Concept Design and Performance Investigation on Coal-fired Power Plant Using a Novel MEA-based Process for Peak Shaving

CO2 capture and peak shaving are two main challenges for conventional coal-fired power plants now. With a 1000MW ultra-supercritical coal-fired power plant being the reference unit, this paper proposed a novel monoethanolamine (MEA)-based CO2 capture process with lean/rich-solvent energy storage for simultaneous flue gas decarbonization and peak shaving. Then Aspen Plus was used to simulate the reference unit, the novel MEA-based CO2 capture process with lean/rich-solvent energy storage, and the conventional MEA- based CO2 capture process, respectively. The results show that when the 1000 MW coal-fired power plant was retrofitted to the conventional MEA-based CO2 capture process, the net electric efficiency of the process was reduced by 10.28~ 10.96%. However, an increase of 1.47~2.1% in the average daily net electric efficiency was achieved when the coal-fired power plant was retrofitted to the novel MEA-based CO2 capture process with lean/rich-solvent energy storage. Moreover, the novel MEA-based CO2 capture process with lean/rich-solvent energy storage improves the peak shaving capacity and operational flexibility of the process significantly, the peak-shaving coefficient of which reached 2.47. © 2021 Chin. Soc. for Elec. Eng.