Repowering the existing coal power plants using advanced heat sources presents a key political opportunity to garner bipartisan support for climate action in a way that maintains jobs, socio-economic benefits and tax revenues in those communities.. Another key point to consider is that the majority of the existing, global coal fleet is just fourteen years old, representing a trillion dollars of unrecovered capital.
At the same time, we attach a planned strategy for increasing or decreasing scale and content and how to flex to suit local conditions e.g.scale up or down to hit a particular brief.
rearrange or reconfigure to suit site constraints and layout.choose between a ‘seismic’ or ‘non-seismic’ version.choose between key suppliers for major equipment or specific materials required by fire codes etc.. We achieve this level of flexibility by thinking about the asset and the design in terms of ‘Chips’.
To create Chips, we break your assets, and the processes within them, down into the smallest, meaningful sets of interacting or interdependent components.Chips are created at all levels, from.
Simplest level e.g.
single components that can be optimised for material efficiency.Existing coal-fired power plants have enormous value in terms of established markets for their power, grid connections, access to cooling water and experienced personnel necessary for the generation and distribution of power..
But even though coal plants themselves are the largest single source of carbon, they can also act as flexible generators, complementing renewables in support of delivering reliable, affordable and resilient electricity grids..Installing advanced heat sources, such as small modular reactors (SMRs), to replace the coal-fired boilers at existing coal plants will enable the continued use of existing infrastructure for emissions-free electricity generation.. Repurposing coal offers a fast, low-risk, large-scale contribution to decarbonising the world’s power generation as we move into the future..
Together with Terra Praxis, other specialists and key stakeholders, we are developing a solution that will contribute to creating a huge market for rapid, low-cost repurposing of coal and gas plants with carbon-free advanced heat sources, while delivering a substantial portion of the clean electricity required to help achieve Net Zero by 2050..Traditional Approaches won’t work – a platform (P-DfMA) approach will.