Collaboration of GTCC-Powered CAES with Residual Compression Heat for Gas Turbine Inlet Air Heating

In order to enhance the off-peak performance of gas turbine combined cycle (GTCC) units, a novel collaborative power generation system (CPG) was proposed. During off-peak operation periods, the remaining power of the GTCC was used to drive the adiabatic compressed air energy storage (ACAES), while the intake air of the GTCC was heated by the compression heat of the ACAES. Based on a 67.3 MW GTCC, under specific demand load distribution, a CPG system and a benchmark system (BS) were designed, both of which used 9.388% of the GTCC output power to drive the ACAES. The performance of the CPG and the BS without intake air heating was compared. The results show that the load rate of the GTCC in the CPG system during off-peak periods is significantly enhanced, and the average operating efficiency of the GTCC is increased by 1.19 percentage points. However, in the BS system, due to the single collaborative method of load shifting, the GTCC operative efficiency is almost increased by 1.00 percentage points under different ambient temperatures. In a roundtrip cycle at an ambient temperature of 288.15 K, the system efficiency of the CPG reaches 0.5010, which is 0.62 percentage points higher than the operative efficiency of 0.4948 in the standalone GTCC; while the system efficiency of the BS is slightly inferior to that of the standalone GTCC. The findings confirm the technical feasibility and performance improvement of the ACAES-GTCC collaborative power generation system.