Automating one of the world’s most efficient energy plants

Symphony Plus, ABB’s automation platform for the power generation and water industries, controls and optimizes one of the world’s most efficient combined heat and power plants.

DONG Energy’s Avedøre 1 combined heat and power plant is one of the most efficient of its kind in the world. The company’s long-term strategy is to transform all its power plants in Denmark from fossil fuels to cleaner burning biomass by 2020. This will reduce the carbon dioxide emissions of Denmark’s largest energy producer by a massive 90 percent.

Located near the Danish capital, Copenhagen, Avedøre 1 uses excess heat from its power generation process to produce district heating for homes and businesses in the surrounding area. This gives Avedøre 1 an exceptional energy conversion efficiency of around 92 percent. Along with the adjacent Avedøre 2, the plant supplies 200,000 households with heat and around 1.3 million households with electricity.

Prior to its forthcoming conversion of Avedøre 1 from coal to biomass, DONG Energy required a new state-of-the-art plant automation system that would give them the flexibility to operate the plant even more efficiently using renewable biomass. The system also had to be simple to engineer and configure, without the involvement of the vendors.

Simple and cost-effective evolution:

DONG Energy chose Symphony® Plus, ABB’s flagship automation platform for the power generation and water sectors and the most widely used distributed control system (DCS) in these industries.  DONG Energy already has previous experience of ABB automation systems at Avedøre 1, where its Contronic 3 boiler control system and Procontrol P13 turbine control system have been functioning reliably and efficiently throughout the plant’s lifetime since 1990.

Thanks to ABB’s policy of “evolution without obsolescence”, which ensures simple evolution to Symphony Plus from previous Symphony family members like Contronic, ABB was able to retain and reuse much of the hardware from the old automation system, significantly reducing installation costs and project execution times.

Symphony Plus is designed to meet the requirements of engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractors in the power and water sectors, and of plant owners across all types of power generation and water treatment installations. There are now more than 6,500 Symphony DCS installations in operation all over the world, with more than 4,500 in power and water applications.

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