Comparative Evaluation of Power Plants With Regard to Technical, Ecological and Economical Aspects

The development of efficiency of gas turbine based combined cycle plants has been very fast during the last 10 years and has reached now a value of close to 60 %. This value is well above that of coal power plants or other technologies. Even though development has been going on in these fields as well.For a fairly comprehensive reorientation and status evaluation with the time frame of 2005 in focus, a comparative study with equal boundary conditions has been performed considering coal steam plants with various steam parameters, fluidized bed combustion, coal gasification and natural gas fired combined cycle plants. Besides investment also technical differences and ecological data are given.The final evaluation of power generation technologies is based however mainly on its electricity generation costs or life cycle cost. Considering today’s fuel prices and price development projections over the plant life times, an economical analysis has been performed and will be presented, serving also as framework for project and investment decisions.Copyright © 2001 by ASME