Sunday, March 25, 2007

Afsin-Elbistan A Thermal Power Plant Rehabilitation



EUAS’s Afsin-Elbistan A Thermal Power Plant Rehabilitation Project:

The awaited World Bank approval has been granted towards the specifications revision made on the qualification criteria in the international tender.

Following the approval to be taken from EUAS Executive Board planned to be convened on March 26, 2007, a new tender announcement will be made in the Official Gazette.

Firms will be given 1.5 month bid preparation period

Friday, March 16, 2007

Park Group applies to EMRA to establish a nuclear plant



Park Holding has applied to Energy Market Regulatory Authority (EMRA) to establish 1600 MWe electricity generating PHWR type nuclear power plant in Mersin Akkuyu. Park Holding's application is the first application for a nuclear plant in the new term. In an application it made to EMRA on Thursday, Park Holding Joint-stock Co. has declared its intention of establishing a nuclear plant in an area near Mersin. Akkuyu area in Mersin has an authorization for construction of power plants from Turkey Atomic Energy Association

Turkey's Park Holding has applied for a license to build the country's first nuclear power plant in Mersin on the Mediterranean coast, said Yusuf Gunay, president of the EPDK energy regulator. "It is pleasing that a company wants to build a [nuclear] power plant in free market conditions and without putting any burden on the state," said Yusuf Gunay. He added that this was the first application from a private company and that EPDK needed to decide on principles for such applications. Turkey's parliament is currently debating a bill that would allow the construction and operation of nuclear plants. It plans to hold a tender to construct a three-unit, total 5,000 MW nuclear power plant in one of two locations in Turkey, either on the Black Sea or Mediterranean. The Park Holding project could become part of this scheme. Under the nuclear bill, the government would offer purchasing guarantees to major producers to entice private firms. However, Park Holding has not asked for such a guarantee in its application. Turkey, a net importer of gas and oil, hopes to overcome a shortfall in electricity production through nuclear energy and an expansion of current coal-fired electricity generators. The proposed 1,600 megawatt plant is expected to produce 7.5 terawatt hours per year. Turkey's total electricity consumption was 174 terawatt hours in 2006. Park Holding is owned by Turkey's Ciner Group.

Ciner Group (Park Holding) has applied to the Energy Market Regulatory Authority (EPDK) for construction of a nuclear power plant in Akkuyu bay in southern city of Mersin. Sources told the A.A correspondent that Ciner Group applied to receive "production license" to establish a nuclear power plant which will generate 7.5 billion kWh of electricity a year in Akkuyu. Turkey's Atomic Energy Authority (TAEK) earlier granted a site license for the bay. After assessing the application, EPDK will release a statement in the coming days. No purchase guarantees demanded
Park Holding included a self-declared statement in its application that says the company does not a power purchase guarantee for the 1600 MW installed capacity nuclear plant. The company also made a commitment for the completion of the plant by 2015.

Licensing is expected to take at least 2 years and will cost about 50 m US Dollars

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Global Warming



You are invited to conference presentation of "Global Warming Report- Turkey" on 23rd March 2007 in Hotel Dedeman Ankara at 1400 hours.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

100 MWe Nuclear Power Plant in Turkey



3 billion YTL (approx 2 b US Dollar) budget is allocated for Turkish Atomic Energy Institution for Nuclear Power Plant- NTV

High Council of Science and Technology under the Chairmanship of Prime Minister has decided to allocate 3 billion YTL budget for Turkish Atomic Energy Institution to develop local nuclear technology, nuclear fuel and refuse technologies, and to construct a new nuclear power plant with capacity more than 100 MWe. There will be a new Center of Nuclear Technology for constructing new Nuclear power plants with local technology. Moreover a new institution named Nuclear Energy Regulatory Agency will be formed to regulate the new nuclear power plants.

