100 MW electric arc furnace

These are all major projects that require dedicated experts in power systems design. This cannot be done for free via eng-tips, however wonderfully knowledgeable the participants here are.

Muthu

A journey begins with one step. How far have you got on yours?

100 MW is a large percentage of the available 230 MW power and some furnaces have a very irregular current consumption when the process starts. So, you can expect lots of voltage variations and flicker. So, I doubt if the 230 MW will be very successful. It could work if other loads connected to the power station can tolerate the often violent voltage variations.

You are probably already aware of this side of the problem - perhaps also how to use static VAR compensation to reduce the problems somewhat.

Muthu is right. This cannot, and should not, be a one-man show. I hope that you are a team.

Gunnar Englund
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Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.

If you connect wires from your arc furnace to the power plant and there are wires connecting the power plant to the grid, then your arc furnace is still connected to the grid. So, how do you expect this scheme to successfully bypass the utility restrictions????

Statcom was created to deal with the harmonics that arc furnaces put into the system. The furnaces put a lot of harmonics onto the system.

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If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.

There is a huge amount of site/system specific engineering that will need to be done to do this successfully. The most general question to ask yourself is how you supply a load that looks like a fault without screwing with all of your protections. I don't think it's that abnormal to build a specific station to feed these kind of loads.

What Lionel said: this question requires full-on engineering analysis, not just posting a question on eng-tips. That being said, IMHO a combined cycle power plant would be a very poor match indeed for this application, especially if not grid-tied.

I seem to recall seeing somewhere a picture of a dedicated power plant in Texas harnessing scores of vertical shaft multi-cylinder radial high-compression natural gas fuelled engines to generate ~200 MW of electricity for a smelting plant; any thoughts as to whether something like this would be more suitable?

CR

"As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another." [Proverbs 27:17, NIV]