How the gas turbine conquered the electric power industry

This is a rather technical article. I’ll quote enough of the history to get the basic idea:

Though they work on similar principles, gas turbines took much longer to deploy than steam turbines. Both were first developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But while the steam turbine was widely used to generate electric power by the 1910s, gas turbines weren’t used in appreciable numbers for electricity generation until the 1960s, and weren’t widely deployed until the late 1980s.

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[E]arly attempts to build a gas turbine all ended in failure. Stolze’s turbine failed to generate enough work to even run the air compressor. Armengaud and Lemale’s turbine fared better, but it was “woefully inefficient,” with a thermal efficiency of just 2-3%, about one-eighth the efficiency of piston engines at the time. GE’s experiments yielded similar results.

These early failures can be traced to low operating temperatures and inefficiencies in the various turbine components, particularly the compressor. Early engineers couldn’t build a compressor that was efficient enough, or a turbine that could run hot enough, to produce useful amounts of work.

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But outside of the electricity sector, the gas turbine was finding more success. Hundreds of gas turbines found their way into industrial uses such as burning blast furnace gas in steel plants, pressurizing natural gas pipelines, and powering locomotives.

Gas turbines also began to be applied to ship propulsion, particularly for naval vessels where the high power-to-weight ratio of gas turbines allowed for faster speeds.

But the most important use of gas turbines continued to be the jet engine. By the end of the 1950s hundreds of thousands of jet engines had been built, and the jet engine was “almost universal in combat aircraft” and widely used by commercial airliners. To push the boundaries of jet engine performance, engine builders developed new high temperature “superalloys,” and techniques like vacuum induction melting and vacuum arc remelting to manufacture them. These developments raised the temperature turbine blades would withstand by nearly 100 degrees Kelvin. These alloys, and other jet engine technology, would then filter down into industrial gas turbines.

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The first big break for gas turbine electric power came following the 1965 Northeast Blackout, which left 30 million people without power for hours in the Northeast US and Canada. Because starting and running a power plant requires a significant amount of electrical power, bringing a plant back online in a wide-scale power outage (known as a “black start”) is difficult. But gas turbines need comparatively little power to get started, making them useful for restoring a grid from black-start conditions. A gas turbine in New York was successfully used to restart the grid following the blackout, and almost overnight utilities ordered gas turbines by the hundreds to improve grid reliability. Between 1963 and 1975, gas turbine power plant capacity in the US increased by a factor of 70. Many of these turbines were essentially jet engines (aka “aeroderivative” turbines) redesigned to generate electric power.

As gas turbines were built in large numbers for electric power generation, they got larger. By the early 1970s, turbine unit sizes approached 100 megawatts, up from 20 to 30 megawatts 10 years earlier. This also increased thermal efficiency due to geometric scaling effects.

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But the Oil Embargo of 1973 caused natural gas prices to skyrocket, and the 1978 Fuel Use Act prevented the construction of new natural gas power plants. As if this weren’t enough, the rapid scale-up of gas turbines and the addition of complex heat recovery equipment caused reliability issues, giving gas turbines a reputation for being high maintenance. In the late 1970s, the bottom fell out of the utility gas turbine industry. Between 1975 and 1985 no net gas turbine generation capacity was added in the US. The market became so dire that some manufacturers considered exiting the business.

But gas turbine technology continued to advance, mostly thanks to the aerospace industry. The military continued its interest in pushing the bounds of jet engine performance, and the rising cost of aviation fuel incentivized developing more efficient jet engines.

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By the late 1980s, the tide was turning for the gas turbine. Environmental laws that regulated the emissions of coal power plants greatly increased the cost of coal-generated electricity, and public opposition made it difficult to build new hydroelectric power plants. Nuclear power, which had held so much promise in the 1960s, had steadily increased in cost, and also faced significant public opposition following the accidents at 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl. Renewables such as wind and solar were gaining in popularity, but without government subsidies they remained far more expensive than existing sources of energy. The time was ripe for an alternative method of electricity generation.

The gas turbine was well-positioned to fill the gap that had emerged. Natural gas prices had fallen nearly 40% from their peak in the early 1980s, and the Fuel Use Act that prevented gas turbine plant construction was repealed in 1987. The Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA), passed in 1978 as part of the National Energy Act, forced utility companies to buy power from anyone who built a plant and connected it to the grid (for certain types of power plant). One of the technologies allowed by PURPA was cogeneration, plants that produced both electric power and heat. Combined cycle gas turbines qualified, and they were quickly adopted by independent power producers. Because gas turbines had relatively low capital costs and could be built quickly, they had low financing costs, making them attractive to private builders. By 1992, gas turbines were generating 44% of the electricity provided by non-utility companies in the US.