Nuclear Power Plant in Northern Cyprus



Dear Colleagues,

Should we consider a serious decision whether to invest in a Nuclear Power Plant at Northern Cyprus?” We can ask if Turkey has technological capacity to construct and operate a Nuclear Power Plant? Turkey has that technological and commercial capability.

As a matter of fact Turkish intellectual capacity is always underestimated/ undervalued.

However we all know that Turkish university graduates are not less qualified that their counterparts in the leading industrial nations nor less than leading US or European graduates of their elite universities.

Turkish scientific and technical capabilities are of high quality since we know that there are many high profile posts already occupied by Turkish University graduates, not to mention only in nuclear power field but also in other technical expertise.

We can also expect that METU Northern Cyprus campus can be a good opportunity to support and initiate the nuclear facilities in the North.

There is almost no fossil fuel resources, no oil no gas, no coal in the Northern Cyprus. Hence all fossil fuel should be purchased abroad and to be transported by sea ferries to the power plant.

On the other hand as in the all Mediterranean sea coasts, there is a high potential of wind energy resources so that energy can also be utilized a renewable green alternative.

We should also evaluate what sort of prestige we may expect from a Nuclear Power Plant in Northern Cyprus.

The level of development in your own country in Nuclear technology will obviously warn other parties that you are no longer at the vulnerable developing stage but in the high tech league. That has also a deterrence factor for the rival parties to think twice for any action they take against yourselves.

Let us evaluate why we should consider to construct a Nuclear Power Plant in the Northern Cyprus. We can consider because it is within the economic/ financial capacity range. Necessary capacity is medium size, feasible/ easy to finance. Northern Cyprus does not need big amount of electricity generating power plants.

We are now in the 4th generation nuclear technology with maximized security and minimized waste. So for Northern Cyprus, nuclear technology is within reach of reasonable local financing. There is availability of various technologies, small/ medium and reasonable size between 50-100 MWe.

Nuclear power plants are basically a kind of improved thermal power plants. There is one cycle more. You have to employ high safety measures, and solve waste problem.

There are news that Russia has even plans to sell/ export many 50 MWe capacity nuclear power plants on offshore barges.

We may ask the further advantages of a nuclear power plant in energy security. It is good test to train your people on nuclear technology, on nuclear safety, on nuclear awareness.

By being an anti- nuclear activist, you cannot learn details of the technology. You learn by doing as elsewhere as always.

We should also appreciate that nuclear technology is a very dear, very precious, very expensive issue. It is not free of charge. It is not even possible to get only with bare money as in the case of thermal power generation.

You can only get it through your own hard work by employing your young talents with their latest scientific and intellectual capability on a long tedious journey with blood, sweet and tears.

It is also a matter of survival of the fittest in the region.

When we come to evaluate the cost factor, in base monetary terms for a nuclear power plant within range of 50 to 100 MWe, you should pay at least 2000 to 2500 USD per kW power generation if you purchase direct from abroad plus together with concessions you pay on your foreign policies.

Construction period varies between 10-20 years depending on finance, technology chosen and other unforeseeable parameters. Anyhow you should start from somewhere.

If you do not wish to give any concession in your foreign policy, then you should depend on your own talent at a lower and independent cost. You can only get it through your own hard work by employing your young talents with their latest scientific and intellectual capability.

Hence we also need to learn the incentives legislation of European Union on renewable as well as nuclear energy, although we need some time 20-50 years to join EU at this pace. Anyhow information on EU's incentive legislations will help to spread the design application at our end.

However our main problem in Ankara is country’s low quantity of electricity generation. Overall in Turkey, electricity generation and obviously the average consumption is approximately less than 2000 kwh per person per year, whereby in Europe (also in UK and Austria) that figure is around 8,000 to 9,000.

Therefore Turkey (and Northern Cyprus) needs more power plants to generate more electricity, provided that the power plants are evenly distributed as thermal, renewable hydro, wind, solar, and also nuclear.

However we all agree that increased energy efficiency is the most cost effective and environmentally benign energy option and should be implemented first.

