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Iran eyes to improve power plants’ efficiency to 45%

Business Materials 20 December 2015 12:49 (UTC +04:00)

Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 20

By Umid Niayesh- Trend:

Iran plans to increase the efficiency of its power plants to 45-47 percent in the next three years from the current level of 32-33 percent, Deputy Energy Minister Houshang Falahatian said.

It will be possible by turning gas power plants into combined cycle plants, Falahatian said, the official IRNA news agency reported Dec. 20.

The efficiency of a plant is the percentage of the total energy content of a power plant's fuel that is converted into electricity. The remaining energy is usually lost to the environment as heat.

No investment was made for converting gas power plants into combined cycle ones in last decade, Falahatian said, adding alongside with that aging power plants lead to fall in efficiency.

Last year, the energy ministry signed contract to convert several gas power plants with the capacity to produce 16,000 megawatt of electricity into combined cycle plants, in order to increase the total electricity generation capacity by seven megawatts, he said.

Currently over 150 E-class V94.2 gas turbines have been installed in Iranian thermal power plants which enjoy high efficiency in comparison with old turbines, he added.

Right now, Iran is domestically producing E-Class gas turbines, he said, underling this turbines themselves are planned to be replaced with F-Class turbines in the future which will yield an output of over 50 percent.

Falahatian further said that Iran is in talks with a European company to produce F-Class gas turbines.

According to an October 30 report by TAVANIR, the Iranian company responsible for production, transmission, and distribution of electricity, the nominal power production capacity of power plants in Iran is: steam 21.46 percent, gas 34.95 percent, combined-cycle 25.08 percent, hydroelectric 15.2 percent, atomic 1.38 percent, DG and CHP 1.02 percent, renewable energy 0.31 percent, and diesel 0.6 percent. Accordingly, the total nominal capacity was 73,744 megawatts.

In the meantime, the total actual output reached 6,423 million kilowatt hours of electricity.

The country produced 263 billion kilowatt hours(KWh) of electricity, while it exported above 11.7 billion KWh and imported 3.7 billion KWh during the last fiscal year(ended on March 21), according to the annual report issued by Iran's Energy Ministry.

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