The recent advancements in key materials including reactants and catalysts employed in solid-gas, gas-gas, and liquid-gas solar thermochemical energy storage (TCES) systems are reviewed. The thermochemical properties of reactants such as carbonates, hydroxides, metal hydrides, metal oxides, organics, and ammonia are examined. The research status of the modification of these reactants, new material development, and catalyst improvement are also discussed. At present, the reactant materials suitable for solar TCES exhibit various deficiencies in terms of cyclic stability, reactivity, conversion rate, energy storage density, cost or safety, which hinder the commercial viability of solar TCES technology. To further enhance the maturity of solar TCES technology, it is imperative to develop advanced composite materials on the basis of known thermochemical reaction systems, improve novel efficient catalysts, and broaden demonstration application scenarios and scales in the future. The key materials should endow TCES systems with high energy storage density, more robust cyclic stability, and rapider reaction kinetics. It is preferred that they are readily available, non-corrosive, and non-toxic and more cost-effective.

In the context of global energy transition towards cleaner, more efficient, and sustainable energy sources, nuclear power is recognized as a critical base-load power source that serves as a substitute for fossil fuels, playing a pivotal role in transformation of energy structure. Key advancements in integration of large-scale energy storage technologies with nuclear power are introduced, with an emphasis on analyzing the coupling modes of thermal storage, mechanical energy storage, and electrochemical energy storage with nuclear power, as well as their potential to enhance the performance of nuclear power stations. Various methods of coupling energy storage technologies with nuclear power stations are explored, encompassing thermal, mechanical, and electrical coupling, and the effects of these methods on operation of nuclear power plants are discussed. Additionally, solutions for the integration of energy storage systems are presented, such as the redundant design of turbines and the design of heat exchanger-based energy storage. The research points out that, the development of energy storage technologies will offer a broader array of flexible technological options for nuclear power stations, aiding nuclear power in playing an even more critical role in the global energy transition.

Accurate measurement of steam humidity is essential for safe and efficient operation of steam turbines, drawing significant interest from both academic and industrial communities. The primary techniques for measuring steam humidity in steam turbines are systematically reviewed, encompassing thermodynamic, optical, electrical, chemical, and ultrasonic methods. The principles, characteristics, and applicability of each humidity measurement technique are thoroughly examined, and their respective advantages and limitations are critically analyzed. Furthermore, development trends and future research directions in steam humidity measurement technology are explored. The research provides a robust theoretical foundation for selection and optimization of steam humidity measurement techniques.

To meet the urgent need for enhanced grid regulation capabilities due to the high penetration of renewable energy and to resolve load-source imbalances, the optimization configuration method for a wind-solar-hydrogen gas turbine complementary system is investigated. The data-driven model for a gas turbine combined cycle unit that considering start-stop dynamics and hydrogen-blending combustion is developed, along with theoretical models for photovoltaic arrays, wind turbines, and electrolyzers. An energy distribution strategy for the system is proposed, and the system capacity configuration optimization model based on MOPSO algorithm is established. With the objectives of minimizing the levelized cost of electricity, load-source deviation and annual carbon emissions, the capacity configuration of the complementary system is optimized. The results demonstrate that, using selected meteorological and load data, the system equipped with 85.28 MW wind turbines, 108.69 MW photovoltaic arrays, 78.02 MW electrolyzers, and a 139 302 m³ hydrogen storage tank can achieve up to a 6% reduction in annual carbon emissions and a load-source deviation of only 0.02%. This validates that the system architecture integrating electrolyzer-gas turbine can effectively mitigate load-source deviation issues in power grid.

