Gas turbines (GTs) are the workhorses of the power generation industry, churning out electricity for nearly a century. But what role will they play in a clean energy transition?
A huge one, as it turns out.
The United States is predicting unprecedented load growth driven by electrification and data center development, creating an insatiable appetite for firm power. The intermittency of renewables doesn’t align with the requirements of 24/7/365 operations, making natural gas combustion an obvious accompaniment.
“They are the perfect complement for the intermittent renewables coming online today,” confirmed Jeffrey Benoit, vice president of clean energy solutions at PSM in a keynote panel at POWERGEN International Wednesday morning.
More than 2 terawatts (TW) of global capacity can be credited to gas turbines. There are more than 7,000 operational GTs in the United States.
“They are a tremendous anchor of power generation for the industry,” Benoit added. “It is very important to keep these units operating.”
Gas turbines can be utilized to install capacity quickly and retrofitted/modernized to keep them in operation long after their intended lives, but procuring them isn’t always an expeditious process.
how long must i wait?
Simple-cycle and combined-cycle GTs are in high demand, and buyers of F-class, advanced-class, and aero-derivative gas turbines are dealing with lead times not seen since the gas boom of the early 2000s.
“Supply is definitely lagging demand,” observed Jason Jermark, vice president of global services operations at Siemens Energy.
There has been an enormous pickup in demand in the last year, particularly over the past few months, noticed Aad den Elzen, the vice president of power generation and strategic growth at Solar Turbines, a Caterpillar Company. Solar Turbines is the world’s largest manufacturer of industrial gas turbines and has sold more than 16,000 GTs installed in more than 100 countries.
“The lead times even for small turbines are increasing,” den Elzen mentioned. “Basically, we are all depending on the same supply chain. The same suppliers are pushed for more by the power generation and the aerospace industries, but all of us are spending a lot of time and energy to understand the full supply chain until every last bottleneck is opened.”
Fabian Codron, GE Vernova’s director of carbon solutions, admits it’s a tough market to be a buyer in, as factories around the world max out their capacities to meet the call for more GTs, but always better to be part of a boom cycle than a bust.
“What an awesome time for our industry, with high levels of demand for the foreseeable future,” Codron told POWERGEN attendees.
If you’re building a project that involves a gas turbine, another industry leader recommended, you should be talking to your OEMs as long as seven or eight years out.
“You need to get in line, basically,” said Ben Thomas, the director of hydrogen production at Mitsubishi Power.
“We used to be able to build large-scale power plants in three years,” Codron recalled. “Now that’s changing.”
GE Vernova is making massive investments to better align with the demand for gas turbines. Last month, the company announced it would dump $600 million into U.S. manufacturing facilities to ramp up capacity.
“This demand has come quickly, but it will be here for a while so we have to adjust to this new world,” he said. “It’s not our first cycle. We’ve done this before. Perhaps not as short, but not something that’s beyond reason.”
gas turbines and decarbonization
While gas turbines do emit carbon dioxide (CO2), they are considered to have “saved” significant amounts of CO2. A modern combined cycle gas turbine can reduce emissions by 60% or more compared to a similarly sized coal-fired plant, making GTs incredibly useful as customers transition from coal to gas or other technologies. There’s still more than 450 gigawatts (GW) of coal generation capacity globally, not including the major markets in China and India. That’s a lot of carbon on the table to clean up.
Solar Turbines’ Aad den Elzen insists improving efficiency is the best way to reduce emissions.
“The cleanest and cheapest hour (of generation) is the one you don’t need,” he told the POWERGEN International audience Wednesday. “We spend a lot of energy improving the efficiency of our gas turbine operations, reducing our environmental footprint, and increasing their lifespan.”
Gas turbine technology is such a reliable way to produce energy, den Elzen believes, that if we can do it competitively from a carbon intensity standpoint, the technology will have a foundational role in power systems for decades to come.
“Natural gas is a bridge fuel, and I think that bridge is very, very long,” he predicted. “It is there for our obligation to offer technologies to make natural gas a low-as-possible carbon-intensive way to produce power.”
The classic trilemma of affordability, reliability, and sustainability still holds, den Elzen maintains. However, in the U.S. market, the top drivers are speed and reliability, moving the center of gravity in that delicate balance toward the availability of energy.
