Substantially increased volatility in the power grid requires utility companies to cycle their thermal power plants output more frequently and more rapidly. Optimizing these start-up, ramp-up and down operations therefore plays an increasingly important role in the utility’s performance optimization, to save fuel while remaining within the plant’s technological capabilities.
However, optimizing start-up procedures is a complex task. In the past the effectiveness depended heavily on experience and intuition of the individual operators. Analyzing and evaluating start-up processes are very time-consuming. Steps such as extracting data and comparing periods of load changes is very tedious, when using tools as for example Excel. Further, as start-up optimization requires in-depth knowledge of critical parameters, only available through performance engineers, the analysis process could neither be fully automated nor outsourced to data scientists.
Visplore reduces these challenges to a minimum and enables performance engineers to intuitively analyze start-up and ramp-up operations with minimal effort.
