Huntorf power plant
| Huntorf power plant | |||
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| location | |||
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| Coordinates | 53 ° 11 '23 " N , 8 ° 24' 32" E | ||
| country |
 Germany
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| Data | |||
| Type | Compressed air storage - gas turbine power plant | ||
| fuel | natural gas | ||
| power | 321 MWel | ||
| owner | Uniper power plants | ||
| Start of operations | 1978 | ||
| turbine | modified steam / gas turbine make BBC | ||
The Huntorf power plant is a combined compressed air storage and gas turbine power plant in Huntorf near Elsfleth in Lower Saxony . When it went into operation in 1978, the power plant was the first commercially used compressed air storage power plant in the world. To date (as of 2017) there is only one comparable plant worldwide, the McIntosh power plant in Alabama, USA.
The power plant is managed by Uniper Kraftwerke GmbH .
history
The power plant was designed and built by the plant manufacturer Brown, Boveri & Cie at the end of the 1970s on behalf of the Nordwestdeutsche Kraftwerke AG (NWK) . In 1978 it went into operation as the world's first compressed air storage power plant. It originally had the task of base-load power of the nearby nuclear power plant Unterweser in off-peak hours to take and to feed during peak load periods into electrical power. In addition, the storage power plant is supposed to secure the emergency power supply of the nuclear power plant in the event of a network breakdown.
During the construction of the plant, two caverns were dug out in the salt rock at a depth between 650 m and approx. 800 m. They have a total volume of approx. 310,000 m³ (with an elongated shape with a maximum diameter of 60 m and a height of 150 m). The dissolved salt ( brine ) was conveyed from the caverns to be bred into the brackish water region of the Weser around 30 kilometers away . In order to keep the loads on flora and fauna within tolerable limits, the solution of the 300,000 m³ of salt was carried out over a period of almost two years.
As a result of the merger of NWK with its parent company PreussenElektra (PREAG) in 1985, the power plant came under the direct control of PREAG, which in turn merged into E.ON in 2000 .
In the 1990s, PREAG initially considered closing the power station for economic reasons. Due to the liberalization of the energy market and increasing wind power feed-in, there were increasing fluctuations in the supply and price of electricity from the turn of the millennium, so that the operation of the storage power plant was worthwhile again. In 2006, the power plant was even upgraded and the output of the turbine increased from the previous 290 to 321 MW el .
At the beginning of 2018, the operator Uniper announced that it wanted to increase the storage capacity from 1,200 MWh to 1,680 MWh. This is to be achieved by compressing the air in the storage tank under higher pressure than before. Uniper submitted a corresponding application to the responsible licensing authority in February 2018. In addition, the operator, together with the Clausthal University of Technology, is researching the use of hydrogen produced with regenerative energy instead of natural gas in the combustion chamber of the gas turbine.
Technical structure and functionality
In order to make the power plant ready to start , air is pumped into the caverns at a pressure of 46 to 72 bar at times when there is an excess of electricity ( i.e. off-peak times ). The high and low pressure compressors connected in series consume an output of approx. 60 MW . It takes about eight hours for the air in the storage tank to be compressed to the final pressure of 72 bar (depending on the weather, air pressure and temperature). The electrical energy consumed from the network is approx.
Then you can have 72,000 tons of compressed air. The compression of the air automatically leads to an increase in its temperature ( adiabatic change of state ). In order to protect the system from this, its thermal energy is released into the environment via heat exchangers.
If electrical energy is required at peak load times, the compressed air flows out of the caverns in a controlled manner. In doing so, it expands and cools down. In the case of pure compressed air operation, the turbine would ice up. For this reason, natural gas is fed into the combustion chamber of the gas turbine via a gas line . The energy of the natural gas is about twice as high as the electrical energy to build up the pressure. The resulting air-fuel gas mixture is burned in the combustion chamber. The turbine extracts energy from the exhaust gas flow and transforms it into electrical energy via a generator. The compressed air flowing out of the caverns takes over the work of the upstream compressor in normal operation . The compressor work of a gas turbine consumes up to two thirds of the total work.
The Huntorf compressed air storage power plant has an output of 321 MW, which is around a quarter of a nuclear power plant of the usual size of 1,300 MW. This power can be delivered for two hours, then the pressure in the accumulator is too low for full load operation and the machine changes to sliding pressure operation. The electrical energy delivered to the grid is higher than that absorbed due to the combustion of the gas and amounts to approximately
This energy is greater than the one mentioned above because it also contains approx. From natural gas.
The grid connection takes place at the 220 kV maximum voltage level in the Tennet TSO grid .
The power plant runs fully automatically without a permanent operating team on site. For a long time it was remote-controlled from the control room of the nearby Bremen-Farge coal-fired power station , until E.ON sold it in 2009. Since then, remote control has been carried out from the Uniper power plant in Wilhelmshaven .
literature
- Hans Hoffeins, Norbert Romeyke, Dieter Hebel, Fritz Sütterlin: The commissioning of the first air storage gas turbine group . Publication No. CH GK 1139 81 D. Ed .: BBC Brown & Boveri CIE AG. tape 67 , No. 8, pp. 465-473. Mannheim 1980, p. 11 ( Download as PDF - reprint from: Brown Boveri Mitteilungen ).
Individual evidence
- ↑ Axel Kampke: Electricity storage part 2. In: Newsletter “Energy Perspectives” 01/2008. Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, Garching, accessed on June 7, 2019 .
- ↑ a b c Wind power storage will be a new research focus. Energy chronicle. Udo Leuschner, January 2010, accessed on September 21, 2010 .
- ↑ Ulrich Schmitz: Compressed air should store and generate electricity . In: VDI news . August 15, 2014, ISSN 0042-1758 , p. 13 .
- ↑ Fritz Crotogino, Klaus-Uwe Mohmeyer, Roland Scharf: Huntorf CAES: More than 20 Years of Successful Operation. (PDF; 932 kB) April 2001, archived from the original on October 16, 2011 ; Retrieved September 21, 2010 (Spring Meeting 2001 in Orlando, Florida, USA April 15-18, 2001).
- ↑ Volker Kühn: Huntorf compressed air storage power plant: The exotic of the energy transition. Ørsted, March 10, 2017; accessed on June 15, 2019.
- ↑ Institute for Energy Process Engineering and Fuel Technology: Huntorf2020. Retrieved on April 3, 2018 (German).
- ↑ Experience with CAES power plants. In: BINE Information Service. FIZ Karlsruhe - Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure GmbH, May 2007, accessed on February 14, 2020 .
- ↑ Federal Network Agency power plant list (nationwide; all network and transformer levels) as of July 2nd, 2012. ( Microsoft Excel file, 1.6 MiB) Archived from the original on July 22, 2012 ; Retrieved July 21, 2012 .
- ↑ The Huntorf location introduces itself. (No longer available online.) E.ON Kraftwerke GmbH, archived from the original on March 5, 2016 ; Retrieved September 21, 2010 .