“In that light, I think natural gas as a primary fuel for energy has been the biggest single means to reduce CO2,” claimed den Elzen. “Don’t forget that. If we implement that all around the world, we solve a big part of our problem.”
hydrogen, carbon capture, and other innovations
A step level removed from weaning off coal, hydrogen fuel mixes are becoming more prevalent as technology advances.
“Interest in hydrogen continues, despite short-term needs for capacity,” shared Jermark of Siemens Energy. “We are making fantastic progress in research and development.”
Jermark asserts hydrogen fuels have spared our atmosphere from millions of tons of CO2, even in their early adopter stage.
“In applications today, we’re seeing hydrogen make sense. The existing infrastructure and the ability to utilize it in an island grid is important, and hydrogen provides a fantastic solution to supply that effectively,” he noted. “We will see it, and we are seeing it, at a small scale to begin with, but certainly over time we’ll continue to accelerate.”
U.S. companies are looking at ways to repurpose sites via co-firing and blending, Jermark told the POWERGEN audience. He shared insights from Siemens Energy’s synthesis (syn) gas application in Saudi Arabia, the largest of its kind in the world. Jermark’s company is also toying with the potential of ammonia and biofuels.
Aad den Elzen revealed hydrogen and fuel flexibility are among the largest R&D investments in Solar Turbines’ portfolio. Hydrogen as a fuel isn’t some distant aspiration, nor is it exactly new, as den Elzen’s company is already using hydrogen mixes.
“The challenge is to do it at a low NOx profile,” he stated. Solar Turbines is working toward burning 100% hydrogen by 2028, but it’s unknown if there will be large amounts of affordable hydrogen available once the technology is mature.
Den Elzen also believes it’s important to make carbon capture more feasible and attractive. His company has built and operated an exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) system on one of its gas turbines and demonstrated steady operation, increasing CO2 waste from 3% to 6-7%, which would make carbon capture more effective and affordable.
“We’re seeing new technologies and potential new solutions,” GE Vernova’s Codron observed. “Novel and first-of-their-kind pilot projects that are showing us what the future might look like.”
GE Vernova performed full-scale validation of its 100% hydrogen-fueled DLN Combustor last year, with emissions below 25ppm NOx. The innovation is based on the company’s micro-mixer technology designs tweaked and retweaked over 20+ years. The project’s genesis came back in 2005 via a collaboration with the Department of Energy- GE Vernova expects to bring a commercial offering to market as early as 2026.
“This is another step toward solving the hydrogen challenge,” Codron declared. “This is a technology we’re going to position as a potential solution in the energy transition.”
Last December, GE Vernova was awarded a major contract for the Net Zero Teesside Power (NZT Power) project in the United Kingdom, which aims to be the world’s first gas-fired power station with carbon capture and storage. Up to 2 million tons of CO2 per year will be captured at the plant, then transported and permanently stored by the Northern Endurance Partnership. The plant could produce up to 742 MW of flexible, low-carbon power, equivalent to the average annual electricity requirements of more than 1 million UK homes.
Powered by a GE Vernova advanced 9HA.02 gas turbine, a steam turbine, a generator, a heat recovery steam generator, and an EGR system (to increase CO2 concentration), the plant will recycle CO2-rich flue gas back into the turbine inlet. That will reduce the overall cost of the plant and the amount of solvent used while improving performance and emissions.
“This is really a major milestone that we are thrilled to be part of,” Codron declared. The project is now in its execution phase with operations targeted for 2028.
Mitsubishi Power has an in-house validation site for full-circle hydrogen production, the Takasago Hydrogen Park, where the company is already running GTs on a 50% hydrogen mix. Since large quantities of hydrogen are expensive, especially in Japan, Mitsubishi Power decided to make their own with an on-site electrolyzer. It’s stored in bottles and two salt caverns.
“We started at 30% (hydrogen fuel mix) right off the bat, which is a lot,” shared Ben Thomas, the company’s director of hydrogen production.
Thomas noted that at this time last year, people like him were fussing over how hydrogen tax credits would be implemented in the United States. Now, under the Trump Administration, federal support for the technology is uncertain at best.
“Projects are mostly still progressing,” Thomas observes, including Mitsubishi Power’s R&D efforts at another site, the Nagasaki Carbon Neutral Park, dedicated to decarbonization tech including syn fuels, biomass, turquoise hydrogen, clean ammonia, and carbon capture.
“The changes in our country haven’t changed this,” he added.
Some things may indeed feel uncertain in a fast-moving space, but one thing is for sure- gas turbines aren’t going anywhere… Except out the door faster than anyone can make them.
