Thank you everyone. Many experts have responded, and the responses
have been singularly against using steam for small electricity production.
Paul
Doc / Dr TLUD / Prof. Paul S. Anderson, PhD
Email: [email protected]
Skype: paultlud Phone: +1-309-452-7072
Website: www.drtlud.com
On 12/1/2013 1:57 PM, Tom Miles wrote:
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 haven't
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 didn't 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 didn't 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 didn't 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] <mailto:[email protected]>
wrote:
I found that small steam at the residential scale is just a bad idea.
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