Power Generation

Improve plant reliability, emissions control, and performance of generating assets.

Improving Operational Efficiencies while Addressing Environmental Regulations

We protect your investment by helping you minimize the consumption of energy, prolong asset operating life, and minimize the cost of ownership. Leveraging our state-of-the-art solutions, you will improve your plant’s emissions control, reliability, AGC capability, steam conditioning, water chemistry, and generation assets operational coordination and overall plant automation.

Experience and a Proven Track Record

We work with industry-leading power companies worldwide and have expertise in:

Segments

coal-fired power plants

combined-cycle power plants

gas-fired power plants

Applications

steam temperature control

automatic generation control (AGC)

NOx and SOx emissions control

duct burner control

water treatment

Services

controller tuning

load testing and DCS function characterization

unit-wide control loop performance monitoring

model-based control

training

The ControlSoft Difference

Choosing ControlSoft gets you a team of dedicated project and support engineers with extensive experience in the power generation industry. We offer a full range of project services to optimize plant and fleet performance. Our team of power industry experts will work with you to improve plant availability and flexibility while enhancing workforce productivity. We are ready to help you optimize your process control to maintain peak performance under any market conditions.

Case Studies

Power Generation Case Studies

See how we’ve helped power plants reduce fuel costs and emissions, increase revenues with better plant load flexibility and improve ramp rates.

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Results You Can Expect

Improve your plant profitability and reliability through control system health and performance.

Reliably realize and improve available generation flexibility.
Reduce operating and maintenance costs by improving process control.
Improve unit heat rate (plant efficiency).
Institutionalize plant control knowledgebase. Standardize tuning practices.
Improve plant support infrastructure.

Actual performance data of final SH steam temperature control before and after corrective actions.

At-A-Glance Access to Plant Control Health

I&C engineers and technicians can use INTUNE+ I&C INSIGHT to view diagnostic messages, performance indices and process trends, and take corrective action.

Remote access to real-time control valves and diagnostic events of process controllers.
Diagnostics message center with filtering and archiving capability.
View of DCS control hierarchy of all PID controllers reflecting cascading relationships of controllers color-coded for performances.
Average error, absolute error, standard deviation of error, percent of time in various modes of operation, percent of time in various alarming states, oscillation frequency, valve stiction percent, tune status index, recognized patterns in relevant process trends for control loops and final elements.

Date and time indexing of diagnostics message.
Configurable time horizon for data analysis.
Configurable set of commonly used or user-defined KPIs for controllers and final elements.
List of available and preconfigured process trends.
Process fault root-cause analysis by information drill-down using hyperlinks from diagnostic messages to relevant process performance indices and to relevant process trends focused in relevant time frames.

Collaborative Research

We collaborate with industry experts and organizations to research issues related to the power generation industry. See the following reports for details:

Case Studies in Flexible Operations of Combined-Cycle and Simple-Cycle Plants – 2015 Update

Integrating Environmental Process Controls and Combustion Control for NOx Emissions Reduction

Optimal Sensor Placement in Flow Fields for Control

Determining Optimal Ramp Rate

What People Say

“ControlSoft developed a new control strategy that properly distributed reactive power load among generators feeding the same voltage line. As a result, we have reduced the need for any manual adjustments, reduced the occurrence of extreme lagging/leading power factor situations, and now automatically handle difficult excitation limit situations. We appreciated the professional approach taken from initial consultation to problem review, solution development, implementation, verification, and testing. We recommend ControlSoft as a control solution provider for the unique needs of the power generation industry.”

Maintenance ManagerDynegy Kendall Energy LLC

“ControlSoft helped to resolve our high pressure (HP) superheated steam (SH) temperature instabilities. Providing optimal tuning constants via INTUNE software for the attemperation sprays greatly improved the controller response and eliminated the instability we had experienced for months. This tighter control helped to:

Prevent the unit trips from temperature excursions that we had seen in the past
Lower heat rate by reducing over-spraying
Reduce thermal stress on tubes and equipment, which aids their life extension and lowers both replacement costs and likelihood of tube leaks or damage to the turbine in the long run

In short, ControlSoft did a good job for us and delivered the desired outcome. We recommend ControlSoft’s tuning services for the unique needs of the power generation industry.”

Research & Technical Development EngineerNew York Power Authority (NYPA)

To meet the demand of greater production flexibility, we invested in ControlSoft’s MANTRA Duct Burner Optimization technology. This technology has proven very effective for our plant in meeting the CAISO’s dispatch regulation for AGC and ADS signals through our entire MW operating range, including the firing of our duct burners. Our plant’s operators are very impressed with MANTRA software’s capability to respond to load changes. Our plant can now demonstrate a greater range of operating flexibility over its various plant configurations, and more consistent heat rates while maintaining a constant unit ramp rate at MW transitions when the duct burners are fired.

Executive DirectorNRG Power Plant

Improving Operational Efficiencies while Addressing Environmental Regulations

Experience and a Proven Track Record

Segments

Applications

Services

The ControlSoft Difference

Case Studies

Results You Can Expect

At-A-Glance Access to Plant Control Health

Collaborative Research

What People Say

Contact a ControlSoft Industry Expert

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