In the foreseeable future, conventional power plants will be an important part of the Polish and European power system. At least until large-scale energy storage facilities are built, they will be needed to stabilize energy generation from weather-dependent sources. Among conventional units, coal-fired plants will also play an important role in stabilizing the power system, which was not sufficiently considered during their design and construction stages. Maintaining the technical condition at a level that guarantees safe operation and availability is becoming an increasingly challenging task, especially for diagnostics, whose criteria for assessing technical condition and forecasting durability are still based on the duration of operation rather than its mode and conditions. Operation at the minimum technical level of coal-fired units, along with reduced output and increasingly frequent and prolonged outages, may cause loss of durability and damage to not only critical components and not only of a stress-related nature. Diagnostics that take these and other features of flexible operation into account have already been developed; they just need to be implemented and consistently applied.
During this year's Symposium, we intend to present diagnostics tailored to the needs of power plants over the next several years and discuss how to ensure technical competencies at an appropriate level during this period. It is often forgotten that these competencies are an important, if not the most important, part of energy security.