Solstice Development Services HELE Power Station Cost and Efficiency Report June 2017
Executive summary Background Solstice Development Services (SDS) has been retained by ACA Low Emissions Technologies Ltd to investigate the case for High Efficiency Low Emission (HELE) power stations in Australia’s future power generation mix. SDS has engaged GHD Pty Ltd (GHD) to support this investigation by providing information on performance and costs for a generic HELE plant in Australia. This information includes:
Likely performance for a new plant under typical Australian conditions,
A range of capital cost estimates for a new plant, considering Australian labour costs, as well as utilising lower cost equipment from China,
Benchmarks of the cost estimate methodology against reported costs for similar plants built in the last decade.
This report contains the information developed by GHD. Plant and performance The base case HELE plant is a 650 MW (sent out), wet cooled single unit generator. The boiler is fuelled by black coal and a typical Hunter Valley specification has been used for modelling. Steam conditions are 275 barg and 604 Ԩ for the high pressure steam and 59 barg and 604 Ԩ for the intermediate pressure steam. A dry cooing system was also modelled as an alternative. The performance figures for both at an ambient temperature of 25 Ԩ are presented in Table 1. Table 1
Summary of performance figures
Parameter Inputs and outputs Coal consumed Steam turbine output Auxiliary loads and losses Net (sent out) output CO2 emissions Heat rate Heat rate (net, LHV) Efficiency (net, LHV) Heat rate (net, HHV) Efficiency (net, HHV)
Unit
Base case (wet cooling)
Dry cooling comparison case
tph MW MW MW tph
195.6 675.5 25.5 650.0 505.3
201.4 678.8 28.8 650.0 520.3
kJ/kWh % kJ/kWh %
8,396 42.88 8,704 41.36
8,646 41.64 8,963 40.16
GHD | Report for Solstice Development Services - HELE Power Station, 41/30763 | i
Capital costs Preliminary cost estimates have been produced using Thermoflow’s PEACE™ (Preliminary Engineering and Cost Estimation) software. This software uses a “factored cost” approach, which has recognised limitations on accuracy. The estimates are presented in Table 2. Table 2
Summary of capital costs
Cost categories
Base case (wet cooling)
Contractor's Internal Cost
US$1,121.8 M
US$1,162.1 M
US$211.7 M
US$224.9 M
US$1,333.4 M
US$1,387.0 M
Contractor's Soft & Miscellaneous Costs Total - Contractor's Cost Net Plant Output (MW) Cost per kW - Contractor's
Dry cooling comparison case
650
650
US$2,051
US$2,134
The ‘Contractor’s Cost’ is the cost to build the plant, and excludes additional costs incurred by the owner (e.g. project development, finance and legal fees, interest during construction). At an exchange rate of AU$1=US$0.75, the ‘Contractor’s Cost’ for the base case would be AU$1.778b. PEACE uses a number of cost multipliers to reflect the local cost of constructing a power station relative to the cost at the United States (US) reference location. The PEACE database contains default cost multipliers for different regions in the US as well as for various countries around the world. The default multipliers can be manually overridden by the user if there are better project specific figures available. In addition to using the default Thermoflow cost factors for Australia, GHD has considered three alternative scenarios in order to assess the potential range of outcomes under different combinations of cost multiples. These three additional cases reflect consideration of: 1.
A set of cost multipliers produced by WorleyParsons for a report publis
