GE will continue to focus on and invest in its core renewable energy and power generation businesses, working to make electricity more affordable, reliable, accessible, and sustainable. GE Steam Power will continue to deliver turbine islands for the nuclear market and service existing nuclear and coal power plants.

Russell Stokes, GE Senior Vice President and President & CEO of GE Power Portfolio said, "With the continued transformation of GE, we are focused on power generation businesses that have attractive economics and a growth trajectory. As we pursue this exit from the new build coal power market, we will continue to support our customers, helping them to keep their existing plants running in a cost-effective and efficient way with best-in-class technology and service expertise."

Source:  GE
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"We are recognizing that more and more customers are making progress in overcoming the economic standstill caused by the COVID-19 pandemic," said Marcus Mehlkopf, Founder and Managing Partner of E-quad Power Systems. "This has forced us and the customer to push more projects through the pipeline, further accelerating projects through the remainder of the year," concluded Mehlkopf.

Six natural gas-fueled C65s will be deployed in a combined heat and power application for a premier manufacturer of construction materials. The thermal output of the microturbines will be used in a fluid bed dryer to dry sand used in the production of plasters and mortars. The modular and versatile C65 units will be housed in a self-contained ISO-style container allowing for easy installation. The container allows for quick deployment and reduces installation and engineering costs.

As part of an upgrade of an existing turbine system, two C65 microturbines will be installed in a hospital in the city of Eilenburg. The microturbines will operate in a combined heat and power (CHP) application to lower emissions, increase energy efficiency, and ensure reliable power generation for the regional hospital. The natural gas-fueled microturbines will be grid-connected and provide electricity, heating, and hot domestic water for the facility.

An additional two microturbines will be deployed at a nonwoven textile manufacturing facility that specializes in the development of bedding and technical textiles. The C65 microturbines will be utilized in a direct drying application whereby the clean exhaust gas will be utilized in the manufacturing process to achieve energy efficiency levels greater than 80%.

After a thorough analysis comparing various distributed generation technologies, operators ultimately chose low-emission Capstone microturbines as the ideal solution for their scalability, resiliency, and ability to reduce energy costs. In addition to the direct cost-saving benefits of the cogeneration system, there also were government incentives for producing electrical power under efficient conditions.

"These new orders continue to illustrate the strong rebound we are experiencing from the energy efficiency markets in Europe. Quarter-to-date, approximately seventy-five percent of our new product orders are for projects in Europe with wins in Germany, the United Kingdom, Austria, Italy, Slovenia, Romania and Poland," stated Darren Jamison, President and Chief Executive Officer of Capstone Turbine Corporation. "These projects will be backed by Capstone's industry-leading Factory Protection Plan as we continue to execute on our energy as a service vision for the company with over half our revenues coming from reoccurring revenue sources for the previous three quarters," concluded Jamison.

Currently, in Europe, cogeneration supplies 11% of the electricity and 15% of the heating demand. Using a single fuel source, Capstone microturbines can be easily integrated to capture thermal energy produced from the clean exhaust to provide a significant economic advantage to end-users and our society.

All of the microturbine systems will be backed by Capstone's comprehensive Factory Protection Plan (FPP). The program is an industry-leading aftermarket service plan, delivering peace of mind, predictable maintenance costs, and remote monitoring capabilities at an economical price. The all-inclusive long-term FPP contract helps ensure business continuity while normalizing maintenance costs with a simple fixed maintenance fee per year regardless of the annual scheduled or unscheduled maintenance required.

Source:  Capstone
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Cheaper, easier, and more reliable

A postgraduate student of the Institute of Engineering and Technology Nikolai Neustroev, under the guidance of D.Sc., Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering Sergei Gandzha, proposed to implement a new design of an autonomous generator for a gas turbine plant. It can significantly reduce losses in electricity generation and increase the reliability of the unit.

High-speed generators are a very promising scientific area. About 2,150 gas turbine units with a total capacity of 28 GW are annually used in Russia. Gas turbines have low maintenance, autonomous operation, high fuel efficiency, and small dimensions. They are used in different spheres of human activity.

"In the currently used radial magnetoelectric generators, the main disadvantage is large magnetic losses in steel due to the high frequency of magnetization reversal. This creates some problems: efficiency decreases, heat losses are reduced using a complex cooling system, the monitoring and control system becomes more complex. The use of special steels and the weakening of the magnetic flux only reduce the problem but do not solve it. In this case, the price of the product increases significantly. We propose to use a permanent magnet generator with axial magnetic flux and a diamagnetic armature. There is no steel core in it, which means there are no such problems either. The efficiency increases, the design is simplified and the price of the product is reduced," Nikolai Neustroev explains.

The high-speed generator with permanent magnets and axial magnetic flux on a magnetic gas-dynamic suspension has high efficiency due to the elimination of magnetic losses, it is energy efficient.

At the same time, the gas turbine engine can use any combustible substance from gas to fuel oil. The proposed concept can be applied in any field of technology: power supply of passenger airplanes, ships, on-board military equipment networks, household power consumption needs.

The original design modularity allows adjustment of the required power due to additional sections.

"At this stage, we are completing work on the creation of a "digital twin model", since all the main components and assemblies must have three-dimensional solid-state virtual models for virtual tests," the scientific advisor Sergei Gandzha says.

A unique generator requires innovative solutions to create it.

"Now, I spend all my free time on the design of a magnetic gas-dynamic suspension. The fact is that the proposed suspension will reveal the full potential of the generator being developed. However, it is not an easy task to combine the magnetic and gas-dynamic bearings, but this is why we need science," Nikolai Neustroev says.

After a thorough study of the existing Russian and foreign scientific literature, scientists calculate several options for magnetic suspensions, trying to take into account all possible technical risks. They should consider options for combinations of gas-dynamic and magnetic bearings and determine the optimal one. The scientists intend to test their innovative idea in practice, that is, to make and test a prototype using the funds of the grant. A real sample model should confirm the concepts applied.

The grant will help bring the research to its conclusion. The research results will be published in journals indexed by the scientometric databases Scopus and Web of Science (Q1 and Q2). The growth in the number of domestic developments and patents for inventions is provided for the Nauka national project, which should be implemented in Russia by 2024.

Source:  South Ural State University
Associated URL: Click here to visit