EPRI invited ADEX to participate in its biannual Heat Rate Conference, in front of dozens of US utilities. This was a three-day event with fantastic speakers and great debates with participants.
In the new context, electricity markets are requiring power plants (and particularly CCGTs) to increase their flexibility to be dispatchable. And to be, in a new business model where their new role is to complete intermittent renewables. Nevertheless, in this operation mode, plant performance is usually worse than in a stable base load operation. Additionally, thermal damage is higher and their reliability is lower, as some processes become unexpectedly a bottleneck for the plant.
Conventional control systems and even Advanced Process Control systems (both based on Model Predictive Control, Neural Nets or Fuzzy Logic) do not support this change of paradigm. The main reason is that all of them are using oldish PID controllers to rule critical processes. And this is no longer a valid solution.
Most of the power plants have equipment that could deliver the required flexibility but the control systems are not following properly. New control tools are required to address this situation without investing massively in hardware retrofits. Thus, innovative Self-tuning Artificial Intelligence control technology is emerging as a solution to plant managers and grid dispatchers that eliminates the bottlenecks and provides a sustainable way to solve the problem.
ADEX shared some case studies of CCGTs from customers where the commissioning of our Self-tuning AI produced a huge economic and operational impact in the plants.
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