The conventional heating method in thermal power plants has low energy utilization efficiency. To deeply explore the energy-saving potential of cogeneration units, a source load coordination load optimization allocation model for cogeneration units is proposed, which comprehensively considers the heat load side and heat source side. A modified outdoor temperature-heat load prediction model is established considering meteorological disturbances on the load side, and an energy efficiency variation model for cogeneration units is established on the heat source side. An optimal scheduling model considering source-load coordination is constructed with the goal of minimizing the coal consumption rate of all heating units. Finally, simulation experiment is carried out based on the heat network composed of six units and two heaters. The results show that, the load optimization distribution method considering source-load coordination based on the predicted value of heat load can effectively reduce the total coal consumption of the units during the heating period. Compared with the conventional distribution method, the coal consumption of the thermal power plant can be reduced by 214.56 tons in one day during the typical peak heating period, which is helpful to improve the operation economy of the thermal power plant. This load optimization distribution method has certain practical application value.

To promote the utilization of biomass energy and solve the problem of high carbon emissions brought by biogas power generation to integrated energy system, a low-carbon optimal scheduling strategy for integrated energy system considering coupling of biomass gas and power to gas is proposed. Firstly, a biogas production model is constructed, and the improved pressure swing adsorption (PSA) technology is introduced to purify biogas and recover carbon dioxide. Secondly, the power to gas is introduced and coupled with biomass gas, and the recovered carbon dioxide is used as raw material to produce natural gas, while reducing the system carbon emissions. Then, with the goal of minimizing the sum of equipment operation and maintenance cost, system energy purchase and sale cost and system carbon emissions cost, Cplex is called on MATLAB for optimization solution. Finally, different scenarios are set up for example analysis. The results show that, the introduction of the improved PSA technology to purify biogas reduces the system carbon emissions by 21.7%, which solves the problem of high carbon emissions brought by biogas power generation to the system. The coupling of power to gas and biomass gas reduces the system carbon emissions and dispatching costs by 7.6% and 4.4%, respectively. Thereby, the system’s low-carbon and economic performance is enhanced.

Three-dimensional numerical models of solar enhanced indirect air-cooling tower are established, and the effect of apex angle of radiators on thermo-flow performance of the tower and the varying mechanisms caused by environmental crosswind are evaluated. The distributions of air inflow and temperature fields inside and outside the tower, as well as the airflow rate and heat transfer in different cooling sectors are analyzed. The performance comparison is carried out between scenarios with and without solar radiation. The results show that, under crosswind, the flow characteristics and heat transfer properties of the tower improve with the increasing apex angle of the radiators, and the enhancement effect of solar radiation on tower performance also increases. Crosswinds enhance the performance of the radiators in the windward sector while weakening the performance of the radiators in the crosswind sector and leeward sector. Additionally, solar radiation improves the performance of the radiators in each sector, but if secondary heat transfer rate occurs in the sector, solar radiation may instead weaken the heat transfer rate performance of the radiators in that sector. When the apex angle of the radiators increases from 60° to 120°, solar radiation enhances the increase rate of the average air inflow rate of the tower at various wind speeds increase from 0.66% to 3.18%. Concurrently, the increase rate of the average heat transfer rate increase from virtually unchanged to 3.12%. The enhancement effect of solar radiation on the tower increases with apex angle of the radiators. Therefore, the tower with radiators apex angle of 120° has the optimum thermo-flow performance.

The oxy-fuel combustion technology and natural gas blending with hydrogen technology have good engineering application prospects in reducing system carbon emissions and promoting the integration of new energy sources. In response to the low efficiency of post combustion capture mode in integrated energy systems containing a high proportion of renewable energy, as well as the underutilization of oxygen and reaction heat generated during the electric to gas conversion process, a comprehensive energy system is established by supplying products from different stages of the electric to gas conversion process to oxy-fuel combustion power plants and gas turbines, and jointly operating oxy-fuel combustion power plants and hydrogen doped gas equipment. Based on the introduction of a reward-penalty carbon trading mechanism, a low-carbon economic dispatch model for comprehensive energy systems is established with the goal of minimizing comprehensive costs such as carbon trading costs, gas purchase costs, and coal consumption costs. Simulation analysis of case studies shows that, the proposed model can effectively reduce operating costs and system carbon emissions. The research provides a reference for the development of integrated energy systems.

