Tehran, Iran, August 8
By Mehdi Sepahvand –- Trend:
Iran has increased its power output this time not by building new power plants, but by optimizing the performance of some of its generators in a simple, economical way.
“By carrying out two improvisational plans, we have managed to add 620 megawatts to our power output for this year (the Iranian year ends on March 20),” said Qolamreza Mehrdad, an official of the Iranian Thermal Power Plants Holding Company, IRNA news agency reported August 8.
“The first trick was to cool the air that goes into our gas turbines. Carried out at 18 power plants across the country, this increased our output by 260 megawatts compared to last year.”
This worked by spraying water over the inlet media, which proved to be able to increase the plant’s output as much as 10 percent of its nominal capacity, the official explained.
Of the benefits of the new method, he said it cost only 10 percent as building a power plant, underlining the fact that 90 percent of the equipment used for the projects were home-made.
Mehrdad went on to say that the second improvement method came in the form of optimizing the angle and volume of the air inlet of turbines (technically called the inlet guide vane), which showed to improve the power output by three to five megawatts per V94.2 gas unit.
This summer, Iran’s peak power consumption was registered at 52,692 megawatts, 2,500 megawatts more than the previous summer’s peak.
This is while the country’s peak output increased 2,100 megawatts year on year.
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