COSTCOM™

Cost Control of Operation and Maintenance and Cost Communications to Operations and Dispatch will Lower Your Total Operation Costs! In today's volatile electricity markets, most power plants must be flexible; often load following to minimum loads, and frequently cycling on-off. This type of cycling operation can be very damaging to fossil power plants, and add large costs due to increased equipment wear and tear, and adverse heat rate effects. For all generation units, these costs can amount to significant increases in maintenance and capital expenses. These costs can be greatly reduced by proper operations tuning and operator training provided by COSTCOM.

APTECH has developed COSTCOM to:

• Display total power plant costs in real time
• Reduce cycling costs
• Monitor power plant damage accumulation rates
• Improve control of load transients
• Optimize daily plant operation
• Help train new operators on cycling operations

APPROACH

COSTCOM™ is a Windows™ -based software product that is designed to be easily added to the current generation of power plant data acquisition and control systems (DACS). COSTCOM computes Plant wide damage accumulation rates and dollar costs for specific types of base load and cycling operation. This is done by drawing real-time measurements from the DACS system and computing actual stress increases and damage accumulation. This approach draws on APTECH's cost of cycling analysis that derives dollar costs for defined load transients.
COSTCOM™, APTECH's automated plant damage and cost monitor, is a real time software package that can be installed at each power plant to calculate and control plant-wide damage and costs. This can be applied to fossil, hydro, and gas turbine combined cycle power plants. The plant-wide damage and calibrated costs are then sent to plant management and on to the dispatch center as they occur in real time. This uses the plant data acquisition system, plant historical data, and a small PC-based (Windows XP) system. The code is available for installation at plants at which APTECH has previously performed a cost of cycling analysis, or can be estimated based on plant test data and a benchmark to similar units.

COSTCOM determines the cost impacts of increasing ramp rates, MW load transient ranges, and shortened startup times. By using COSTCOM, operators can learn how to control cycling operations in order to optimize operations and reduce costs.

Given above is a COSTCOM screen showing specific collected
and processed data points and typical output.
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