Rwe Power Lignite-Fired Plant, Neurath, Germany

Two new 1,100MW blocks are being added to RWE Power's lignite-fired power station in Neurath. The station is located in the Lower Rhine brown coal mining area near Grevenbroich, Germany, and will make Neurath the world's largest power plant fired by lignite (brown coal). Instead of the traditional 35% efficiencies of lignite fed to the system, the new plant will be around 43% efficient.

Electricity company RWE Power started construction work in January 2006.The plant, also known as BoA power plant, is scheduled to begin operations in 2011. The new units will cost €2.2bn ($2.8bn), making the project one of Germany's largest investment schemes. It will bring about 2,000 jobs and apprenticeships in the opencast mines and administration, with construction providing job opportunities for 4,000 local people. Before commissioning the first of the two BoA units, RWE plans to shut down six 150MW units in the Frimmersdorf power plant.

The two units are being built near the existing power plants at Neurath and will cover an area of up to 37ha. The units will be named as F and G, and will be partially connected to the supply and disposal facilities of the existing Neurath power plants. The cooling structures will be 170m tall.

The existing plants will be either retrofitted or extended to facilitate partial connection.

A coal yard in the shape of a subterranean slot-bottom bin is being built within the premises to store lignite. The company will use its own north-south rail line to deliver raw lignite to the coal yard from where conveyor belts will transport lignite to the day bins in the boiler houses.

Contractors

Babcock-Hitachi Europe GmbH (BHE) is consortium leader, and is supplying both the steam generators of the power plant. The order for the consortium is worth around €660m, with roughly half falling to BHE and associated companies. The units are the world's largest steam generators with the highest steam mass flow, super-critical steam pressure and the highest-ever steam temperatures for brown coal.

Alstom won a €450m contract to build the two units (BoA 2 and 3), and will carry out the overall power plant engineering.

The company will also supply, erect and commission two steam turbine islands including condensers and, in consortium, deliver the two steam generators.

The Alstom-made steam turbines will be the largest in fossil power plant construction. They use the most modern generation of blading with flow-optimised three-dimensional blades and the longest last-stage blades so far available.

An extremely compact four-cylinder turbine helps reduce construction costs, while the associated generator will be the world's largest two-pole type.

Along with sheer size of the steam generators, the supercritical steam parameters are a particular challenge for the engineering of the individual components and – due to the overall height – for the erection of the two units.

GEA Group's Energy Technology division won the contract to build the two cooling towers for Neurath. The order is worth around €50m and is one of the largest contracts yet won by GEA's Energy Technology division. The cooling towers use wet cooling; the natural draft created in the tower cools the water, which is fed back into the cooling circuit.

Siemens Power Generation (PG) is supplying the control system for both blocks. The company is also delivering the transformers for the plant and the drive turbines for the feed water pumps.

Siemens' order exceeds €90m, and will be the first worldwide fully web-based fourth-generation control system.

Christ Ultrapure Water AG, subsidiary of Christ Water Technology Group, is supplying a turnkey water treatment plant. The company will supply equipment for demineralisation and condensate polishing. The demineralisation plant has two lines, handling 2 x 250m³/h and will use flushing bed technology.

Besides the two full demineralisation lines, the contract includes a regeneration unit, chemicals storage and neutralisation. The condensate plant uses security cartridge filters and externally regenerated mixed bed exchangers (Christ-Movex). Nominal output is 3 x 1,350m³/h.

Bilfinger Berger Power Services will supply a high-pressure piping system through subsidiary Essener Hochdruckrohrleitungsbau (EHR). This order is worth about €170m, of which €100m goes to EHR.

The company will prefabricate and install 5,000t of pipes with a total length of over 20km. New composite materials can be up to 100mm thick to cope with the ever-increasing temperatures and pressures in modern power plants. This can place tremendous demands on, for example, welding.

Investment restarts

RWE supplies 20 million customers with electricity, 10 million with gas and 14 million with drinking water and wastewater services.

The investment comes after many years of stagnation in power plant investment in Germany. An estimated 50GW of generating capacity needs replacement by 2020. The station is part of a programme of 24 new power station projects in Germany with total output of almost 20GW being built or planned at the start of 2006. They are planned for completion by 2011.

Protestors target plant

Lignite is a heavy polluter, and Neurath uses conventional coal firing, rather than the cleaner and more efficient coal gasification with carbon dioxide scrubbing.

In December 2005, 30 Greenpeace activists climbed onto a cooling tower at the site. They were protesting against climate change contribution by the electricity company, which they claimed was responsible for the biggest CO2 discharge in Europe. A banner showed the words 'CO2 Kills', and the protest was timed to coincide with the Montreal climate talks. The organisation wants investments to be redirected into clean energy.