In order to study the dynamic characteristics of supercritical once-through boiler units and design a coordinated control algorithm for it, a supercritical 600 MW coal-fired once-through boiler unit is taken as the research object and a mechanism model of the unit is established. In the model, the complex heat absorption equation and steam pressure difference equation in boiler section, as well as the superheated steam flow equation and unit load coefficient equation in turbine section are fitted by the long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network with real operational data from the unit given the algorithm's superiority in handling sequence data with long-term dependencies. This established four sub-models of the equations that can capture the operating characteristics of the unit. For the dynamic parameters in the mechanism model, an improved differential evolution algorithm is proposed to identify. After this, a complete state equation model is obtained. The established model is verified through open-loop step disturbance testing and closed-loop simulation upon historical operation data. The results show that the established model can accurately reflect the dynamic operating characteristics of the unit. The mean absolute percent error of the main steam pressure, steam enthalpy in separator and unit load are all less than 1.76%, which means the established model has high accuracy and can be used for research on coordinated control algorithms of supercritical units.

With the development of hydrogen energy storage technology and the popularity of sharing concept, shared hydrogen energy storage is gradually becoming a new way to deal with the consumption of new energy and the long-term energy storage needs of users. Taking power selling companies and users of production and marketing as research objects, a double-layer optimization economic model of power selling companies based on shared hydrogen energy storage services is established. The upper layer model is responsible for solving the long-term hydrogen energy storage configuration and revenue problems of power selling companies, while the lower layer model is responsible for solving the short-term operating cost problems of production and marketing users. The mixed integer linear programming problem is solved by KKT condition and Big-M method. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed model is verified by setting up different scenarios. The results show that, compared with the self-built hydrogen energy storage by the production and marketing users, the establishment of shared hydrogen energy storage power stations by the sales companies can reduce the configuration scale of hydrogen energy storage under the constraint condition of meeting the energy storage needs of users. At the same time, its daily operating income increases by 66.71%, and the daily operating cost of production and marketing users decreases by 34.90%, realizing the mutual benefit and win-win situation between the sales company and the production and marketing users.

Air-cooling island platform in power station contains arrays of air-cooling cells with two direct air-cooling power units, and the flow and heat dissipation behaviors of air-cooling cells in each direction interacting with each other will have a direct and dissimilar effect on thermal economy of operation of the two units. Therefore, the thermodynamic model of direct air-cooling unit and the three-dimensional flow and heat dissipation numerical model of air-cooling island are coupled to study the correlation between the flow and heat dissipation behavior of each air-cooling cell, the cooling performances of the air-cooling cell groups, and the operating thermal economy of the two units in different ambient wind directions and wind speeds. The results show that, in any wind direction, the flow and heat dissipation behavior of the air-cooling cells on the windward side are poor and deteriorate rapidly, while the downstream air-cooling cells perform well and are less affected by the ambient wind. The phenomenon of hot wind reflux tends to occur on both sides and the windward side of the air-cooling cells. The cooling capacities of the two air-cooling cell groups in wind direction of -90° are equal and the worst, while the cooling performances of the two air-cooling cell groups in wind direction of 0° are one high and one low, and the downstream one is better than the upstream one. With the increase of wind speed in –90° wind direction from 0 m/s to 12 m/s, at 100% THA load, the power generation efficiency of the two units decreases by 2.46% and the weighted coal consumption increases by 15.91 g/(kW·h), while at 30% THA load, the efficiency decreases by 1.24% and the weighted coal consumption increases by 8.65 g/(kW·h). The overall operating economies of the two units in wind direction of 0° and 90° are similar, and the sensitivity of the thermal economic parameters of the two units to the change of the wind speed at the low load is also relatively small.

