It is well known that the Łagisza power plant in Poland is the world’s first supercritical circulating fluidized bed (CFB) boiler, whose commercial operation started on June 2009. It has attracted a great deal of interest and operational data are publicly available, therefore it has been chosen as the object of the present study aimed at assessing load and fuel flexibility of supercritical CFB plants. First, the thermal cycle was modelled, by means of the commercial code Thermoflex®, at nominal and part load conditions for validation purposes. After having verified the validity of the applied modelling and simulation tool, the advantage of having supercritical steam combined with CFB boiler over subcritical steam and pulverized coal (PC) boiler, respectively, was quantified in terms of electric efficiency. As a next step, the designed fuel, i.e. locally mined hard coal, was replaced with biomass: 100% biomass firing was taken into account in the case of subcritical CFB boiler whereas the maximum share of biomass with coal was set at 50% with supercritical CFB boiler, consistently with the guidelines provided by the world leading manufacturers of CFB units. A broad range of biomass types was tested to conceive mixtures of fuel capable of preserving quite high performance, despite the energy consumption in pretreatment. However, the overall efficiency penalty, due to biomass co-firing, was found to potentially undermine the benefit of supercritical steam conditions compared to conventional subcritical power cycles. Indeed, the use of low-quality biomass in thermal power generation based on steam Rankine cycle may frustrate efforts to push the steam cycle boundaries.
