After a nearly ten-year development process, Siemens announced its re-entry in the gas turbine market June 14 with a new generation of “H-Class” energy-efficient gas turbines. A leading U.S. utility is the first commercial customer.
Starting in 2013, six of the “world-record turbines” will be in operation in the state of Florida. By upgrading its power plants, the customer Florida Power & Light expects it will achieve net savings of nearly $1 billion over the turbines’ entire lifecycle. In a year and a half of testing, Siemens found the class to have an efficiency of more than 60 percent. Siemens says equipping all the combined-cycle plants in the US with its H-Class turbines would yield as much additional power as 25 million Americans consume in one year, without increasing CO2 emissions.
The turbines are also designed to go from standby to startup in five minutes and reach full power operation in only 15 minutes. Siemens says they need only minutes to switch from full power to half power or vice versa, enabling them to optimally compensate for natural fluctuations in rapidly increasing grid feed-ins from wind and solar energy sources.