At the Emerson Exchange EMEA 2024, Hervé Dussol, maintenance manager at Engie, described how it will extend the life of its Cycofos plant in France by upgrading the plant distributed control system (DCS) and turbine control systems.
Cycofos is a 420 MW combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) power plant with a single shaft GT26 gas turbine installed in 2010. To extend the life of the plant and ensure reliable production, Engie has taken the decision to upgrade the legacy Alspa P320 DCS and ABB Egatrol and Turbotrol turbine control systems, all of which are obsolete and posing challenges for operations and maintenance.
A turbine control system retrofit requires the right expertise and resources, but because the GT26 is a complex, advanced-class gas turbine that has no reference control system retrofit, this is especially important. Emerson has performed over 1000 gas turbine control system retrofits to date. Based on an evaluation of its expertise and capability to upgrade these legacy systems, Engie selected Emerson to upgrade both the Cycofos plant DCS and the turbine control systems during a single outage in 2024. These systems will be replaced by one unique control platform, Emerson’s Ovation™ distributed control system. This will provide Engie with a single system to control all the plant equipment, simplifying interface management and maintenance operations, while also enabling different users to benefit from having the same environment and configuration tools.
The key objectives of the project are to ensure a reliable migration, minimize production downtime, and ensure dependable lifecycle support of the new system. The new system will control both gas and steam turbines (in a single-shaft configuration connected to a single generator) through all operating modes, including start-up, part load and base load operation. The new control system will also be interfaced with the plant DCS and other third-party systems. The Ovation system will completely replace the ABB Egsatrol/Turbotrol systems, eliminating a range of obsolete components, including the engineer and operator stations, controllers, processor modules, data logger, PLC and operation data counter.
The migration strategy requires the new solution to be durable, homogeneous and simple, offering high performance, reliability and availability. The proposed system from Emerson includes redundant Ovation controllers with I/O modules that are integrated into the Ovation balance of plant system. Two thin client operator stations are also integrated into the Ovation balance of plant virtualized system, with a non-virtualized anti-virus station and server cabinet for the supplemental balancing reserve (SBR) station.
The migration project scope includes all engineering and commissioning work. Mirroring of the existing system configuration will be used, with validation provided by the Engie team. The project execution model will be focused on minimizing risks and outage time. An example of this is that all I/O panels will be pre-wired and tested at the Emerson factory.
