IGCC Power Plant Dispatch Using Infinite-Horizon Economic Model Predictive Control

Abstract

The Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) possesses many benefits over traditional power generation plants, ranging from increased efficiency to flex-fuel and carbon capture opportunities. A lesser-known benefit of the IGCC configuration is the ability to load track electricity market demands. The idea being that process modifications to enable dispatch capabilities will allow for a time-shift of power production away from periods of low energy value to periods of high value. The work begins with an illustration of Economic Model Predictive Control (EMPC) as a vehicle to exploit dispatch capabilities by pursuing the objective of maximizing revenue directly. However, implementation of EMPC can result in unexpected and, at times, pathological closed-loop behavior, including inventory creep and bang–bang actuation. To address these issues, an infinite-horizon version of EMPC is developed and shown to avoid many of the performance issues observed in the finite-horizon version. The paper concludes with an in-depth discussion of energy value forecasting and how the quality of forecasts can be incorporated into the design of the infinite-horizon EMPC controller.

Operational optimization and demand response of hybrid renewable energy systems

“…Receding Horizon Optimization (RHO) is typically used as the first layer of Model Predictive Control (MPC), which is a mature technology widely used in process systems engineering [40]. For real-time operational optimization considered in the present work, we adopt a receding horizon strategy in which a certain cost function is minimized over a moving time-horizon to determine the optimal power references for the various energy generation subsystems as shown in Fig.…”

Sustainability and process control: A survey and perspective

“…The characteristic time for charging and discharging of these storage tanks is on the order of hours to days, so these activities introduce long-term time coupling in operational decisions which must be addressed at the supervisory level. This challenge has been addressed using a simplified description of the dynamic power plant [226]. The consideration of such storage along with a detailed, dynamic power plant model has not yet been attempted.…”

Economic Model Predictive Control - A Review

“…[31], an EMPC "directly and dynamically optimizes the economic operating cost of the process, doing so without reference to any steady state". EMPC has been successfully implemented for HVAC energy saving applications, and started flourishing in power systems, as has been found in recent works, including those from [17,18,15,27,1,26,30,33,5]. For chemical process systems, the review in [10] has also pointed out that "while steady-state operation is typically adopted in chemical process industries, steady-state operation may not necessarily be the economically best operation strategy".…”

“…The research in smart grid and energy saving has started flourishing from economic MPCs, as has been found in recent works including those from [1,15,17,18,26,30]. Unlike the rigorous developments in the previous three papers, these application-oriented papers simply prolong the predictive horizon for feasibility or applies an infinitehorizon approximation, while emphasizing the effectiveness of the economic MPC approach in power systems and energy saving problems.…”

“…The stability proof is supported by a Lipschitz continuous property, plus an assumption on the weak controllability of the cyclic steady state. Different strategies for the infinite-horizon EMPCs have also been proposed in [40,19,27,26,41,30]. However, these are only the preliminary results or EMPC alike formulations, thus will not be given a review herein.…”