Effect of seawater temperature rising to the performance of Northern Gorontalo small scale power plant

Abstract

The change of seawater temperature is suspected to affect the power plant condenser’s overall performance. In this paper, we present a gate cycle model of the Northern Gorontalo steam power plant system to investigate the effect of the seawater temperature variation used as the condenser cooling medium on the performance of the steam power plant. The model shows that the power plant can still achieve the required power output even when a significant change in the temperature occurs. Based on the gate cycle model, higher seawater temperatures result in smaller values of the generated power and efficiency of the steam power plant and an increased condenser’s load. This finding is consistent with the reported increased production cost of electrical energy. We have found that an increase in seawater temperature of 2.5 °C results in a 0.33% decrease in system efficiency compared to the reference value.

Keywords

• Gate cycle software small scale power plant sea water temperature power plant efficiency production cost