Combined-cycle gas turbine power plant integration with cascaded latent heat thermal storage for fast dynamic responses

Abstract

The combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) power plants are often required to provide the essential fast grid balance service between the load demand and power supply with the increase of the intermittent power generation from renewable energy sources. It is extremely challenging to ensure CCGT power plants operating flexibly and also maintaining its efficiency at the same time. This paper presents the feasibility study of a CCGT power plant combined with the cascaded latent heat storage (CLHS) for plant flexible operation. A 420 MW CCGT power plant and a CLHS dynamic models are developed in Aspen Plus based on a novel modelling approach. The plant start-up processes are studied, and large amount of thermal energy can be accumulated by CLHS during the start-up. For load-following operation, extensive dynamic simulation study is conducted and the simulation results show that the extracted exhaust gas can be used for thermal energy storage charging, and the stored heat can be discharged to produce high temperature and high pressure steam fed to the steam turbine. Besides, the stored heat can also be used to maintain the heat recovery steam generator (HRSG) under warm condition to reduce plant restart-up time. The simulation results demonstrate that the integration of CLHS with CCGT power plant is feasible during the start-up, load-following and standstill operations.