19/04/2016
What is Power Plant?
A power plant or a power generating station, is basically an industrial location that is utilized for the generation and distribution of
electric power in mass scale, usually in the order of several 1000 Watts. These are generally located at the sub-urban regions or several kilometers away from the cities or the load centers, because of its requisites like huge land and water demand, along with several operating constraints like the waste disposal etc.
For this reason, a power generating station has to not only take care of efficient generation but also the fact that the power is transmitted efficiently over the entire distance. And that’s why, the transformer switch yard to regulate transmission voltage also becomes an integral part of the power plant. At the center of it, however, nearly all power generating stations has an A.C. generator or an alternator , which is basically a rotating machine that is equipped to convert energy from the mechanical domain (rotating turbine) into electrical domain by creating relative motion between a magnetic field and the conductors. The energy source harnessed to turn the generator shaft varies widely, and is chiefly dependent on the type of fuel used.
Types of Power Station
A power plant can be of several types depending mainly on the type of fuel used. Since for the purpose of bulk power generation, only thermal, nuclear and hydro power comes handy, therefore a power generating station can be broadly classified in the 3 above mentioned types. Let us have a look in these types of power stations in details.
Thermal Power Station
A thermal power station or a coal fired
thermal power plant is by far, the most conventional method of generating electric power with reasonably high efficiency. It uses coal as the primary fuel to boil the water available to superheated steam for driving the
steam turbine. The steam turbine is then mechanically coupled to an alternator rotor, the rotation of which results in the gen