Bavarian Geothermal Alliance - Monitoring

Motivation

Electricity and heat from geothermal energy sources have great potential especially in the Bavarian Molasse Basin, which can play an important role in the near future to achieve the energy policy objectives. Therefore, the scientific consortium Geothermie-Allianz Bayern adopts a holistic approach. This consortium is founded by the Bavarian State Ministry of Education, Science and the Arts and focuses on application-oriented fundamental research as well as networking activities and knowledge transfer between geothermal plant operators, industrial partners and universities.

The power plant is crucial for electricity revenue, thus, an improved plant operation with high efficiency and availability, can improve the profitability significantly. An unplanned shutdown of the plant generally causes high losses through lack of current revenues. Within the project "Monitoring" therefore a software-based monitoring tool for existing and future geothermal power plants is developed to optimize the plant operation.

Research goals

The overall objective is to evaluate the operation of the geothermal plant developing an software-based online application for operational monitoring. In the long term it should be made possible to detect changes in plant operation early in order to take appropriate countermeasures. By comparing current operation data with previous operating conditions aging-related changes can be identified in order to possibly take maintenance measures. Sharing the data with other operators on a uniform database allows the comparison of the plants and focused evaluation with the aim to increase efficiency, availability and thus also economic performance of the power plant.