By Michael Kuser
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. — Refurbishing an existing combined-cycle plant can squeeze an extra 12 to 15 MW of generating capacity from each gas turbine — and the compelling economics of equipment upgrades provide New York generators a choice beyond building new plants.
That was the view of Bob Prantil, executive director of sales and strategic accounts for GE Power North America, who spoke Sept. 14 at the fall conference of the Independent Power Producers of New York.
“After all the debates and discussions, eventually electrons need to be placed on a grid at the lowest LCOE [levelized cost of electricity] to make sure that whoever is providing those electrons can break even,” Prantil said. “We recently combined our power business with our grid business because that’s what the market wanted. When you’re going to speak to a utility, it’s not just necessarily about generation. You have to figure out how to get those electrons around.”
Existing Versus New Generation
While New York has a goal of getting 50% of its electricity from renewable resources by 2030, Prantil pointed out that other states are looking at more. Iowa, for example, aims to reach 100% renewable energy over the next five years.
“You all know the complexity of new generation from the standpoint of permitting and do people want it in their backyards — and the construction, where it makes sense,” Prantil said. “I would just challenge you to understand the existing generation that you have in-state already and what [original equipment manufacturers] can do to reduce overall CO2 emissions, gain more efficiency and get more output from those plants at a quarter of the price of a new plant being built.”
Energy conferences these days focus more on renewables and efficiency than on gas, which strikes Prantil as odd.
“Especially in the northeast United States, if you see what’s going on in PJM, there has been an uptick in the installation of combined cycle plants,” he said. “If you think about the sizes of gas turbines now and the efficiencies of those turbines compared to just 10 years ago, it makes the decision to go with gas, as some people call it, a bridge fuel before 100% renewables, a very smart decision.”
GE Power just set a world record with the company’s first plant in France. Prantil said the combined cycle unit is 99.95% available and achieved a record-setting 62.6% thermal efficiency, 5 percentage points higher than the best combined cycle plants could have achieved just five years ago.
“If you take that efficiency over the life cycle of a plant and then you look at the LCOE for that, and you think about the saved BTUs and CO2, it’s a pretty compelling story,” Prantil said.
Energy Storage and Hybrids
GE built one of the first battery plants in the U.S. in Schenectady, N.Y. “So we know how to do all this,” Prantil said. “We believe that energy storage prices are going to come down.”
He said California has been doing generation-storage hybrids longer than New York, but instead of trying to figure out how to create new markets — which is what New York is doing — GE is looking at how to take an existing market and apply battery technology to it. He cited a case in California where GE applied storage technology to the famed “duck curve.”
“That power needs to be instantaneous, almost like spinning reserve,” Prantil said. “So if you take a 50-MW gas turbine that takes eight or nine minutes to ramp up to speed … you put in a four-hour battery that’s being charged by the grid. We can have the battery take over for the seven minutes of ramping.”
GE sees energy storage as a very cost-effective way to meet some of the ancillary requirements of RTOs and ISOs — and there has to be an ancillary service for any developer to do it and get paid.
“We always want to get the EEI [Edison Electric Institute] award for a 1,200-MW combined cycle plant or some offshore wind farm, but we got the EEI award for a 15-MW battery hybrid system,” Prantil said.
Energy efficiency is also driving changes to the dispatch stack, which will also occur in NYISO, he said.
“A developer will look at what zone they’re in, and if there’s a combined cycle plant in that zone, they want to know the efficiency of that plant. And if a generator can build a more efficient plant in that zone, or increase the efficiency of an existing plant, their capacity is more likely to get dispatched.”
New York Native
A native New Yorker schooled in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, Prantil said GE is also a native of the state.
“The headquarters of our GE Power business from the very beginning, from the Thomas Edison years, is located 20 miles from here in Schenectady,” he said.
Prantil noted that GE technology has outfitted about half the state’s nuclear fleet and wind farms, as well as providing 152 gas turbine units and 116 steam and hydro turbine units.
“We like to say that New York is powered by GE, as 60% of the megawatts generated in New York comes from GE equipment,” Prantil said. “We have 152 gas turbine units, we have 116 turbine units, half of the nuclear fleet is with GE technology and about 50% of the installed blades in wind is with GE technology.”
If New York decides to go heavily into offshore wind, GE’s not going to debate if that’s right or wrong, he said, but will instead figure out how to develop the resources at the lowest cost.