The world has a lot of coal, but right now carbon capture and sequestration is not commercially viable. Natural gas has national security implications and does emit CO2.

“If one side in a conflict goes nuclear, the other is bound to follow suit” says David Hirst, Tuesday April 4,2006 The Guardian

Monday, March 12, 2007

Turkish Energy: Brave New World 2007



Dear Colleagues,

In the 1990s, we received an important contract to build a new power plant for leading Erdemir Iron & Steel Mills on the western Black Sea coast.

Client specs required an expatriate engineer who would be available full time at the site. We looked for such a competent person. No such person was available.

We did find a young expatriate engineer, a recent overseas university ME graduate who happened to be in Turkey as a tourist, but anyhow prolonged his stay due to a love affair with a young lady in Ankara. He was looking for a part-time job. So we hired this young expatriate gentleman full time on site for one year. We paid him a high-end four-digit US dollar monthly salary, plus paid all his taxes and reimbursed his living and traveling expenses such as hotel accommodation, rental car, PC and cellular phone.

He had no experience, nor any capability to lead the project. Moreover he had a stiff southern accent not so easy to understand. Anyhow we also put one local senior engineer at the site to handle everything for a fraction of the expenses for an expatriate. That was the “cost of business” that we had to pay. Similarly we hired another expatriate civil engineer, quite a senior figure, for the Kemerkoy thermal power plant FGD project (EUAS), and another for textile-based energy companies Bursa (Bisas) and Yalova (AkEn) for their combined cycle power plant construction.

For a big local private company in their Bursa combined cycle power plant extension project, our foreign partner sent a senior German engineer to our site who was completely illiterate in computer skills, even unable to type on a keyboard. His monthly payment was similar to what was mentioned above. So we employed a competent Turkish engineer to handle the necessary project management at the site.

Their professional incompetence aside, most of the time they even humiliated our local engineers as in the case of utility size power plant constructions. These once-proud foreign companies were later bankrupt, and there is now practically no one responsible for their disastrous leftover projects.

This was all because our senior decision makers had no confidence in the capabilities of our young Turkish engineering graduates. Times are different now. It is not too much that they should understand that work is the same everywhere, with the same hardware and software used in every design and project management office, not only in the US, Europe or Japan, but also in China, India, Korea and also in Turkey.

In the past, our local private enterprise companies worked as subcontractors for leading international companies in thermal power plant and industrial plant constructions with an available qualified and semi-qualified local workforce. They had enough experience for project management for simple “civil works and site installation” facilities, first in the local market, then they had enough confidence to work abroad, in the Middle East then in North Africa, Central Asia and even in Western Europe.

We sent thousands of young workers to these countries, we gave them three meals per day, a reasonable and comfortable bed to sleep in, a reasonable hourly wage slightly higher than prevailing local market rates, and then we asked them to work 12 hours per day, seven days per week. We received many orders and earned a substantial amount of money. But these good old days are over. International US, European and Japanese companies placed these manual job subcontract orders with other cheap vendors, namely to Indian, Korean and Chinese companies.

These companies started to worked first as subcontractors and then increased their scope and started to receive orders as lead companies with full basic design, overall design, plus international guarantees. They received orders as lead companies and distributed the subcontracting work to their own nationals. We went to Europe, while European workers were receiving a minimum seven euros per hour and working a maximum 39 hours per week, and we hired our own manpower at three euros per hour and let them work 12 hours per day, seven days per week.

Initially, governments were pleased since they were spending less, but labor unions and parties were displeased. They applied to courts and regulators and stopped our work. Now with their rules we cannot receive any more jobs in Europe for subcontracting work. Furthermore some of our local subcontractors have entered into legal disputes with those international lead companies, at such a displeasing level that they can no longer work together.

