An Efficient Summer Operation Scheme for a Thermal Power Plant Air Cooling System based on Electric Peak Shaving

We proposed a novel efficient operation scheme for a thermal power plant's air-cooling system based on peak shaving, in order to cope with high ambient temperature in summer. We introduced an absorption-generation equipment with water/lithium working pairs into the air cooled condenser (ACC) to reconstruct the traditional thermal power plant, and established a dynamic thermodynamic model adopting Ebsilon code. We studied the thermodynamic performance variation of the reconstructed thermal power plant throughout a 24-hour cycle and found that the fluctuation ratio of the turbine back pressure decreased to 6% from 78%, which is beneficial for the stable and safe operation of the electric power system. The thermal performance improvement benefited from the exploitation of the heat transfer potential of ACC, which realized via cold duty schedule throughout the day, under different ambient temperature conditions. In this system, the generated power was higher at relatively high ambient temperature than that at relatively low ambient temperature, which solved the electricity demand-supply imbalance problem under high ambient temperature. Finally, the same optimization effects for power thermal plants with an indirect air-cooling system were obtained using the same operation scheme.