Thermal power, a traditional way of power generation, is still the most stable and reliable source of electricity today, playing an important role in the safety of the whole society. However, with the promotion of the “dual carbon” goal and the rise of energy costs in recent years, the thermal power industry with coal and natural gas as the main raw materials is facing unprecedented challenges, and it is imperative to build a “safe, efficient and low-carbon” smart power plant.

At the beginning of this year, in Huainan, Anhui Province, the energy capital known as the “three gorges of thermal power”, a new digital smart benchmarking power plant – Huainan Panji Power Plant (hereinafter referred to as Panji Power Plant) was officially put into operation, and two 660MW ultra-supercritical units in the first phase of the project can generate 6.6 billion KWH of electricity annually. In the construction and daily operation and maintenance of this nearly “zero” emission and green thermal power plant, the native digital delivery technology has played a key supporting role.

Digital wisdom pioneer power plant, to achieve N digital applications

Rich coal resources, good coal quality – Huainan with unique advantages in the thermal power industry, gathered many large thermal power plants. In recent years, in order to ensure the safety and reliability of the Yangtze River Delta power supply, optimize the Anhui power transmission to the east, the Three Gorges hydropower transmission channel construction along the Yangtze River, the state issued the “Yangtze River Delta regional integration development Planning Outline”, which clearly put forward the “relying on the coal base of the construction of clean and efficient pit-mouth power station” strategic layout. The new Panji power plant built by Huaihe Energy Group is the first implementation project of the strategic layout.

Aiming at the benchmark of digital smart power plant, Panji Power Plant now closely combines thermal power industry knowledge with digital intelligence technology. Based on a cloud platform, in addition to realizing multi-network integration of production control and management information network, 5G private network and WiFi 6 coverage of the whole plant area, It has also created N digital application modules, including digital delivery, intelligent operation, predictive maintenance, MIS & SIS integration, intelligent dust removal and intelligent denitrification, etc. The comprehensiveness and completion of its digital technology application are unique in the industry. For example, at the level of intelligent operation, the unit can help the power plant achieve stable operation without intervention for 168 hours (7 days and 7 nights) through self-optimization and self-regulation.

However, as we all know, as a typical asset-intensive industry, thermal power plant project volume is huge, involving complex institutions, involving a wide range of technologies, and the industry digital transformation started relatively late, the digital system is relatively dispersed, want to build such a leading digital power plant is not easy, before the construction must solve the data island and information transmission efficiency of low pain points. To this end, as early as the early stage of the factory construction planning, Huaihe Energy decided to use digital delivery to lay a solid digital base for the factory.

Native digital delivery, successfully creating a “3-minute plan”

The whole process of a new factory from design, construction to operation and maintenance will generate data from time, space, people and business. Because the software used by different design institutes is different, the format is incompatible, and the data of each system will form a data island, and with the continuous operation of production and equipment, if the mass data is archived with drawing data, the transmission efficiency is low, and the data will face the risk of being submerged and lost after delivery.

Today, to achieve high-quality engineering handover, digital delivery has become the company of choice, the most intuitive benefits of doing so is to open up a large number of data sources from the design institute, construction and hundreds of suppliers, standardize various habits and rules.

In the early stage of the project, Schneider Electric combined with the actual situation of the first phase of the power plant, from planning and design, installation trial operation to delivery and production, a total of 11 replicable and reusable digital transfer standard documents were completed, and based on the national power standard, on the basis of its original design institute 16,500 KKS codes, expanded to more than 50,000 KKS codes.

In order to eliminate the silos between the large amount of dynamic/static data, engineering data and operation and maintenance data of the power plant, Panji Power Plant selected Schneider Electric AVEVA™ AIM digital delivery platform (asset information management platform) after careful research and requirements communication. With the reliability and strong format compatibility of the platform, Panji Power Plant was able to integrate isolated and dispersed information at various stages, and successfully created a “three-minute plan” for operation and maintenance management, which can obtain more than 46,000 equipment, engineering drawing information and real-time operation and maintenance data in up to three minutes and as soon as a few seconds.

With the help of Schneider Electric’s professional engineering team, the Panji Power Plant not only improves the quality of engineering data and information delivery, but also creates a unified, high-quality “digital library” covering all specialties. When dealing with emergencies, inspection and maintenance personnel can use handheld mobile devices such as computers and ipads to quickly achieve data retrieval, which greatly reduces the workload and improves the operation and maintenance efficiency of the entire factory.

Not only that, Schneider Electric used AVEVA AIM’s powerful digital twin technology, based on on-site photography and 100% real native data, to also restore the physical Pan collector plant 1:1 in the system. This “native digital delivery” also allows 3D models to achieve industry-leading levels of completion, clarity and detail. In this digital twin power plant, operation and maintenance personnel can not only measure the distance remotely, but also use built-in functions such as cutting to accurately obtain information such as the underground pipe gallery and cable direction of the power plant, which is of great benefit to the maintenance and transformation of complex hidden projects in the plant.

At the same time, at the data visualization level, Panji Power Plant also uses Schneider Electric’s AVEVA Engage touch large-screen decision system to achieve three-dimensional visualization and intelligent applications. Now, power plant operation and maintenance personnel only need to click the mouse or drag the screen, they can obtain any equipment at any time, from drawings, manufacturers, to installation and commissioning, maintenance, inventory and other records and real-time status data, the whole paperless to avoid the risk of data loss caused by cumbersome file access, improve work efficiency and data traceability.