Alstom to Upgrade Britain’s Biggest Gas Plants with Latest MXL2 Technology

Regulatory News:

Alstom (Paris:ALO) has agreed plans for a major upgrade with RWE Generation to implement its high performance MXL2 upgrade package on all nine gas turbines at the 2,200 MW Pembroke and 1,650 MW Staythorpe facilities – Britain’s two biggest gas-fired combined cycle power plants.

The five GT26 gas turbines at Pembroke and four at Staythorpe will each be retrofitted with the multi-mode MXL2 upgrade, which offers increased performance, substantial improvements to operational efficiency and enhances availability through increased maintenance intervals.

This agreement also includes a comprehensive maintenance programme for the RWE Generation GT26 fleet across Europe; including Staythorpe and Pembroke in the UK, and Claus-Maasbracht in the Netherlands.

"The MXL2 upgrade package has been designed to help the customer get even more value from his machines with reduced maintenance hours over the life of the plant– and that is an offer which is difficult to resist”, says Michael Rechsteiner, Senior Vice President for Alstom’s Thermal Services business.

The upgrading of nine advanced class gas turbines at some of the UK’s most important power plants is another milestone for Alstom’s MXL2 product portfolio. Since its first implementation on a GT26 gas turbine at Spanish plant Castejon in 2009, the upgrade has been successfully demonstrated on the conventional class GT13E2 gas turbine, at South Humber Bank in Lincolnshire, UK in early 2012, and then on the GT24 gas turbine for the 60Hz market at Bayside plant in Canada in November of the same year.

With the MXL2, Alstom offers performance improvements usually associated with completely new machines – but balanced with the security that comes from fully tested technology, backed up by many thousands of operating hours.

About Alstom
Alstom is a global leader in the world of power generation, power transmission and rail infrastructure and sets the benchmark for innovative and environmentally friendly technologies. Alstom builds the fastest train and the highest capacity automated metro in the world, provides turnkey integrated power plant solutions and associated services for a wide variety of energy sources, including hydro, nuclear, gas, coal and wind, and it offers a wide range of solutions for power transmission, with a focus on smart grids. The Group employs 93,000 people in around 100 countries. It had sales of over €20 billion and booked close to €24 billion in orders in 2012/13.

About RWE Generation SE
RWE Generation SE is the generation company in the RWE Group. The company pools the generation entities and engineering expertise of RWE Power in Germany, RWE Essent in the Netherlands, and RWE Generation in the UK. The company has around 17,000 employees and nearly 40 GW of power generation capacity.