Scale and efficiency will drive energy transition

Written by
1 Apr 2022
Scale and efficiency will drive energy transition

Abdurrahman Khalidi, chief technology officer, GE Gas Power, Europe, Middle East and Africa tells Energy & Utilities that a multi-technology approach focusing on efficiency and digitalisation is required to succeed with climate change goals

While the 26th edition of the UN’s COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, UK, in November last year was praised by some for setting out the first targets for reducing coal usage, Abdurrahman Khalidi, chief technology officer, GE Gas Power, Europe, Middle East and Africa, feels that more could have been done.

“I am not sure why the transition from coal to gas or coal to renewables is slow,” Khalidi tells Energy & Utilities. “The last few hours of Cop 26 were very disappointing for people that looking for stronger commitments to reducing coal. Taking out coal alone would contribute significantly to reducing C02 within 10 years – and the world needs to be serious about transitioning away from coal.”

When quizzed about more needs to be done to deliver on climate change programmes, Khalidi says that objectives need to be delivered on a global scale to ensure any chance of success with reducing global warming to less than 1.5c a year.

“The problem of decarbonisation or reducing carbon is a problem at scale – it’s a huge problem, so we need solutions at scale, not just some new shiny objects here or there,” he warns. “Any solution that will seriously reduce or contain world temperature will need massive applications.”

 

Decarbonisation at scale

 

Scale is something that GE is good at – the group is one of the largest and most-diversified corporations in the world. The firm has been one of the largest equipment and technology providers in the energy sector for decades and improving efficiency and decarbonising power production has risen to the top of its agenda.

Khalidi believes that to successfully achieve climate change, a multi-technology approach must be adopted across the world to allow different countries and regions to reduce carbon emissions by targeting the correct areas.

“There is no silver bullet [ to reduce carbon emissions] - different countries have different fuel requirements, resource and land availability and different geopolitical needs amongst many others,” he explains. “The same decarbonisation programme cannot be applied in every country; we need a multi-pronged approach, and it needs to be collective if we are to achieve scale.”

                  

Role of gas in energy transition

 

The growth of renewable energy is growing at a rapid pace, with renewables accounting for more than 80 per cent of the new power capacity additions globally in 2020 and 2021. This resulted in renewables producing 10 per cent of the total power generated across the world in 2021, according to a recent report from Ember.

While the development of renewable energy will continue to grow at lightening pace, with much of the intermittent renewable sources developed to date installed without storage there will a crucial role for cleaner gas in supporting the energy transition.

“In GE, we expect a large growth in renewables from now until 2050, and it will be dominated by solar PV and onshore and offshore wind. Renewable energy will continue to grow, and we are fully behind it,” says Khalidi. “At the same time, even if you look behind the projections – gas power will remain a strong contributor to the grid stability in the short and medium term. We see a growth of gas power up to 2030, and even 2050.”

Khalidi says that delivering power to meet growing demand while ensuring power supplies remain stable will require significant support from gas-generated power.

“In addition to solving the intermittency issue, when the sun sets or the wind stops, gas power adds a stabilising grid inertia because it is synchronous power operating huge rotors at synchronous speed. Gas power plants are able to follow the grid disturbances up and down, and this is not readily available when you talk about renewable resources,” he adds. “The flexibility of gas means we may see gas power plants being adopted as a peaker or seasonal resource rather than a baseload in some countries.”

Khalidi says that the recent storms in the UK showed the importance of having readily dispatchable gas power to deliver power when wind resources were unavailable.

“At the beginning of the storm there was plenty of wind power, but then as the storm built up it has to be shut down – and then revert to baseload. The benefit of gas is you can turn it down when you don’t need it and then ramp it up,” he says. “Gas can actually be a force multiplier for renewables.”

 

Improving efficiency

 

With gas set to remain a key fuel for the coming decades, improving the efficiency and performance of existing and new gas-power plants is vital if the climate change targets of the Paris Accord are to be met.

The efficiency of gas turbines has increased significantly over the past couple of decades, with efficiency of H-Class turbines breaking through the 60 per cent efficient barrier – a limit which was regarded as the ceiling in the 1990s.

“The best combined-cycle gas H turbines are now reaching 64 per cent,” says Khalidi. “We have an example here in the UAE where the H-class turbines are being installed.”

GE is installing its first H-Class turbines in the UAE at the 1.8GW Hamriyah independent power producer (IPP) plant in Sharjah. The first two 9HA.01 gas turbines were installed in 2021, with GE providing a total of three for the project.

While the efficiency of combined-cycle turbines has increased significantly in recent years, Khalidi says that upgrading the configuration of existing power plants is the low hanging fruit when seeking to improve efficiency of power infrastructure.

“There is still significant power coming from simple-cycle power plants across the world – converting these plants to combined-cycle is the easiest place to start to improve efficiency and reduce emissions.”

 

Digital revolution

With utilities and industries moving ahead with ambitious programmes to improve efficiency of power production and develop renewable energy, power plants and electricity grids will need to be much smarter and flexible to deliver electricity to end users. Khalidi says the ability to create digital twins of power plants can improve the efficiency and reduce operating and repair costs of power plants significantly.

“Being able to digitally create a copy of our complicated power plants that tells you on a millisecond basis what is happening in the power plant is essential,” he notes. “A small deviation in heat rate or efficiency can go unnoticed for days, weeks or months if you don’t have the right digital tools to see what is going on. Now we have some marvellous technologies that can decide within seconds whether there is a fault, and we can rectify it before it causes a major problem.”

Effective digital monitoring and capture of data from power plants can result in major savings in fuel savings and prevent downtime from critical energy infrastructure.

“A year of one per cent reduction in efficiency of a plant which can go unnoticed might be billions of dollars of fuel,” Khalidi says. “The power blocks for the latest combined-cycle power plants are much larger than previously, now up to 800MW. If you trip one gas turbine because of a failed sensor that costs 10 cents you will be cutting power from a million households, and we cannot allow that to happen. Digitalisation is the path forward, and there is a long way to go.”

 

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