An EMD-based method for assessing and analyzing coal consumption of coal-fired units

Operation habits of coal-fired unit workers often affect significantly the level of coal consumption. In practice, different operation teams usually consume different amounts of coal, thus it is necessary to carry out benchmarking management to guide the workers towards optimal operations. Conventionally, the level of coal consumption within a time period is evaluated by statistics such as the mean, the minima, and the maxima. However, these simple statistics are not informative enough to reveal the operation habits of workers. an EMD-based assessment method is proposed to analyze operation habits of teams. By taking the coal consumption distribution of the best operation team (i.e., the one with minimal amount of total coal consumption) as the baseline comparator, the method first estimates, for non-optimal teams, how far away their operations are from the optimum, and then finds out the primary parameters that cause the difference. Based on such an analysis, suggestions are provided to the operation teams, such that their behaviors can be adjusted. The proposed method achieves accurate assessment of coal consumption and may provide an analytical method for electric power enterprises. to save energy and reduce coal consumption. And it also may provide technical support for government supervision departments to carry out fine benchmarking management and performance evaluation of energy-saving for coal-fired units.