CHP Technologies Research Articles

ADD CHP Accelerated Development and Deployment of Combined Cooling, Heat, and Power at Federal Facilities

ABSTRACT Fuel-efficient distributed energy generation systems such as combined cooling, heat, and power (CHP or cogeneration) are attracting increasing attention among project developers and policy makers because they can make significant contributions to mitigating key power sector constraints. These systems can meet increased energy needs, reduce transmission congestion, cut emissions, increase power quality and reliability, and increase the overall energy security for a site. The U.S. Department of Energy's Federal Energy Management Program (DOE-FEMP) recently completed a national market assessment to estimate the potential impacts of CHP in the federal sector (ORNL 2002). That study suggests that CHP could be successfully applied in 9 percent of large federal facilities, annually conserve 50 trillion Btus of primary energy, reduce CO2 emissions by 2.7 million metric tons, and cut utility bills by $170 million. Although many CHP technologies are proven and the potential savings and benefits are signifi...

Minimum energy consumption in sugar production by cooling crystallisation of concentrated raw juice

The sugar manufacturing process based on cooling crystallisation of concentrated raw juice is considered. Micro-filtration and softening of raw juice makes it possible to obtain white sugar by three-or four-stage cooling crystallisation. Prior to crystallisation, raw juice should be concentrated by multistage evaporation in a pressure range below the atmospheric pressure. The preferred evaporator arrangement is backward feed. As the temperature of vapours and condensates leaving the evaporator station is low, the opportunities for heat recovery are limited. In order to save energy, vapour recompression can be applied. For a given evaporator structure, the energy consumption depends on the parameters of the evaporation process. The minimum energy consumption of the novel process should thus be determined by simultaneously carrying out energy targeting and optimisation of evaporation. It is assumed that the consumption of utilities in the sugar factory is balanced with the supply of heat and power from the factory’s own power plant. Energy systems employing various CHP technologies and various evaporator stations optionally combined with vapour compressors are studied. A range of feasible solutions is defined in terms of minimum energy consumption and combined heat transfer area of the evaporator station and the heat exchanger network.

Combined heat and power: how much carbon and energy can manufacturers save?

In this paper we analyze the potential for CHP in US manufacturing. We use typical efficiencies of today's available CHP technologies to estimate the technical potential for the frozen technology case. We find that if manufacturers in 1994 had self-generated all their steam and electric needs with existing cost-effective CHP technologies, they could have reduced carbon equivalent (=12/44 carbon dioxide) emissions by up to 30 million metric tons of carbon (MtC) or nearly 20 percent, and energy use by nearly an Exajoule (EJ). With growth in manufacturing and expected improvements in CHP technologies, this technical potential could be much larger. However, without environmental regulatory reform and innovation-oriented utility restructuring policies, actual CHP installed by US manufacturers could fall far short.

The viability of combined heat and power generation in Cyprus

This paper presents the results of an investigation on the feasibility of the application of packaged CHP systems to the commercial and industrial sectors of the Cyprus economy. A number of case studies have been considered covering a wide range of applications and energy demand patterns. The results indicate that the application of CHP systems will provide very attractive paybacl periods of the order of 2–3 years. With current energy pricing policies the wide application of CHP technology offers the potential of significant energy savings and a reduction in the load demand on the national grid.