Department of Energy Projects

NeuCo and the Department of Energy (“DOE”) are partnering to bring to market software solutions that serve DOE’s strategic goal of ensuring that US generators can produce abundant, reliable and affordable electricity in an environmentally-friendly way. This is being done through the Clean Coal Power Initiative (CCPI), a ten-year, $2 billion initiative to demonstrate advanced coal-based power generation technologies in the field that could help meet President Bush’s “Clear Skies and Climate Change” directive to reduce power plant emissions by about 70 percent by 2018.

NeuCo is involved in two projects: CCPI Round 1 “The Demonstration of Integrated Optimization Software,” with Dynegy, Inc., and Round 2 “Mercury Specie and Multi-Pollutant Control Project,” with NRG Texas.

CCPI Round 1

In 2004, NeuCo and the Department of Energy (DOE) announced a four year, $19.1 million technology development initiative to deploy and demonstrate integrated optimization software systems at Dynegy, Inc.’s 1,768 MW Baldwin Energy Complex in Baldwin, IL. Over the course of this four-year project, NeuCo has installed and refined five real-time, closed-loop process optimizers that address combustion, sootblowing and SCR operations, overall unit thermal performance and plant-wide economic optimization at all three Baldwin units – two cyclones and one T-fired boiler. This installation represents the first time multiple optimization software modules of this breadth have been integrated into a computerized process network in a coal-fired power plant.

NeuCo and DOE share the cost of developing and demonstrating the comprehensive set of NeuCo products that will integrate operations, maintenance and total plant economic performance. Read more about the project in the November/December 2007 issue of Electric Light & Power Magazine.

CCPI Round 2

Through the acquisition of Pegasus Technologies, NeuCo is now working with NRG Texas in a $15.5 million DOE cost-sharing project to demonstrate the ability to affect and optimize mercury speciation and multi-pollutant control using non-intrusive advanced sensor and optimization technologies at NRG Texas’s 890 MW Limestone Plant in Jewett, Texas.

The intent of the project is to demonstrate plant-wide advanced control and optimization systems on a coal-fired steam electric power plant in order to minimize emissions while maximizing the efficiency and by-products of the plant, including ash from an electrostatic precipitator (ESP) and effluents from a flue gas desulfurization (FGD) system.

Advanced solutions utilizing state-of-the-art sensors and neural-network-based optimization and control technologies will be used to maximize the portion of the mercury vapor in the boiler flue gas oxidized or captured in particle bonds resulting in lower uncontrolled releases of mercury.

This technology is expected to have widespread applications since it can be directly retrofitted to existing coal power plants or integrated into future new plant designs.

Read more aout the CCPI 2 project in this paper presented at Coal Gen 2006: Mercury Specie and Multi-Pollutant Control.

To learn more about NeuCo's Department of Energy projects, please visit the National Energy Technology Laboratory's website highlighting the CCPI projects.