The power plant, which began commercial operation ten years ago, provides electricity and steam to Equistar Chemical’s Channelview Complex, with surplus electricity sold to consumers in Texas.
The facility includes four 170MW Siemens-Westinghouse 501F natural gas-fired combustion turbines, four heat recovery steam generators and one Alstom COMAX steam turbine.
Emerson claims that the upgrading of steam turbine controls to the Ovation system has improved the plant’s operational efficiency, and resulting performance improvements contribute to the plant’s ability to have an additional 8MW of capacity.
The company was responsible for designing, engineering, manufacturing, testing, training, installing and commissioning of the control systems for the turnkey retrofit project.
According to the company, the integrated Ovation control system now manages more than 3,100 I/O points across the entire facility, and includes nine redundant controllers and nine engineering and operator workstations communicating over a Fast Ethernet network architecture.
