Re: GAS-L: Gasifier Annual Use and Engine Life

[AJH <andrew.heggie@dtn.ntl.com>]

On Tue, 29 Oct 2002 18:35:04 -0800, "Tom Miles" <tmiles@trmiles.com>
wrote:

>Andrew,
>
>8,000 hours per year makes the payback look good but is it realistic for small scale
>CHP?

It must depend on you definition of small scale. Our town centre is
run on a natural gas chp system and ic engines. 6 months of the year
it provides heat from exhaust and coolant and summer time it runs an
absorbtion cooling system, mind you hot here is about 25C, not the 40C
I experienced when Macys were spilling 19C air out onto the sidewalk
via their garage, not to mention all the taxis and police parked up
with engines running spilling heat onto the sidewalk!
>
>When I have visited CHP plants in Denmark, or looked at the duty of CHP in other
>locations, it appears that the heat loads and actual run time of the small scale
>plants is about 4000-5000 hour per year. Some even shut down on weekends.

This is not a big problem to me, once the amortisation of capital is
budgeted for. In uk it is not unusual for a farmer to have a capital
spend on grain harvesting systems that are only used 50hrs a year.

>
>If you're running a CHP gasifier do you generate power when you have no heat load?

We are running a *diesel* powered chp genset, it dumps heat to a
radiator when the heat is not required. The additional cost of a
gasifier would not be justified in our private wire system as none of
the renewable incentives apply. Gasoil  costs ~GBP0.02/kWhr and dry
wood chips would approach this price.

>Our sawmills often use an air cooled condenser to waste heat for balancing dry kiln
>loads with turbine demand for full power generation. I suppose that could easily be
>done with a gasifier CHP. In northern latititudes it would be pretty easy to waste
>heat for a small scale system.

I know some of our furniture factories in developed areas have "wood
Heating" systems, they consist of a few hot air units and rows of
calorifiers on the roof, my take on this has been that the regulations
for wood heating systems are easier to comply with than those for
incinerators ;-).

AJH


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>