US INDUSTRIAL giant General Electric (GE) has developed a new combined gas, wind and solar energy plant that is ultra-efficient and produces low CO2 emissions.
The company is building an Integrated Renewables Combined Cycle plant – the first of its kind in the world – for MetCap Energy, a Turkish utility firm.
Based on GE’s Flexefficiency conventional power station technology, the plant will feature a modern gas turbine, a steam turbine, 22MW of wind turbines and 50MW of solar thermal technology, which involves solar panels concentrating their heat on a water tower to produce steam that powers a turbine.
The plant will have a total capacity of 1,080MW and is expected to be built by 2015. It aims to achieve a high of 69 per cent efficiency – which is greater than any of the technologies on their own – and when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing, it can begin generating electricity in 28 minutes to keep the power flowing.
It is expected to run on renewables 15 per cent of the time, but this could increase as renewable technologies improve in the future, according to Marcus Scholz, GE’s commercial director of advanced combined cycles.
