Turbo Expo and IJPGC join forces in the Big Easy

Michael Valenti
Mechanical Engineering magazine

NEW ORLEANS — Last month's 46th annual ASME International Gas Turbine Institute's Turbo Expo marked the first time the exposition was co-located with the International Joint Power Generation and Conference.

John Parker, who was president of ASME during the co-located event, began the keynote session by saying he was excited to host all three society events — the Summer Annual Meeting, Turbo Expo and the IJPGC — at the same time in New Orleans.

"It bodes well for the power industry to see the same kind of synergy here that it will need for the 21st century," Parker said. Nearly 4,000 people drawn from industry, government and academe attended the jointly located conference. Attendees were offered more than 500 technical papers and nearly 400 exhibitions, as well as technical sessions, plenary sessions and panel discussions.

The first speaker was Randy Zwirn, who is president and chief executive officer of Siemens Westinghouse. He described the critical challenge of manufacturers to build and service gas turbines for projects in the United States, as well as Southeast Asia. "This will tax our resources," Zwirn cautioned, while predicting that gas turbines will represent 10 percent of the power generating fleet in the United States in the next year.

Zwirn said that gas turbine manufacturers could take a lesson from the nuclear industry, which has reduced the outages of its steam turbines from days to hours and even minutes. "This took a great investment in preplanning, something we gas turbine manufacturers and our customers need to do," he said.

Siemens Westinghouse has already increased its turbine production to meet the hunger for energy, shipping 10 gas turbines per month, up from three a month a few years ago. "We need to invest more in production, and use e-trade to facilitate equipment transfer, service and analysis," Zwirn said.

As has been the case, power companies will install and service turbines during the fall and spring to provide peak power in the winter and summer months. To meet that maintenance challenge, Siemens Westinghouse tripled its training investment, and brought in 150 of its German engineers until sufficient American personnel are trained.

Wayne MacIntire, International Paper's senior manager for power technology, gave the gas turbine users' point of view, explaining that his company buys about $1 billion of energy each year, most of it generated from natural gas. The rising cost of natural gas led the paper maker to survey energy use at its plants and cut consumption by 25 percent. That was done in part by improving energy efficiency, for example, by retrofitting vintage boilers.

Del Williamson, president of GE Power Systems Global Sales, provided a region-by-region breakdown of the global boom in gas turbine sales that made his company the largest earner in the GE portfolio.

"In the Americas, we see the need for adding 330 gigawatts of capacity over the next five years. The major impacts will be deregulation, fuel price, the field availability of the machines, the possible return of nuclear power, transmission constraints and the possibility of overbuilding," said Williamson.

The Asian recession of the latter 1990s slowed demand in the Pacific region to about 200 gigawatts over the next four to five years. Modest European demand for that period, projected to be 165 to 170 gigawatts, is largely spurred by deregulation in Italy and Spain.

Williamson said that GE is investing in new technologies, such as its trailer-mounted TM2500s, to better serve its customers. These mobile power plants are based on GE's 23-megawatt LM2500 gas turbines. "We will supply California with enough TM2500s to generate 450 megawatts," Williamson said.

GE has also increased its production, expecting to ship 281 gas turbines next year, up from 212 in 1999. Echoing Zwirn's comments on the need to invest in service personnel, Williamson said GE Power Systems has trained more than 1,000 new technical advisers in the past two to three years.

The next speaker, Thomas Mason, executive vice president of Calpine Corp., said energy demand has driven the independent power producer's explosive growth.

"We went from generating 16,000 megawatts to 37,000 megawatts last year, and have targeted producing 70,000 megawatts in the U.S. by 2005," Mason said, noting that most of that energy would be generated by gas turbines operating in combined cycle. The challenge he sees for Calpine is servicing that fleet while bringing down costs for the company's rate payers.

The final speaker, Rita Bajura of the Department of Energy's National Energy Laboratory, gave the government perspective to the keynote addresses. Bajura credited partnerships formed among government, industry and universities with improving turbine performance. She cited the 60 percent efficiency achieved by General Electric's 480-megawatt H turbine, and Siemens Westinghouse's 501 G turbine.

The latest gas turbines now meet environmental goals of emitting fewer than 10 parts per million of nitrogen oxide by using lean premix combustors, said Bajura, who warned that developing countries need more energy — much of it from gas turbines — to make a more peaceful and stable world. She noted that distributed generation systems, such as microturbines, will bring that energy to populations that live where no power infrastructure exists.

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