POWER March 2022 - 21

ENERGY TRANSITIONS
The company said repowering can extend
the design lifespan of a solar array
by 20 years or more.
Repurposing Coal Plants with
Nuclear Power
2. GE will provide 26 Cypress 6.0-164 wind
turbines for a wind farm repowering project
in the Netherlands. Courtesy: GE Renewable
Energy
bines at the Pinnacle site enables the
farm to produce 16% more energy than
the previous turbines. The project created
about 50 full-time construction jobs,
and will increase Clearway's tax payments
to Mineral County by as much as
$200,000 in the first year of operation.
The company said the wind farm also will
contribute $3.7 million in West Virginia
business and occupancy taxes over its
newly extended operating life.
A WindEurope analysis of about
140 projects repowered in Europe also
shows the benefits of updating turbine
technology. On average, the number
of turbines in those wind projects decreased
by 27%. Meanwhile, installed
generation capacity was doubled, and
electricity output tripled.
Repowering solar farms also is being
done with an eye toward improved
generation capacity and power production,
particularly due to the rapid pace of
technological advancements in the solar
sector for photovoltaic modules, inverters,
and trackers. Repowering often focuses
on inverters because they offer
the greatest potential for performance
upgrades, as they convert direct current
electricity that solar panels generate to
alternating current electricity for use by
the grid. Inverters, in addition to converting
power, also are responsible for grid
services, control, and monitoring.
Germany-based BayWa r.e. is known
for its solar repowering efforts, in Europe
and elsewhere. The company last
year, in announcing projects in the UK,
noted how modernizing and optimizing
solar power plants can " considerably
improve [solar power] availability and
production, and thus offer significant
improved return on investment, " according
to Natasha Kumar, managing director
for BayWa r.e. Operation Services.
March 2022 | POWER
A UK-headquartered international design
company, Bryden Wood, is working with
TerraPraxis, a non-profit organization focused
on action for climate and energy,
on a " Repowering Coal " initiative to
help countries meet net-zero emissions
targets by replacing coal-fired boilers at
existing power plants with Generation
IV advanced modular reactors (AMRs).
Bryden Wood has created a new design
and construction solution that the group
says would make such a program possible
at scale and speed, in part by deploying
a new digital platform.
" We've developed a new, standardized
and optimized approach that's
completely different to previous infrastructure
thinking, " Martin Wood, cofounder
of Bryden Wood, told POWER.
" We're building the market for AMRs at
the same time as the product itself is
being developed. The digital tools we're
creating will enable us to have a huge
number of projects, across multiple
sites, ready to go as soon as the reactors
are approved. Speed and agility have
never been so important. "
Bryden Wood, in addition to joining
with TerraPraxis, is working with
the University of Buffalo, the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology,
Microsoft, and KPMG to standardize
and optimize processes, along with
building and engineering systems. The
groups said the project to replace coal
units with small reactors would first
be deployed in the U.S.
Kirsty Gogan, founder and managing
partner of TerraPraxis, told POWER, " By
sustaining permanent high-quality jobs
for communities, repowered coal plants
reduce the negative impacts on communities
to public and political support for a
just transition. The challenge is not only
to build enough clean electricity generation
to power the world, but to do so
quickly while building the infrastructure
required to decarbonize end-use sectors
such as heat, industry, and transport. "
Many coal plants have been retrofitted
to burn natural gas over the past
decade-plus; a repowering with nuclear
technology presents new design and
regulatory challenges.
" Coal plants vary widely and developing
a new design for each plant would
be complex, costly, and slow, " said
www.powermag.com
Wood. " Rather than thousands of individual
projects, we must have a unified
approach where the design is simplified
and standardized to make this plan a
reality as quickly as possible. The plan
is to replace the existing boiler with a
standardized advanced heat source
(AHS) that fits into a standardized facility.
A new heat transfer and storage
system will run between the existing
coal plant and the AHS, which is itself in
two parts: the reactor within a modular,
component-based enclosure, and another
enclosure with support systems.
A modular heat transfer system and associated
energy storage will allow the
plant to efficiently match reactor output
with generation demand. "
Gogan acknowledged the regulatory
challenges, and said, " Our building system
is designed to reduce regulatory
scope by firstly separating the power
island from the heat island via thermal
energy storage. This means that no accident
propagation is possible from the
power island to the heat island, and that
the power island has no nuclear safety
requirements. Secondly, safety by design
characteristics of the advanced
heat sources means that safety is
achieved with no active safety systems.
This reduces complexity and means that
all safety-related systems can be combined
in one reactor building. The relatively
small reactor building, assembled
from pre-fabricated components, therefore
becomes the only safety-related
building. As part of their initial license
review, the regulator will have already
reviewed this exact configuration and
its associated building designs. "
Gogan said repowering is a way " to
accelerate and de-risk global decarbonization, "
while also supporting an
" affordable clean energy provision on
existing sites utilizing existing transmission. "
She said it provides " the opportunity
to reduce the overall scale of
investment required to enable the clean
energy transition. "
It also could help the energy workforce,
as plants are repowered with
new technology and able to remain in
operation. " Repurposing the majority of
existing coal plant sites and infrastructure,
including transmission, and maintaining
the workforce employed today,
dramatically reduces the investments
and effort otherwise required to site,
plan, build, and connect new infrastructure, "
she said.■
-Darrell Proctor is a senior associate
editor for POWER.
21
http://www.powermag.com
POWER March 2022

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