Siemens Commissions Record-High-Efficiency Steam Power Plant

ERLANGEN, Germany (Dec. 11, 2013) – The Lünen hard-coal-fired power plant owned by Trianel Kohlkraftwerk Lünen GmbH und Co. KG has been on line in continuous operation since December 2013. The plant was built as a turnkey unit under a consortium arrangement between Siemens and IHI Corporation. It has an installed electrical capacity of 750 megawatts. With 7,000 full-load operating hours predicted for 2014 the Lünen plant can provide electricity for around 1.5 million households. It also supplies the city of Lünen with district heating. With an efficiency of almost 46 percent, Lünen is the cleanest and most efficient hard-coal-fired power plant in Europe. Using leading-edge Siemens-technology makes it possible to save up to a million tons of CO2 every year. The Lünen power plant lies on the Datteln-Hamm Canal, a major inland waterway in North-West Germany. The core feature of the plant comprises a model SST5-6000 steam turbine, a model SGen5-3000W generator, the complete electrical installations, and the SPPA-T3000 instrumentation and control system. The SST5-6000 high-performance steam turbine guarantees not only highly efficient operation in base load; but thanks to its design characteristics it is also ideally suited for highly responsive ramping. These properties are crucial to meeting changing demands due to the increasing importance of power from renewable resources. "Despite difficulties arising from the special licensing situation for coal-fired power plants in Germany, we have managed to build a plant to the highest technical standards that by far surpasses the contractually agreed performance values for output and efficiency," stresses Rainer Hauenschild, CEO of the Energy Solutions business unit at Siemens Energy. "The energy transition in Germany we need the right balance between power plants delivering constant base load and fluctuating power from the renewables," explains Manfred Ungethüm, Managing Director of the Trianel power provider. "The high-efficiency coal-fired power plant in Lünen is a mainstay of the energy mix in the state of North-Rhine Westphalia. The power from this plant is in demand." The Siemens Energy Sector is a supplier of a broad spectrum of products, services and solutions for power generation in thermal power plants and using renewables, power transmission in grids and for the extraction, processing and transport of oil and gas.