China's largest coal power plant gets control system upgrade

To solve the issue of unnecessary trip.

GE’s Measurement and Control announced today that it completed a control system upgrade for a steam turbine unit at the Taishan Power Plant, China's largest coal power plant, replacing the existing control system to solve the issue of unnecessary trip.

According to a release by GE, prior to the upgrade, the Taishan Power Plant, had been experiencing controls issues in the plant’s Phase I section, specifically with a 600-megawatt (MW) steam turbine unit (not manufactured by GE).

The release said that the current control system in the plant--located in Tongguwan, Taishan City--had been failing to switch over to the redundant controllers, causing unnecessary trips every year.

Here's more from GE:

Each failure resulted in a total profit loss of more than $300,000 (U.S. dollars) per trip. This cost accounted for the loss of power generation and the costs to restart the turbine.

Seeking better system operating reliability, Taishan chose GE to upgrade the controls for the steam turbine unit, even though the original equipment was not manufactured by GE.

Taishan selected GE based on the continued successful operation of two other units with GE OC6000 controls at the plant. As a result, Taishan requested GE to apply the GE OC6000 to Unit 3 to solve the tripping issue.

GE completed the installation of the OC6000 controls in the beginning of 2014, and with the upgrade, Taishan improved operations and reduced costs associated with unplanned outages.

GE also integrated the system into the plant’s existing distributed control system (DCS) bringing about high efficiency and convenient operation management.