Guascor® engine provides energy to UK grid-connected electrical energy storage

Guascor® Engines and Gen-sets

As an island with no geographic support from neighboring countries, the UK faces a particular situation that forces the National Grid management to make a special configuration of the electrical distribution along the country. The energy providers can’t supply at 100% of availability and there may be a lack of coal-fired plants in the near future.

As such, the government carried out a plan called short term operating reserve (STOR) that will rescue the country from unexpected high peaks (peak shaving) of demand when the base load supply is not able to support such a high consumption level.

As a consequence, National Grid approached different power generation providers to meet this reserve requirement. The requirement is to focus on the total availability of the energy source at the fastest reaction, in order to provide the most efficient power output on a particular window of time.

The Dresser-Rand business provided a stand-by engine solution to work at certain periods of time that will allow National Grid to cover peak high demand situations most efficiently.

Thirty-seven containerized Guascor® SFGLD 560 highcompression-ratio gas generator sets were delivered to three different sites in less than 16 weeks. Nominal output for each gen-set is 1,090 kWb (1,059 kWe) at 400 V. These 40-foot (12-meter), ISO-noise-insulated containerized Guascor gensets, that include heat recovery equipment and power control, were installed in three different areas of the UK:

19 at Exeter; six at The Drove; and 12 at Lesterway.

The modular design of these three plants enables fast equipment interchangeability and is easy to construct /

disassemble and move from site to site as needed. These light-duty engines run less than 2,000 operating hours/year and have a life cycle of 25 – 30 years (48,000 hours) before an overhaul. The units’ configuration improves the scheduled maintenance interventions, consequently reducing operating expenditures. Further to this, this type of gas engine is 10 times less pollutant (NOx emissions) than an equivalent diesel gen-set and complies with the medium combustive plant directive for emissions that will be passed into UK Law in

December 2017. This new law, published in late 2015, will apply to all operators of combustion plants rated between 1 – 50 MW thermal input.