Posted on 09/29/2014 12:38:59 PM PDT by thackney
General Electric’s new high-efficiency gas turbines, fired at temperatures 200 degrees hotter than an erupting volcano, will see their U.S. debut at two gas power plants near Houston and Dallas.
The New York industrial conglomerate said Monday it is getting paid more than $500 million to build four of its most advanced gas turbines and other equipment to power two of Exelon Corp.’s planned combined-cycle gas turbine units at its existing gas-fired plants in Texas. Combined-cycle units are more flexible than plants that rely only on gas or coal.
GE’s new 440,000 horsepower gas turbines, each as powerful as about 1,000 Ferraris, use advanced air-cooling technologies to cut into electricity costs and carbon output, features that the Chicago power generator says will make its Texas power plants “among the cleanest, most efficient” units in the United States.
“Being mindful of increased water efficiency in drought-prone Texas, the new units will be cooled with air instead of water,” Exelon said in a written statement Monday. GE is also building two steam turbines and six generators for Exelon.
The new combined-cycle units will each add 1,000 megawatts to the Texas power grid, which means they can light up 2 million Texas homes combined. The four turbines combined could save Exelon up to $32 million a year in power costs.
Gas turbines, used in everything from oil and gas production to energy transportation to refining, took center stage in Siemen AG’s $6.5 billion buyout offer last week for Houston’s Dresser-Rand Group, a maker of turbines and compressors. Siemens, angling to get a better foothold in U.S. oil and gas like its rival GE, cited Dresser-Rand’s lower-power gas turbines used in oil production as one of the key attractions of the deal.
GE’s gas turbines start up and ramp up faster and turn down more efficiently than other turbines on the market, meaning Exelon will be able “to deliver power quickly when it is needed and ramp down when it is not,” said Victor Abate, president and CEO of power generation products at GE Power and Water.
“We have invested more than $1 billion in our latest H-class technology to deliver the most cost-effective, dispatchable power to consumers,” Abate said.
GE will begin building the equipment next year, and are expected to add 1,000 temporary engineering and construction jobs, as well as 17 permanent jobs at Exelon’s sites at Wolf Hollow near Dallas and Colorado Bend near Houston. It’s the new gas turbines first appearance in the United States. It is building a few others for buyers in Japan, Russia and elsewhere.
GE said the turbines “feature modular constructability for a shorter installation schedule, a real benefit in Texas given concerns about skilled manpower availability.”
probably because they won’t have a flight plan on file.
The biggest I messed with was Rolls-Royce RB-211 (42,000 Hp) for the Northern Border Gas Pipeline. At the time, Continental was using the same engine base for 757s.
Some gas turbines in generator service are the same ones used for aviation. With appropriate modifications of course.
Post a graph in BTUs showing both NG and coal output. The loss of coal energy is outstripping the increases in NG, and NG production is already cutting back for price support reasons (ala OPEC pricing).
NG can heat directly at a far lower cost than running through 2 energy conversion processes to warm air, water, etc.
One to the advantage is combined cycle natural gas power turbine plants are nearly double the efficiency of modern coal plants.
Let me look for the graphs. But they are not going to be gone soon. It will be slower change than you might expect.
Interesting tidbit: Rolls-Royce made more money on the Olympus turbojet engine used as a gas turbine generator than as an airplane jet engine (the Olympus was best-known for its use on the Avro Vulcan bomber and the Concorde SST). The Olympus engine actually powered many warships built in the 1960’s and 1970’s.
If you click the graph I posted, it will take you to the data source. You can download the actual data. The past 12 months of coal has increased over the previous 12 months, and the same trend from 12 months before. Natural Gas has gone the otherway, decreasing for the past couple years.
We were on a trend of decreasing coal use and more natural gas for the US electric power generation. But that trend reversed a couple years ago, due to recovering prices in the Natural Gas.
The trends are both slight, as the chart shows. We are not far off steady values when you average the seasons together.
The “big boys” (heavies) were easier to work on...the “little guys” (fighters) weren’t too bad, but in the jet, they were a royal PITA...
There are days I miss it, and days I don’t...but would go back to working on engines if the conditions were right.
It would only need to run for about ten seconds, until it’s up to about 3,000 mph.
Gotta use those downdraft wings like race-cars have to prevent liftoff.
Don’t know if it’s still that way, but when I lived in Alabama in the 1970’s, the Alabama Gas Company’s HQ building in Birmingham got its electricity from a GE J-79 jet engine turning a generator. It was set up in the basement and ran on natural gas. I always wondered if you could hear it howl like a F-4 Phantom.
The 79 was also used in the B-58 Hustler and the F-104 Starfighter. Great engine.
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