A decades-old thermal power unit in Tianjin has been granted a new lease on life, becoming the first in China to receive a 30-year operational extension following a full-scale retrofit using domestically developed technology.
Source: China Electric Power News
A decades-old thermal power unit in Tianjin has been granted a new lease on life, becoming the first in China to receive a 30-year operational extension following a full-scale retrofit using domestically developed technology.
Unit 1 of the Guoneng Panshan Power Plant, originally built in the 1990s with Soviet-era design, had been in service for 29 years and was nearing the end of its operational lifespan. The upgrade—led by Harbin Electric International, a subsidiary of Harbin Electric Corporation—marks the country’s first successful modernization of an aging coal-fired unit using proprietary Chinese solutions.
Rather than replacing the unit outright, engineers retained the plant’s original infrastructure, including its main building and support systems, and carried out a comprehensive retrofit. Two 530-megawatt Russian-designed supercritical units were transformed into ultra-supercritical units featuring higher efficiency, improved flexibility, and lower emissions.
Post-upgrade, the unit has cut coal consumption by 14%, more than doubled its heating capacity, and now supports deep peak shaving down to 20% of its rated load. Emissions performance now meets or exceeds current benchmarks for similar plants. The retrofit not only extended the unit’s design life but also demonstrated the commercial and technical viability of upgrading legacy infrastructure—an area where China had previously lacked precedent.
The Panshan project is China’s first to achieve simultaneous upgrades in both operating temperature and pressure—a world-first for this class of equipment. With many countries along the Belt and Road facing similar challenges in modernizing aging fleets, Harbin Electric sees potential to export its retrofit model internationally. The company plans to leverage lessons from Panshan to expand its footprint in global power plant upgrades, positioning Chinese engineering as part of the solution to aging energy infrastructure worldwide.
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