Proposed Baselines and Standard Methods for Systems Analyses of Power Generation Technologies

The Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) routinely conducts analyses of power generation systems in order to guide responsible expenditure of public funding used for the development and demonstration of advanced power generation technologies, especially in the field of carbon capture, utilization and storage.  Many of these NETL analyses ultimately need to be compared to one another or to third-party studies to exercise due diligence in confirming and comparing results.  As a result, NETL has found great value in standardizing methodologies for capital cost estimation, operating cost estimation, calculation of required product pricing as well as methodologies for calculating the performance of power and fuel generation systems.

This presentation will cover the details of standard methods NETL uses for: calculation of required electricity selling price, computing Nth-of-a-kind plant costs based on learning curve assumptions, coal & feedstock selection and composition, and recommended specifications for sequestered CO2.

In addition to the standard methodologies discussed above, there are many more assumptions that must be made when simulating a 'typical' power generation system.  Often times, these assumptions are made in the absence of any specific requirements and are made at the sole discretion of the engineering team performing the analysis.  Due to the many choices that can be made, rarely do the assumptions made by engineers performing systems analyses of these facilities converge.  This makes comparison difficult and requires a great deal of reconciliation amongst other public studies in order to provide valuable conclusions by way of comparison.  Therefore, this presentation will also cover the standardized representations of baseline power generation facilities, covering coal feed to busbar, to which the effects of implementing advanced power generation technologies and CO2 capture can be compared.  Overviews of NETL's baseline Pulverized Coal, Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle, and Natural Gas Combined Cycle power plants will be presented in this context.