Cost reductions and profit opportunities are abundant throughout your flue gas pollutant control systems if you know what to look for and where to look. Neundorfer, Inc. is helping utilities and industrial companies realize these opportunities.
The nature of power generation has changed. We now live in an environment where power generation comes from diverse sources. And today’s energy diversity has coal fired units reacting to market conditions, often acting as swing load or peak producers, a drastic change from the days where coal-fired plants were the base-load plants. This has reshaped our operational and financial strategies. All the while, meeting compliance regulations adds considerable cost and can constrain our flexibility. These shifts complicate the operational strategies and interconnected flue gas pollutant systems on these units.
Looking at large, capital intensive solutions can reduce the economic viability of a plant, and so we need to approach things differently. For some, their internal processes cannot shift fast enough, resulting in MW production costs that prohibit them from running. For others, it means finding big savings by taking advantage of the incremental changes, optimization, and synergistic improvements in their systems. This is possible when we reevaluate maintenance, operations, and emissions control strategies through the lens of operational flexibility and system optimization.
Plants need to be able to capitalize on the synergies within the power generation system to lower dispatch costs and increase unit flexibility. Through understanding the synergistic and competing processes within the power generation system, efficiencies can be made that have exponentially beneficial effects on other areas. Trade-offs between load, operating costs, environmental controls, and emissions can lead to strategic decisions involving maintenance and operations. If we know our financial and operational objectives, understand the interconnectedness and complexity of our systems, and the efficiencies that can be gained in our systems, we can align internal processes and objectives to achieve optimal savings.
In the past, the economic environment allowed us to implement the simplest solution: capital projects to solve the new problems. Most often, we didn’t also look at the underlying inefficiencies that may be contributing to the problems we were solving. We attacked the Mercury, PM, or NOx issues as mutually exclusive, independent issues without looking at the holistic nature of our power generation system. And with new regulations coming, we didn’t have the time to investigate the total system complexities that these “bolt-on” solutions created.
The challenges we are facing are abundant. As we operate in this new environment, we need to spend the time defining our objectives so that we can find the incremental improvements and efficiency gains that support these objectives. Often, we find that we lack proper instrumentation for data inputs. But more often we find that we have so much data available that we cannot readily identify what is relevant and valuable. We cannot underestimate the true complexity of our pre-combustion and post-combustion pollution control strategies. And our internal processes and procedures must support our ability to achieve these savings.
We may know where we want to go, but if we do not know where we are starting from it will be difficult to get there. We have used our consulting and software capabilities to support our customers adjust their operational strategies, reduce the use of consumables for emissions control, implement condition-based maintenance strategies, take advantage of new revenue streams, and identify upstream improvements that yield significant efficiency gains and cost reductions.
Increasing the profitability of the coal fired generation fleet is going to be an important objective in remaining competitive. Taking a holistic approach to identifying and implementing strategies to reduce operating costs and increase operational flexibility is the approach that will enable us to achieve this objective. We can find the opportunities in your system to reduce costs, gain efficiencies, and take advantage of the incremental improvements possible in your system.
Get started working with Neundorfer today & see how we can assist your company.
