How Aveva is powering CS Energy’s big generation goals

Queensland government-owned CS Energy is constantly juggling grid pressures across its coal, renewable and battery systems as it tries to meet commercial and efficiency goals.

CS Energy’s Chinchilla Battery project, at its Kogan Creek site on the Western Downs in Queensland.

Queensland government-owned CS Energy, which owns the Kogan Creek and Callide B and half of Callide C power stations, wants to leverage data from its baseload and renewable assets to have “one source of truth and improve its commercial availability”.

CS Energy’s asset analytics head Kate Bowden shared the challenges facing the business and the software solutions helping it to overcome the issues at industrial software giant Aveva’s showcase conference in Paris in October – as the team progresses ambitions to create multiple green energy hubs

Current projects include the Chinchilla Battery, Kogan Renewable Hydrogen Demonstration Plant and the proposed Brigalow Peaking Power Plant at Kogan Creek as well as a regional clean energy hub that prioritises new firming and storage assets at the Callide Power Station site, supported by investment in solar and wind energy in the broader Central Queensland region.

In recent months, CS Energy and the government have come under increased scrutiny following new revelations and the release of a report into an explosion at the Callide C in 2021.

Ms Bowden told attendees CS Energy’s challenges include really widely varying generation profiles as increased renewables are entering the market.

“This is resulted in negative energy prices for approximately eight hours every day.

“We have also … unplanned outages, which result in offline units during peak generation periods, which has got a significant impact in terms of our demand profile.”

What CS Energy has done is leveraged its Aviva PI system – in use for 16 years – to “streamline operations and to flex to market and weather conditions”.

CS Energy’s Kate Bowden outlined the challenges and solutions of the generation business at the Aveva conference in Paris.

At CS Energy, that has resulted in forward planning maintenance and plant operations based on forecast weather as well as forecast market demand, she said.

“So that could include looking at some of our competitors, when their outages are planned, what that will mean for the market conditions and how we really need to optimise our plans to meet that demand position in the future.

“We also have real-time monitoring and alerts of our remote greenfield sites, and that’s meant to increase safety and optimised critical resource allocation. Lastly, we’re able to optimise our asset strategy.”

CS Energy provides a third of the power of Queensland and has a portfolio of 3.5 gigawatts. It has transitioned from a pure coal generation asset owner to becoming a supplier of solar battery and wind energy and has hydrogen energy ambitions.

Ms Bowden said on a typical day, the 40 per cent of Queensland households that have solar panels provide up to 4 gigawatts of power in the middle of the day, which results in the National Electricity Market having an 80 per cent likelihood of negative power prices between the hours of 10am and 4pm.

“So it’s a real challenge, not only in that we’ve got excess power entering the market, but we have reduced demand because each of those 40 per cent of households will meet their own power needs first from their solar before they are exporting energy into the market.

“As a generation company, the challenge for us is that base load power generation, which is your typical use case for coal-fired generation.

“We can’t maintain a static baseload power for our thermal power stations because we are burning coal for nothing. We’re contributing to greenhouse gases for negative power prices.”

The company has become much more flexible in the way its plants operate today, including by reducing coal production during the solar hours, with the help of data analytics software.

“We have flexible plant operations, adjusting our plant output to meet the demand needs.

“We also manage our maintenance and outages to meet that demand profile, and we look at seasonal preparedness to make sure we’re ready for what’s coming ahead in weather.”

“And lastly, we’ve also introduced battery deployment to try to take advantage of some of that excess power in the middle of the day and really use that towards peak power periods,” Ms Bowden said.

The Callide Power Station at Biloela in Central Queensland.

“These plants were designed to be baseload power generators, to operate at sort of a pretty consistent capacity, and we are now flexing them every day. We are ramping up and down multiple times a day to meet that demand.”

She says the next step is to leverage some of the data and get more predictive analytics across its thermal and renewable assets.

“We’re also looking at our regulatory compliance reporting, we have a lot of that already, but looking at how we bring that into Pi (the Aveva system), really have that one source of truth and improve some of our commercial availability, making sure that we’re available when the market needs us.”

Lastly, CS Energy is also looking at analysing its battery performance over the medium to long term. “We can see our batteries operate at the moment. We can certainly make money using them, but we need to look and make sure we understand how their performance is affected.”

The writer travelled to the Paris tech conference courtesy of Aveva in October.