Nowadays we have another very interesting development in the local market. Chinese companies are constructing three CFB-based thermal power plants.  They bring over 500 qualified workers to the each site for civil works and site installation activities. Our laws and regulations don’t prohibit such large scale labour inflows. Other than that, our local investors don’t care about quality, performance and efficiency. All they care about is the cheapest price. The cheapest price is the virtue of Chinese companies. When you declare the expected cheapest price in any tender, the Chinese always have a better price. There are explanations that these new foreign workers are either soldiers or young prisoners with good manners. They work hard, 12 hours per day, seven days per week, in a civilised environment, with a clean bed to sleep in and with three good meals a day.

Chinese companies are getting all the turn-key orders, complete with design, fabrication, procurement, leaving almost nil to the local partner. They are much cheaper than Western companies, although they are rather inexperienced or shy in their early designs. Sometimes they can’t meet the guaranteed figures or expected performances. It is a common saying that “Chinese companies have no backbones, they have very flexible ethics,” which means certain red-flag warnings in the application of anti-corruption measures.

Earlier we hoped that the service business -- civil works and site installation would be ours at all times, by all means. Not any more. Now that it is time to create our own technologies as lead companies, there is no more subcontracting. We need to focus on high value, high technology items; not only traditional construction. Many of our companies are focused on working as “contractors” with only interest in the “C” (construction) of “EPC” contracts. Engineering is usually a small part of a project but procurement is a big ticket where a lot of the profit is. Taking economics into account, companies need to focus on turn-key projects to build the expertise we are talking about.

When I explain these thoughts, local decision makers for big private local contracting companies start to stare at me with empty faces. But the times have changed and so should they accordingly, otherwise they will face the consequences, since this is the world of the fittest. Recently, we have been very pleased to learn that the Turkish Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources together with Turkish Electricity Generation Public Company (EUAS) have released a new tender for design activities to obtain design drawings for a minimum 170 MWe power plant which will fire local coal with pulverised or CFB firing methods. The contract is purely for steam boiler design activities to obtain drawings for three different local coal samples. We understand that the local interested engineering parties would be in need of necessary design software and hardware and young local engineering talent to finalise the design work within 270 calendar days.

Priced proposals will be collected on March 22, 2007. The contract's budget is estimated not to exceed a figure of $20 million. For such a big mega project, one company cannot handle all the work so consortiums will be formed. A location in a university technopark would be a preferable place to work in order to utilize the hardware, software backbone as well as the available engineering and academic workforce. That is an extraordinary development in the local market, a great opportunity for our engineering companies to sail overseas. We are very happy to learn that the Turkish Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources has at last shown confidence in young local engineering talent.

"Beautiful days beckon us, lads, sunny days beckon," says Nazım Hikmet.

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

The Best 10 Thermal Power Plants in Turkey


Photo. SeyitOmer Thermal Power Plant,
One of 10 Best in Turkey

Dear Colleagues,

In Energy Commission of Chamber of Mechanical engineers in Ankara Branch, we meet every two weeks on Monday evening in our Ankara office in order to review current energy issues, and try to make appropriate programs/ panels/ technical excursions.

Earlier we had following conversation at the end of our regular agenda. In our country we are just pointing the negative issues. We need to point out the positive developments. We should be more proactive.

There are good developments. There are good power plants/organizations, running smoothly, generating power with high efficiency, at high availability rates. We need to review them and appreciate their performance and advise them to be good examples to continue.

In our draft 2007 technical excursion program, we decided to list them and invite our colleagues as well as students to visit these selected sites, review the operations, write down reports

Here are our best 10 successful thermal power plants we planned to visit in 2007

BAYMINA- Temelli, Thermal/ Combined cycle power plant/ Natural gas/ Private ownership, 55km west of Ankara. 770 Mwe, 2 each GE Frame 9F gas turbine, CMI licensed Gulermak fabricated 2 each Forced Circulation HRSG with supplementary firing, 1 each 300 Mwe Alstom steam turbine. High efficiency latest technology turbines, high availability, further water treatment on downstream of Ankara Creek. Plant is visited on 22nd February 2007.

