Abstract
Co-generation systems can provide economical and environmental benefit by making good use of thermal energy that is the by-product of electric energy generation. In order to extract the maximum benefit from co-generation systems, it is important to operate them in the optimum way. However, it is not always easy for operators to figure out the optimum solutions because of the following reasons: (1) the configuration of co-generation systems is not simple because it consists of multiple facilities such as gas turbines, boilers and refrigerators that are connected to one another via multiple kinds of energy such as electricity, steam and chilled water, (2) the characteristics of the individual facilities can change along with the weather conditions, e.g., the gas turbines efficiency and rated output get lower when the ambient temperature becomes higher, and (3) the optimum solutions are different from case to case depending upon various conditions such as the electricity and steam demand, the unit prices of the gas, oil and electricity. Therefore, we developed the operator-supporting system to provide the optimum solutions of the heat and co-generation facilities. The key technologies are the object-oriented system-describing models to represent heat and power systems and the linear programming technique to find the optimum solutions. This operator-supporting system has been applied to the daily operation for 2 years at Sanage Plant, Araco Corporation.
