Thermoeconomic Optimization of a 450 MW Natural Gas Burning Steam Power Plant

The theory of thermoeconomics and local optimization were used to investigate how the cost of the resources consumed by a 450 MW power plant varies with the unit cost of the resources consumed, the technical production coefficients of the productive structure and/or the external demand for the products. In order to accomplish this, the costs of exergy of the productive structure were analyzed under three different conditions by using the relevant characteristic equations. In general, it was found that the thermoeconomic cost of a flow consists of two parts, namely the monetary cost of the fuel exergy (natural gas in the present study) needed to produce the flow, that is, its thermoeconomic cost and the costs due to the productive process (cost of capital equipment, maintenance, etc.). The results show that the steam leaving the boiler has the lowest exergy cost, while the condenser has the highest. The sequential quadratic programming (SQP) algorithm was used to obtain the optimized solutions of each major component of the plant. It was found that substantial operational and capital cost benefits were realized by optimizing most of the major plant equipment (boiler, turbines, feedwater heaters and the pumps). However, optimization of the condenser did not yield any cost benefit in capital equipment cost, but did produce some savings in operational cost.