Development and Commercialization of IDAES-Based Performance Monitoring and Optimization System

DOE and NETL have created an advanced, open-source computational platform through the Institute for the Design of Advanced Energy Systems (IDAES). The IDAES platform is a very extensive modeling environment that can be used for a broad range of power plant and process applications including rigorous analysis of power-plant operation and comprehensive system-wide optimization. When these computational models are applied to coal-fired power plants, they offer the potential to identify actionable recommendations aimed at improving the efficiency, controllability, and/or reliability of existing facilities. Currently, the IDAES platform consists of a library of classes, methods and functions that can only be assessed via Python-language programs containing properly formatted statements and function calls. The IDAES technology platform requires programming knowledge of Python, is difficult to learn and cumbersome to use. The proposed work will solve this problem by developing and commercializing a software application that utilizes the IDAES platform but makes it easier to set-up and run IDAES-based analyses. The application will make the implementation of performance monitoring and optimization of existing coal- fired power plants more straight-forward and less time-consuming. The number of engineers and asset managers using the IDAES framework will increase, and the cost to perform plant performance optimization analysis will decrease. Together these factors increase the likelihood of finding and implementing improvements in power-plant operations. The Phase I work will focus on the modeling of coal-fired power-plants but will be structured so that Phase II will support a broad-range of IDAES applications including the design of advanced energy systems and the development and deployment of new energy technology. The objective is to support the development of optimization models to identify the necessary characteristics in new generation systems and transmission infrastructures required to meet the projected demand for electricity over the next few decades.