Trianel Gaskraftwerk Hamm GmbH & Co. KG is owned by a communal network of 27 shareholders. It operates two turnkey single shaft configurations from Siemens Energy, with SGT5-4000F gas turbines, SST5-3000 steam turbines and SGen5-2000H generators. Designed for 8,000 operating hours per year, the plant contributed about half of the full load hours it was capable of in 2013, due to changing market conditions. Its ability to provide ancillary services such as secondary frequency response and minute reserve (tertiary frequency response) was crucial to keeping the plant in business.
Since then, the market has only gotten tougher for Trianel. It faces low profit margins, frequent part-load operation, which means reduced efficiency and increased emissions, and fluctuating prices on the power trading exchange. It must also cope with more changes to the operating schedule, forced nighttime operations and a high number of load change requests for a short duration that come in on short notice.
Already in 2011, Trianel had asked for help to stay on the market longer and return earlier, and Siemens (as the parent company of the spin-off Siemens Energy, an independent company that was formed in September 2020) began to accelerate its development activities to steepen the gas turbine load gradient from 13 megawatts per minute to higher values. But, as Matthias Nickl, the Product Manager of Flex-Power Services at Siemens Energy, says, “The potential for improving the operational flexibility of a combined cycle plant is very much dependent on integrated solutions that take all components of the plant into account, especially the interaction of the gas turbine with the downstream steam cycle. Getting this right means operators can stay in the money.”
