EMC UAE

Gas Turbine Power Generation at EMC UAE

Gas Turbine Power Generation at EMC UAE

Introduction

In today's world, nuclear energy plays an important role in electricity generation. In fact, 13.5% of the world's electricity need is provided by nuclear power reactors. It offers carbon-free emission and sustainable energy, and these features make nuclear power more favorable than other generation types for a prospective solution to the world's increasing energy demand. Based on a report released by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the number of nuclear reactors in operation was 435, producing 369 GWe, throughout the world on the last day of 2011. Investigating this result demonstrates a decrease in nuclear electricity generation compared to the last year's report mainly due to the permanent shutdowns of 13 reactors during 2011. Four of the shutdowns took place in Japan because of the nuclear disaster in Fukishima considered as the biggest one after the Chernobyl disaster and the others were in Germany as an implementation of the country's energy policy.

Although the disaster in Japan brings the safety issue related to nuclear power to the world's attention once again, it seems utilization of nuclear power with its disadvantages is inevitable. This conclusion can be drawn by just looking at the number of nuclear reactors currently under construction all around the world which is 65. In addition, renewal of operating licenses of existing nuclear power plants (NPP) and even capacity updates to these power plants are continuing. One last note is that developing countries also are stepping forward in order to have nuclear technology. While the Islamic Republic of Iran constructed and commissioned its first NPP in 2011, several countries including Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Belarus are in contact and negotiating on an agreement about building NPPs with nuclear reactor vendors such as Russia and The Republic of Korea. International Energy Outlook 2011 reveals that the usage of nuclear power for electricity production will continue to increase and an almost 10% growth is projected by the end of 2035 compared with the data of 2008.

The case study utilized by the report factors in some uncertainties such as construction costs, uranium enrichment and safety regulations. Nonetheless, the expected increase in nuclear energy production shows no fluctuations but a nearly linear trend of growth taking all the factors above into consideration, one can easily conclude that nuclear energy will be on the table in an environment where the energy planning of the future is discussed. The question then arises, is it really possible to operate NPPs as loadfollowing power plants, for the purpose of having a more reliable power system, rather than just producing energy at a constant rate to meet base-load demand? The answer is yes and actually it is already the case in UAE and Germany. Before moving forward and investigating why these two countries want NPPs to change their output according to power demand, one should know that the main reason of having NPPs as base-load power plants is that they ...