As a leading provider of renewable gas, natural gas, and hydrogen-rich solutions, INNIO’s Jenbacher technology helps to provide communities, industry and the public access to sustainable, reliable and economical power.
INNIO's Waukesha engines are at the forefront of the energy transition, providing reliable and compliant energy solutions for distributed gas compression and power generation applications.
Keeping the lights on: Soft energization and INNIO Group’s Jenbacher technology
Access to power is an important part of our everyday lives, and the ability to quickly recover from an outage is especially critical for such services as hospitals and data centers. Today’s energy regulators and electrical utilities go to great lengths to build reserve capacity in our grids to avoid wide-scale blackouts.
However, doing so is always a difficult balancing act between ensuring reliability and avoiding overspend on potentially unnecessary infrastructure. And, no matter which way the balance is struck, no network can ever guarantee 100% reliability.
60,000
metric tons of
CO2 savings
92%
Total usage
65,000
Homes with
Electricity
13,000
Homes with district
heating
14
When responding to a blackout, grid operators often divide their electrical network into smaller sub-networks, known as "islands," which then are powered up by special power stations, known as "black start" generators. These power stations are paid to be available at short notice in an emergency, without the assistance of an external power supply for their internal auxiliary systems. Black start generators at a scale that can support cities, or even states, are large, in part because the network that they energize is large. Large power stations can be used, of course, but they then require very large emergency generators on site. Small- and medium-sized decentralized power stations often can start up much faster with only a small temporary local power supply, but they may not be large enough to switch on – or energize – the entire network in a single step, let alone power the thousands of customers waiting with their lights off.
Soft energization in Saarbrücken
To solve this challenge for the city of Saarbrücken, Germany, INNIO Group worked with Energie SaarLorLux, Stadtwerke Saarbrücken Netz AG and Engie on a hybrid approach. Commissioned in 2022, a combined heat and power (CHP) station called GAMOR is powered by five Jenbacher J920 FleXtra engines that can supply around 65,000 households with electricity and 13,000 homes with district heating. Together, the engines have an electrical output of 53 MW, a thermal output of 52.5 MW, and an overall efficiency of more than 92%. The Jenbacher J920 FleXtra engines are “Ready for H2”* and can, in principle, be converted to operate with up to 100% hydrogen in the future. GAMOR was designed by Energie SaarLorLux in cooperation with grid operator Stadtwerke Saarbrücken Netz AG to expand capacity and as a black start power plant for Saarbrücken. This strategy leverages the fast start capabilities of Jenbacher’s engines to restore power to Saarbrücken’s district heating and water distribution infrastructure in an emergency scenario, especially the Wasserwerk Blickweiler facility, roughly 35kms away. Because the islanded electrical network between the two facilities would be too large for a medium-sized power plant like GAMOR to energize in a single step, it is energized gradually using a process called “soft energization.”
Our gas engine power plant in Römerbrücke, Saarbrücken [GAMOR for short] is exemplary, not only in terms of its emissions savings. Compared to the former coal-fired power plant, we save more than 60,000 metric tons of CO2 per year with the new Jenbacher combined heat and power system. In addition, the potential use of the new plant as a black start-ready power plant also enables us to safeguard critical infrastructure in the event of impending blackouts or total power outages.
Joachim Morsch, Chairman and Spokesman for Energie SaarLorLux
Soft energization is nothing new for INNIO Group’s Jenbacher technology, which has supported it as a standard feature of its control software for many years.
It often is used to gradually energize the medium voltage networks of INNIO Group’s customers, including cables, switchboards, and larger transformers, before synchronizing with the wider grid. What is relatively unique in this application is the extension of this concept to the wider grid, which requires Jenbacher control systems to run automatically, in perfect harmony with the grid operator’s high and medium voltage network control systems.
In the event of a total network failure, the operators in Energie SaarLorLux’s master control center issue a remote signal to trigger an emergency start-up of the Jenbacher station control system at the GAMOR power plant in Saarbrücken. This station control system then automatically reconfigures the entire power plant and quickly starts up the Jenbacher J920 FleXtra units in less than 5 minutes. Once the engines are up to speed, the station control connects to the now deenergized grid and gradually increases the entire HV and MV system voltage. In doing so, the Jenbacher technology energizes greater than 220 MVA of transformer capacity and even more network capacitance in the islanded network between the new GAMOR power plant and the Blickweiler water treatment facility. Once the nominal voltage is achieved, high priority loads such as Wasserwerk Blickweiler can then be started, to restoring critical services to the city of Saarbrücken.
This approach has been demonstrated elsewhere, although it is relatively rare, in part due to the near-impossible network outages that must be arranged by the network operator (in this case Stadtwerke Saarbrücken Netz AG) to test the entire chain of control systems without a major impact on customers. In many cases, the strategy remains a hypothetical plan to manually respond in an emergency scenario, with only partial tests and simulations to prove the strategy should work. In October 2022, INNIO Group’s Jenbacher team, Engie, Stadtwerke Saarbrücken Netz AG and Energie SaarLorLux successfully commissioned the entire solution, together with all control systems automatically running in tandem, to power up the Blickweiler water treatment facility. The flawless commissioning took place with no impact to the residents of Saarbrücken. This marked the culmination of the entire project, which now not only has bolstered the local electrical and heating generation capacity of Saarland, Germany, but also the overall resilience of its critical infrastructure.
* In general, “Ready for H2” Jenbacher units can be converted to operate on up to 100% hydrogen in the future. Details on the cost and timeline for a future conversion may vary and need to be clarified individually.
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