency 50 works:

With the new tech, a utility will save approximately $2.6 million per year under typical operating conditions, and each plant will cut annual CO2 emissions by more than 12,700 metric tons — equivalent to removing more than 6,000 cars from EU roads. They’ll have annual fuel savings of 6.4 million cubic meters of natural gas, which is equivalent to the annual natural gas consumption of more than 4,000 EU homes.

* Read today’s announcement.
* Watch a webcast from the Paris event at 8 a.m. ET
* Read about GE’s recent big investment in solar energy, the deployment of which will be aided by the new natural gas tech announced today.
* Read about GE’s new wind turbine, the most efficient ever.
* See why FlexEfficiency is part of GE’s ecomagination portfolio.

* Trademark of the General Electric Company

Arthur Bosman

Exciting stuff from GE, at Intelligent Platforms we are normally the guys with exciting new products. This new technology really addresses World issues, Well Done to the design team.
Eric Bermingham

The infographic is rather misleading. To produce the equivalent 510 MW from wind, you would need 200 2.5 MW wind turbines (the really big ones) running full speed. The Topaz Solar Farm being constructed in California will generate 550 MW, but it covers 6,400 acres (10 square miles) of land. I say skip the extremely expensive solar and wind hardware, and just go with the natural gas turbine. It is clean, efficient, and cheap.
Yuan

I will be very interested to know that how many extra hot-start/cold start cycling capability the new gas turbine has to be able to deliver to support 500MW level of windfarm as back up power. Technical speaking, material fatigue due to cycling will be a big concern for any utility owner of their equipment’s life span. Thanks to the low availability factor of windpower, maybe 30% at most?
ptharso

I think this is way more interesting to renewable energy. Integrating multiple sources supported by natural gas turbines and steam combined cycle. Look at this Evolution
Ecomagination
steve demoret

Why was the Fr9 selected over the LMS100, or put another way, depending upon the back-u[ Mw power requirements, isn’t an LMS100 the preferred alternative?
RichardB

@eric – “extremely expensive solar and wind hardware, and just go with the natural gas turbine. It is clean”

a) Gas may be cleaner than coal – but it still produces CO2 at the end. So CLEAN it is not, not in the way we really need to go.

b) report today saying solar power likely to be as cheap as coal within 5 years. So labelling it expensive, let alone extremely expensive, is ridiculously short sighted. Fortunately, some people can envision a clean cheap future, and work and invest towards it, instead of caring only about today’s cheapest solutions.
RichardB

@Yuan.

Presumably GE can design turbines for many start stop cycles – we rely on them for keeping planes in the air!

But, you do have a point. But surely, we are not talking about matching one gas plant with one single wind farm. Wind farms, Solar Thermal, Wave Energy, Geo-Thermal etc will all be connected to the grid, Collectively, designed properly,they will provide reliable power for perhaps 99% of the time. The Gas turbine systems will be more like the seat belts in the car, only called on to perform very occasionally.

So the problem is far less an engineering one, far more one of how to finance a plant that will be used so infrequently. Again, it will have to be considered as just one part of a larger system, a system that in the main will be using cost free fuel for 99% of the time. And, in that regard, probably regulation or contracts will be required to ensure networks do reliably provide power 99.99% of the time.

As with most things about renewables, the engineering and design problems are easy. It’s the finance, the regulation, and of course the politics, that are the roadblocks to successful deployment for the future. This is why scientists and engineers and financiers all need to be get involved with the politics and regulation, for renewables to happen as quickly as we need.