en.Wedoany.com Reported - The thermal power unit coupled with molten salt thermal storage project at China Energy Ningxia Yinyanghu Power Plant was successfully started up as a complete system on August 13, with the full-process operation of the heat storage and heat release systems running smoothly, and all performance indicators meeting or exceeding design values. The project was undertaken as a general contracting project by the Service Company with equipment supplied by Shanghai Boiler Works. It is Shanghai Electric's first EPC general contracting project for thermal power coupled with molten salt thermal storage, and also undertakes the technology implementation task of a key R&D project under the Ministry of Science and Technology.
The project targets the upgrade and retrofitting of in-service coal-fired units, focusing on four directions: clean and low-carbon operation, safety and reliability, efficient regulation, and intelligent operation. To address the complex operating conditions involving long-duration deep peak shaving decoupled from diversified industrial steam supply, the project adopts a multi-parameter steam-heated molten salt thermal storage system and designs a multi-resource coupling scheme for supercritical coal-fired units with a high degree of integration, resolving operational bottlenecks in high-parameter, high-flow steam supply scenarios. The unit's peak shaving capability now covers the full range from 20% ultra-low load to 100% full load, improving core issues such as low-load operation boundary constraints and the difficulty of balancing steam supply assurance with peak shaving demands, while enhancing both peak shaving and topping capability and steam supply system reliability.
The project took over 13 months from initiation to commissioning. The Shanghai Electric project team completed the full-process construction tasks, including scheme demonstration, technical comparison and selection, civil construction, equipment installation, system integration, control logic optimization, and joint commissioning. During the complete trial operation, the unit operated continuously under 20% ultra-low load deep peak shaving heat storage conditions and 100% peak load heat release conditions, with core indicators such as molten salt temperature, steam flow rate, and deep peak shaving load all meeting requirements, and the parameters of the heat storage and heat release systems fluctuating smoothly.
The commissioning of the project has verified the engineering feasibility and operational stability of the thermal power coupled with molten salt thermal storage technical route, providing a replicable and scalable "Shanghai Electric solution" for the flexibility upgrade and retrofitting of similar in-service units nationwide, and also offering a practical model for the low-carbon transformation of the coal-fired power industry and the construction of a new-type power system.