AYEN Enerji- OSTIM Ankara, Thermal/ Combined cycle power plant/ Natural gas/ Private ownership, 41 Mwe, 1 each GE LM2500 gas turbine, Allborg licensed Enka/Cimtas fabricated, 1 each Forced circulation HRSG with supplementary firing. Further utilization of municipality refuse land. Plant is visited on 3rd March 2007

ZORLU Enerji- Sincan OSB Ankara, Thermal/ Combined cycle power plant/ Natural gas/ Private ownership, 60 Mwe, 1 each GE LM6000 gas turbine, Allborg licensed Enka/Cimtas, fabricated 1 each Forced circulation HRSG with supplementary firing . Plant tour is scheduled on 15th March 2007.

SeyitOmer Thermal Power Plant- 4th Unit, Thermal/ Lignite firing/ Public (EUAS) Ownership, 165 MWe Owned by EUAS. High efficiency and high availability reported. Excellent utilization of local mine mouth lignite. We planned the plant visit on 14/15 April 2007.

Cayirhan Thermal Power Plant- Thermal/ Lignite firing/ Private Ownership. 4x165 Mwe. High efficiency and high availability reported. Excellent utilization of local mine mouth lignite. We applied for management permission for plant visit. We applied for management permission for plant visit in May 2007.

EnerjiSA KentSA IZMIT. Thermal/ Combined cycle power plant/ Natural gas/ Private ownership, 120 Mwe, 2 each GE Fr.6B gas turbine, DESA and BWG locally fabricated 2 each Natural circulation unfired HRSGs, plus steam Turbine. Plant visit will be scheduled. Permission will be requested soon.

Entek Bursa. Thermal/ Combined cycle power plant/ Natural gas/ Private ownership, 50 Mwe, 1 each GE LM6000 plus 1 each GE LM2500 gas turbines, locally fabricated (1+1) each Natural circulation unfired HRSGs, plus steam Turbine.

Eregli Iron & Steel Mills. 5th Steam Generation unit, Thermal/ low LHV Blast Furnace gas firing/ Private Ownership. High efficiency and high availability reported. Excellent utilization of BFG and CO gas.

Adapazari- Gebze ENKA. 770+1540 Mwe Thermal/ Combined cycle power plant/ Natural gas/ Private ownership, Plant visit is scheduled. Permission from management will be requested soon.

AkEnerji Bozuyuk Thermal/ Combined cycle power plant/ Natural gas/ Private ownership, 120 Mwe, 2 each GE Fr.6B plus locally fabricated 2 each Natural circulation unfired HRSGs, plus steam Turbine.

Above specs are tentative and they could be revised with your assistance in time.

We would like to visit our selection of the best 10 thermal power plants of Turkey in year 2007 and further plan to write technical articles to explain these excellent thermal power plants in our month bulletin.

We have lignite coal as our biggest fuel source and we all agree that we should use that coal

with maximum efficiency and availability,
with minimum harm to the mother nature,
with minimum impact on global warming.

The world has a lot of coal, but right now carbon capture and sequestration is not commercially viable, and no guarantee it will be in the future.

Solar and wind plants have long term availability problem.

Natural gas has national security implications and does emit CO2 which creates global warming.

The primary energy sources for new capacity and energy efficiency measures need to be chosen using some kind of quantitative risk-assessment scheme that most likely will result in a diverse energy mix that includes nuclear.

We are really not sure how to get around/adapt to the global climate change problem without some drastic changes, even if nuclear energy is implemented.

Hopefully someone will win Sir Richard Branson’s $25 million prize for developing a technology to cost effectively remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

Join me in a toast to the Turkish Thermal Power Plant industry as we sing a couple of lines of that Sinatra classic:

“...You think you’ve seen the sun, but you ain’t seen it shine; You ain’t seen nothing yet, the best is yet to come, and babe, it’ll be fine...”

Your comments are always welcome.
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