Statkraft Fires Up Hurth Knapsack II Gas-Fired Plant

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Written by Martin Lynch, European News Editor for Industrial Info (Galway, Ireland) - Statkraft AS (Oslo, Norway) is celebrating the commissioning of a new state-of-the-art combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) power plant in Germany just two years after construction started.

The Hürth-Knapsack II plant, which is located near the city of Cologne, was completed six weeks ahead of schedule by Siemens AG (NYSE:SI) (Munich) and has a generating capacity of 430 MW. At full capacity it is capable of powering up to 500,000 homes. The commissioning comes just three months after Statkraft announced that it was shutting its 519-megawatt (MW) Robert Frank gas-fired plant in Lower Saxony, Germany, due to falling electricity demand and the high price of gas. For additional information, see March 21, 2013, article - Statkraft Shutting German Gas-Fired Plant.

The turnkey facility uses a SGT5-4000F gas turbine, an SST5-3000 steam turbine, an SGen5-2000H generator, and the heat recovery steam generator as well as all the electrical engineering and the SPPA-T3000 control system. The Knapsack II power plant is a single-shaft unit in which the gas and steam turbines are arranged on one shaft and drive the same generator. Statkraft opted for the design due to its lower investment costs and its operational flexibility.

"In less than two years, we built a state-of-the-art CCGT at the site in Hürth-Knapsack," declared Dr. Horst Kesselmeier, head of project development at Statkraft. "It is now available to support the production of renewable energies with environmentally friendly gas power."

The plant has an efficiency rating of almost 60%. Statkraft has been operating a gas and steam turbine power plant with 800 MW of capacity at the same site since 2007.

Lothar Balling, the head of Gas Turbine Power Plant Solutions at Siemens Energy, commented: "Due to its high efficiency, the CO2 and nitrogen oxide emissions are very low. In addition, when in hot-start mode, the power plant can be run up to full load in just a few minutes and thereby compensate for fluctuations in electricity generated by wind turbines and solar stations. Flexible and reliable CC plants such as Knapsack II are necessary to support the new energy policy. However, it does have to adapt to market conditions in order to ensure that the investments are amortized over time".

Statkraft admitted that opening a gas-fired plant in the current climate was difficult, especially with cheap U.S. coal imports flooding the European market and gas prices remaining high.

Dr. Jürgen Tzschoppe, Senior Vice President Energy Management at Statkraft said: "With our investment, we are currently in a rather unsatisfactory situation for our company. The expansion of renewable energies continues, while emission trading as a control instrument practically does not exist any longer. This, in combination with high gas prices, leads to gas no longer being an economical option as an environmentally friendly addition to a regenerative system."

Statkraft remains convinced in the long-term viability of gas-fired power but said the 'wait and see' attitude when it comes to capacity markets has resulted in the loss of billions of euro in investments.

"Virtually all our dialog partners agree that capacity markets are necessary in the long term," states Tzschoppe. The introduction - according to Statkraft - is being pushed out at the moment, because Germany currently has sufficient capacities to secure the supply. "Emergency decrees are currently being made that defy the logic of market competition," he added. "For us as an investor it is unacceptable that these stranded investments are systematically taken into account. Additionally, there is the risk of significantly higher follow-up costs caused by unnecessary shutdowns."

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