OPTIMAL PLANNING FOR GEOTHERMAL POWER PROJECTS

Abstract

Geothermal energy is one of the most cost-competitive of all renewable energy sources. The average generation Costs of geothermal energy are significantly lower than those of other green energy sources. Geothermal power plant utilizes the heat to drive power plants to generate energy. Geothermal energy accumulated within the earth was formed in the course of the creation of the earth, radioactive degeneration of minerals, and the captivation of solar energy from the sun. Producing electricity from geothermal fluids of low to medium temperature geothermal heat source has made substantial growth since developments were made in the binary fluid technology. The higher edge is determined by thermal strength of the working fluid, and the substandard limit on techno-economic features. Binary power plants are generally erected in _j small modular units of a few hundred kW to a few MW sizes. The cost of the plant is governed by various elements, but most predominantly on the produced brine temperature, which affects the dimensions of the turbine, condenser system and heat exchanger system. The overall size of the plant has slight influence on the unambiguous cost, because a series of customary prefabricated units are integrated together to procure larger capacities. Successively afterwards trial and error, binary power plant is evolving as a specific cost-effective and consistent means of transforming low and medium temperature heat into electricity from the energy available in the water-dominated geothermal fields. An innovative binary cycle application has been built-up recently, called the Kalina cycle in which N1-13-water mixture is taken as the working fluid and lingers advantages of regenerative cycle. The ammonia-water mixture has a low boiling point, so that the excess heat coming from the turbine's exhaust can be recycled to vaporize a considerable percentage of the working fluid. This plant is expected to be up to 40% more efficient than remaining geothermal binary power plants. In this work an attempt has been made to provide optimal planning for geothermal power projects, of four Indian geothermal projects, in generating electricity from low or medium temperature geothermal fluids by applying binary fluid technology. The optimum selection of the working fluid which is the main parameter in binary cycle has been selected and all the statel / points of working fluid at the different stages of the cycle have been calculated using COOLPROP software. The installation cost of the binary power plant has been calculated by cost-correlations which gives the optimized result