Thomas,
We have seen four or five biomass fired Stirling companies fail in the last 15 years. Successful Stirling engine companies supply the solar and recreational markets with very small systems and run mostly on LPG. Stirling DK had the potential to fill an important niche. I liked their 9 kWe and 35 kWe units. It seems likely that they failed for business reasons as much as technical reasons. They were very slow to get organized and capitalize on the early experience of the DTU units. It is not clear why they charged so much. We have a few small scale 50 kWe Organic Rankin cycle (ORC) generators in operation in the US. They seem to work very well for clean waste heat like exhaust from diesel gensets or biogas. One of my clients is testing one on diesel exhaust. http://electratherm.com/ The owner of a poultry farm tells me that his ORC unit works fine but the heat exchanger from his poultry litter fired gasifier keeps plugging up. (We have been there before.) He gets 20-30 kWe from the $280,000 machine. The gasifier and ORC system cost $1 million. There seem to be conflicting reports about how much the system is actually run. Steam systems suit district heat or industrial settings where much more steam is produced than needed for electricity otherwise load balancing is a problem. We have seen a 1 MWe wood boiler and steam turbine system fail at a prison due to the inability to balance heating and electrical loads. We saw many small turbines in the 250 kWe-1.5 MWe range installed in the wood industry in the 1970s and 1980s. It was common to see a sawmill generate higher pressure steam and use a 500 kWe backpressure turbine to reduce the pressure for distribution to a large number of lumber dry kilns. We have lost most of our sawmills in our region and electricity is cheap so we havent seen any new systems installed. I visited a 600 kWe Russian turbine at a district heating plant in Hjordkær, Denmark in about 2004. At the time they had been running since 1997 and were happy with it. They were serving about 700 homes and a chocolate factory. It seemed like a good match. In recent years we have seen a couple of small scale steam systems in the 250 kWe to 2 MWe range. One supplier will provide a 1 MWe modular fluidized bed steam system for $5 million. These need to be installed in industrial or utility setting for reasons cited by others. We were disappointed last year not to find more gasifiers with demonstrated performance in the 2 MWe scale for the Alaska project. Nexterra was just installing their 2 MWe Jenbacher system at University of British Columbia. Babcock Volund gave us a budget price but didnt think putting a unit in Alaska was interesting to them. Kawasaki Heavy Industries seems to have abandoned their program that was based on the CarboConsult downdraft gasifier. Their principal proponent of the system retired. Etc. And we didnt want a gasifier with a wet cleaning system. We did receive budget proposals from some companies that had 150 kWe to 250 kWe gasifiers but that didnt have field performance data to demonstrate their production with multiple units. We still need to demonstrate more viable small scale systems with any technology. Tom From: Gasification [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Thomas Koch Sent: Sunday, December 01, 2013 9:42 AM To: Discussion of biomass pyrolysis and gasification Subject: Re: [Gasification] Small steam systems plus gasifiers for electricity Jeff Striling.dk just went banckrupt and gasification gas is Dynamite. Thomas Fra: Gasification [mailto:[email protected]] På vegne af Jeff Davis Sendt: 1. december 2013 18:37 Til: Discussion of biomass pyrolysis and gasification Emne: Re: [Gasification] Small steam systems plus gasifiers for electricity I would have to agree with Steve. Steam is a lot like playing with dynamite. A gas producer and an off the shelf engine is the system to beat. Too bad nobody is working on a Stirling engine for using excess heat. Jeff On 12/01/2013 11:29 AM, [email protected] wrote: I found that small steam at the residential scale is just a bad idea.
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