Advances in power plant technology 13

by 2020 in March 2002. More recently at the UN World Summit on Sustainable

Development, in Johannesburg, September 2002, a pledge was made to increase
'substantially' the use of renewable energy in global energy consumption. World-
wide, the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
postulated a 'coal intensive' scenario with renewables contributing 65 per cent of
the primary energy by 2100 (IPCC, 1996). However, on shorter time-scales, it may
remain for nuclear fission (or perhaps someday, fusion) to meet growing energy needs
(VGB, 2001). It is also worth noting that electricity consumption is projected to grow
by 75 per cent relative to 1999 figures (DOE, 2002) by 2020.

1.5 Plant technology developments

Many power stations view the DCS as a direct replacement for older stand-alone
analogue or digital controllers. Hence, the control systems used in the DCS are often
simply a copy of what had been used in the past. In most cases loop control is
implemented using single-input single-output (SISO) linear structures in the form
of PI or PID controllers. For sequence control, the DCS provides an abundance of
logical function blocks (AND, OR, XOR, etc), with programming software allowing
these to be tied together to create multilevel control programs. However, from the vast
amount of real-time data available only a small proportion is typically used, usually
to alarm the operator of plant faults and occasionally to drive simple data trending
for fault finding or management summary reports. Minimal advantage is taken of the
high-speed communication network for plant-wide control schemes or supervisory
layers.
An enlightened view of distributed control systems, however, reveals that the
constraints of former mechanical and analogue solutions are gone. A new vista is open-
ing in power plant control and management, with novel and innovative approaches
being given consideration. It is now possible to implement non-linear multiple-input
multiple-output (MIMO) model-based control, coordinated plant control (trajectory
following and optimisation) or pseudo-intelligence in the form of expert systems,
artificial neural networks (ANN), data mining and genetic algorithms for supervisory
control. These new technologies are embracing all aspects of power plant operation,
from intelligent maintenance, environmental protection, data management systems,
intelligent alarm management, fault diagnostics, productivity management, purchas-
ing and accounting. The potential list of applications is virtually endless (DOE, 2001 a;
Oluwande, 2001; Lausterer, 2000).

1.6 References

ASME: 'Technology implications for the US of the Kyoto protocol carbon emission
goals'. ASME general position paper, ASME, December 1998
BP: 'BP statistical review of world energy' 50th edition, London, June 2001
DOE: 'Vision 21 program plan'. US Department of Energy, Federal Energy
Technology Center, April 1999