Integrated control in a power production system - a case story on multi-level advanced control

As the largest power producer in Denmark, Elsam is the owner of a power production system, which includes different kinds of production units, e.g. coal-fired, oil-fired and biomass-fired thermal units, and wind turbines. The power market in Denmark is a commercialized market and still, a number of constraints and regulations are imposed on the power producers. This means that Elsam, as a power producer, is facing a complex system optimization problem as well as a complex plant optimization problem. The utilization of advanced control at all levels in the power production system and the integration between these levels play a very important role in optimizing the overall performance. The problem of performance optimization is introduced as a distributed multilevel control problem and a number of advanced control examples ranging from low-level control to energy management control show the importance of optimisation at each level and the importance of integration between the levels.