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China Energy’s National Institute of Clean-and-Low-Carbon Energy (NICE) is developing a Power Plant Smart Management (PPSM) platform that employs digital-twin technology to undertake techno-economic modelling analysis on China Energy’s existing coal-fired power-plant units and explore cost-effective solutions to improve those plant units’ thermal efficiencies and operating performance. This paper presents a case study of PPSM on a 320-MWe coal-fired thermal power-plant unit, demonstrating how the digital-twin technology was employed to explore and analyse optimization solutions. Various optimization solutions and their cost-effectiveness were assessed using the digital-twin-modelling analysis; the results indicated the optimization solutions are expected to improve the plant unit’s operating efficiency and reduce its current electricity-generation coal consumption by up to 3.5 g/kWh standard coal …