Industry
News
In addition to looking at district energy, the
council is expected to hire Transitions
Made Better Inc. to administer the city’s
financial assistance program for those who
had used the downtown steam system. That
system had depended on Alliant Energy’s
Sixth Street Generating Station, which was
damaged by the June 2008 flood and won’t
be rebuilt. In late May, the City Council voted
to spend $8 million to help five large steam
system users, including the Quaker Co. and
Cargill plants, convert to another system;
$8 million for a group of 200 smaller users
to help them convert; and $5 million to help
offset higher steam costs for all the users.
More Waste-to-Energy
for Metro Vancouver?
A July 3 article in the Abbotsford News
noted that Metro Vancouver hopes to win
public and provincial approval to build new
waste-fired plants like the one it considers
a model in the city of Burnaby. Metro
Vancouver is a federation of 22 municipalities,
one electoral area and one treaty First Nation
in British Columbia. The Burnaby waste-to-energy plant burns 280,000 tonnes of
garbage a year – 8 percent of the region’s
waste stream. The steam it produces is used
to generate 18 MW of electricity, enough to
power 15,000 homes.
Expanded use of waste-to-energy plants
would open up the potential for district heating, whereby the waste-fired plant would
supply the energy needs of surrounding
buildings. Downtown Vancouver has a
natural gas-fired district heating system, and
buildings in North Vancouver’s Lower Lonsdale
area also use a system that shares heat
generated by local industry.
The current thinking is that three new
waste-to-energy plants might be built in
the region. If Metro Vancouver’s strategy is
approved, waste-to-energy plants in the
region could consume 25 percent of the
region’s waste by 2015, the target date for
new incinerators to be running; recycling
would increase from 55 percent to 70 percent; and 37 percent of the waste stream
that now goes to landfills would shrink to
just 5 percent.
Two Renewable Power
Plants Planned for London
Building Sustainable Design magazine
reported July 6 that renewable energy generator Blue-NG appointed Land and Marine
to build the first of two renewable power
stations in London, in a contract worth
£100 million ($162 million).
The first plant in Beckton, East London,
will be a combined heat and power plant
fueled by locally sourced biomass, i.e., rapeseed oil. It will provide electricity to power
50,000 homes and heat for district heating
or local industry. Blue-NG claims that the
plant will be a new model of CHP, called
combined heat and intelligent power (ChiP).
The company claims that it will be the first
of its kind in the world. Heat from the engine
will be used in the gas preheating process,
which is a necessary part of the pressure
reduction process.
The second power plant, to be built in
Southall, is still currently under consideration
by Ealing Borough Council. If proper approvals
are obtained, both plants could be operational by the end of 2011.
India’s First District Cooling
System Proposed in New Delhi
The Web site Expressindia.com reported
July 9 that the municipal council of New
Delhi, India, is exploring the possibility of
installing a district cooling system to serve
Connaught Place, one of the city’s largest
commercial districts and a major heritage
area. The system would be part of the first
phase of redeveloping the area and the first
district cooling system in the country.
The council has invited expressions of
interest from interested parties to assess
whether the technology is available in India
to carry out such a large-scale project. An
official at Engineers India Ltd., the council’s
consultant for the project, said that almost
all offices and shops in Delhi use window
air conditioners and coolers due to the
adverse climate conditions and high temperatures in the city – consuming high
energy and polluting the surrounding areas.
Atul Bhargava, president of the New
Delhi Traders’ Association, said the concept
of district cooling sounds good, but he
questions its practicality. He also said the
charges to be levied by the council for the
system will also “determine whether we
want such a system.”
Waste-to-Energy Plant
in Eastern Norway
The Nordic Investment Bank (NIB) and
the Norwegian energy company Eidsiva
Energi AS have signed a loan agreement
totaling 40 million euros (approximately
$56 million) for the construction of a waste
incineration power plant in the Hamar
municipality. The plant will serve as an environmentally friendly answer to Norway’s
new law against landfilling residual waste.
On completion in 2011, the plant will
treat up to 72,000 tonnes of waste a year.
It will produce electricity and steam for local
industry and heat for the district heating
system. The new plant will be able to produce approximately 200 GWh of energy,
and the district heating network capacity
will be doubled. The waste incineration
plant will remove all previous dependency
on oil in the district heating system.
Although incineration will cause an
increase in carbon dioxide emissions, it is
estimated that the plant will cause a net
annual decrease in emissions of CO2 to
39,000 tonnes. In addition, there is environmental benefit in not having to transport the waste from the region to distant
incineration plants.
IBM Tests Computers
as Heat Source
A June 24 article in the Guardian
reported that IBM will conduct the world’s
first large-scale test of new technology that
uses heat produced by computers to warm
buldings. The three-year trial of the new
system, called Aquasar, will be held at IBM’s
Zurich Research Laboratory in Switzerland.
The hope is that the system will lead to
carbon reductions of 85 percent through
reducing the energy used to cool the chips
while also reducing heating costs.
The Aquasar system uses a network of
tiny tubes to pump water to within a few
hundredths of a millimeter of the chip. The
heated water will be used to warm a sepa-
