Study of supercritical power plant integration with high temperature thermal energy storage for flexible operation

The paper presents the recent research in study of the strategies for the power plant flexible operation to serve the requirement of grid frequency control and load balance. The study aims to investigate whether it is feasible to bring the High Temperature Thermal Storage (HITS) to the thermal power plant steam-water cycle, to identify the suitable thermal charge and discharge locations in the cycle and to test how the HTTS integration can help support grid operation via power plant dynamic mathematical modelling and simulation. The simulation software named SimuEngine is adopted and a 600 MW supercritical coal-fired power plant model is implemented onto the software platform. Three HTTS charging strategies and two HTTS discharging strategies are proposed and tested via the simulation platform. The simulation results show that it is feasible to extract steam from the steam turbine to charge the HITS, and to discharge the stored thermal energy back to the power generation processes. With the integration of the HTTS charge and discharge processes, the power plant simulation model is also connected to a simplified GB (Great Britain) grid model. Then the study is extended to test the improved capability of the plant flexible operation in supporting the responses to the grid load demand changes. The simulation results demonstrate that the power plant with HTTS integration has faster dynamic responses to the load demand changes and, in turn, faster response to grid frequency services.