During the Spring Festival holiday, CHN Energy pilots several artificial intelligence applications at some of its thermal power plants to help ensure the safe and stable operation of electricity production.
At Beilun Power Plant in east China’s Zhejiang province, AI has been introduced into fuel management. The coal blending process, which traditionally relied on manual experience, is now supported by an AI system. The system integrates multiple coal property parameters with real-time unit operating data to generate more optimized blending schemes, aiming to balance combustion efficiency with environmental performance.
In the field of equipment maintenance, the plant has deployed an intelligent condition monitoring system. Taking the boiler induced draft fan as an example, the system continuously collects and analyzes vibration frequencies, bearing temperatures and process parameters. Through integrated analysis of these multi-source data streams, it seeks to identify early signs of potential abnormalities, such as initial bearing wear, and provide advance warnings to maintenance personnel.
These applications are part of the Group’s AI Plus initiative. In terms of technology development, CHN Energy Science and Technology Research Institute Co., Ltd., together with technology companies, has developed an industry-specific large model named Qingyuan, based on operating data, technical standards and historical cases from thousands of generating units across the Group. The model is currently being piloted in areas such as technical supervision. For example, in the initial stage of preparing comprehensive equipment evaluation reports for an entire plant, the model can rapidly organize data and generate draft reports, reducing preliminary data processing time from one week by expert teams to less than one day, with an evaluation accuracy rate exceeding 85 percent. Subsequent on-site verification requires only three additional days to complete the process, improving supervision efficiency by more than 100 percent.
From fuel optimization to equipment early warning and support for technical supervision, CHN Energy is exploring AI applications across multiple stages of power generation. These technological efforts are intended to provide data-driven decision support for traditional thermal power operations.
