What Facilities Benefit The Most From Cogeneration?

Jason Kaplan

The facilities that benefit most from cogeneration, are those that need high reliability of their energy sources including hospitals, hospitality, multifamily buildings, and heavy industrial plants. If a company is making paint, for example, and it needs to be stirred all the time, you need high reliability and electric power cogeneration would be a good fit. Also, wastewater plants and supermarkets are good candidates as well. Pharmaceuticals are another great place where cogeneration can be beneficial, again, owing to the need for reliable power during the production process.

Standa Soucek

The CHP unit burns fuel and produces electricity and heat. But this heat can be converted, for example, to cooling if CHP unit is combined with an absorption chiller. The absorption chiller can utilize the heat from exhaust gases. Then, we can create a source called trigeneration where we can produce electricity, heat, and cooling to satisfy, for example hotels over the summertime. There are also several projects called quad generation, and as an output from quad generation, its electricity, heat, cooling, and CO2 captured from exhaust gases. So, it means that the CHP unit can be used in many different facilities; plants, multifamily buildings, et cetera. We are using, installing and maintaining CHP units from 30 kW up to several megawatts. For example, a 10 megawatt plant will be combined with several small sources, but we can design, integrate, and maintain the CHP unit at this big range.

Standa Soucek

For pharmaceutical facilities, it makes sense to produce steam. Therefore, the CHP unit is combined with the equipment called Heat Steam Recovery Generator. Heat Steam Recovery Generator utilizes exhaust gases from the engine and produces steam. Steam from 15 PSI up to 120 PSI depends on what type of facility we are talking about.