Carbon neutrality of Guangdong power industry is the premise and important way to achieve the overall carbon neutrality goal. Based on GD-Enduse model, with the overall goal of minimizing the cost of power system, this paper describes three carbon neutral technology paths of Guangdong power and carries out quantitative and qualitative analysis. The results show that scenario CM3 is the optimal carbon neutral technology path, and its installed capacity of renewable energy will reach 60.2% and power generation will account for 51.9%. Nuclear power will grow steadily, generating 25.0% of its electricity. The continuous decommissioning of thermal power units will reduce the number of hours of utilization of retained installed capacity and be reserved for flexible peak-trimming power supply. The carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) ratio of coal and gas power will decrease to 24.0% and 44.0% respectively, while the CCUS ratio of biomass will continue to rise to 81.8%. Therefore, carbon neutrality in Guangdong’s power industry requires the large-scale intervention of CCUS technology and the rapid development of renewable energy technologies led by wind power and photovoltaic. Based on “wind, light, nuclear and storage”, employing the power structure that thermal power is used as flexible peaking power supply, and various power generation technologies and negative carbon technologies flexibly adjust complementary shortboards, can achieve the coordinated development of various types of power supplies.

To address issues such as data information security and difficulty in centralized management and control of data assets, a prototype system for data lifecycle security protection in power plant scenarios is designed. Firstly, the particularity and existing problems of the current field of power plant data protection scenarios are analyzed in detailed. Secondly, in response to the pain point of the lack of industry standards for data classification and grading in power plants, an automated classification and grading method is proposed to standardize the grading and classification of power plant data. Finally, in terms of system development, based on the analysis of the scope of power plant data protection and functional requirements, the functional architecture design and technical architecture design of the prototype system are completed. This system provides specific work steps from data asset sorting, automated classification and grading, full lifecycle management, security assessment, and other aspects, providing a complete solution for data security protection in power plants, and providing a basis for effectively achieving full lifecycle security of power plant data in the future.

The stable operation of carbon market depends on the accuracy of carbon emission data, and the data quality of continuous emission monitoring system (CEMS), as an adjunct to the accounting method, still needs to be improved. Uncertainty assessment is an important part of the construction of CEMS and data quality control. To assess and improve the data quality of CEMS, the uncertainty assessment of the carbon emission online monitoring data of an F-class gas unit was carried out. The results show that, the extended uncertainty of carbon emissions is 4.838%~5.012% (k=2), and the main source of uncertainty is the flow rate measurement, in which the velocity field coefficient detection is the main reason for the high uncertainty in the flow rate measurement, and the operating load does not have a more obvious effect on the results. Therefore, improving the accuracy of flow rate and concentration measurement instruments or conducting regular calibration tests can effectively reduce the uncertainty and improve data quality.

The online monitoring methods for carbon emissions of domestic coal-fired power units in the short and medium term are still mainly based on accounting methods, and the online monitoring methods for carbon emissions are not yet fully developed. An online carbon emission accounting method for large coal-fired power plants is explored based on routine monitoring data from the units’ fuel management system, leading to the formation of a rapid carbon emission accounting method. Additionally, five direct online monitoring approaches for carbon emissions are designed to measure volume fraction, flow velocity and humidity of CO₂. Building upon the rapid accounting method, the calculation deviations of different carbon emission calculation methods within different calculation periods are compared. The results show that, as the time span of the calculation period increases, the calculation deviations for carbon emissions tend to stabilize. Results from a 60-day monitoring period indicate that the computational deviations for the system method, monitoring method, modified monitoring method, oxygen balance method, modified oxygen balance method, and calorific value method are –11.5%, 7.7%, 4.6%, 9.7%, 7.1%, and 17.0%, respectively. After long-term comparative corrections, all these methods are viable for online monitoring of carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants, providing support for managing and controlling carbon emissions and carbon asset management within these facilities.

To improve timeliness and accuracy of the location of condenser leakage cooling tube and solve the problem that the leakage cooling tube cannot be located online, the optimal route of leakage cooling tube location technology is demonstrated by combining theoretical analysis with experimental research. The results show that the tracer gas leakage detection technology has the characteristics of high positioning efficiency and high positioning accuracy, and is suitable for developing on-line locating technology of condenser leakage cooling tube. Through establishing the relationship model between and among the helium concentration change value, time, and water tank liquid level during the isolation of one half of the condenser for draining water, the height of the condenser leakage cooling tube can be located, so as to determine the condenser leakage tube row.