Dynamic Ramping of Retrofitted Coal-Fired Power Plants: Basic Formulation and Tightened Approximation

Decarbonization initiatives play a major role in avoiding worldwide climate change effects. One of the effective actions is expected to upgrade existing aged coal-fired plants to retrofitted coal-fired plants by installing pollution reduction technology for emission reduction. Besides this merit, retrofitted coal-fired units can enable faster ramp rates and achieve lower minimal output power levels, which substantially relieves the peak regulation stress. In this paper, we focus on the dynamic ramp rate characteristics and then derive a new family of nonlinear ramping margin formulations of retrofitted coal-fired units. Moreover, we further tighten proposed nonlinear ramping margins to be a set of linear constraints with a minor inner approximation error. Results of case study validate the effectiveness of the proposed dynamic ramping margin formulation for retrofitted coal-fired power units.