Industry
News
360 industry professionals. SELECT is the
trade association for the electrotechnical
industry in Scotland and holds the awards
in conjunction with CABLEtalk magazine.
The Shetland Island Council’s CHP
operation, Shetland Heat and Power Ltd.,
has supplied district heating to homes
and businesses in Lerwick since 1998. The
system’s heat is generated at a waste-to-energy incinerator on the outskirts of the
city that burns domestic and commercial
waste from Shetland, Orkney and the
offshore oil industry.
Newell McGuiness, SELECT managing
director, said, “Shetland Islands Council
has come up with a fantastic scheme to
win this award, and hopefully its example
will be followed by others across the U.K.
as we seek to successfully address the environmental challenges we all face.”
EPA CHP Partnership Meeting
in Texas Draws Big Crowd
The U.S. Environmental Protections
Agency’s Combined Heat and Power
Partnership Meeting was held in Austin,
Texas, the first week of November with
more than 300 industry professionals in
attendance. Facilitated by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Gulf Coast Clean Application Center, the two-and-a-half-day meeting
included a policy forum and trade expo presented by the Texas CHP Initiative (TXCHPI).
The TXCHPI is an association of business interests that encourages CHP technology applications in industrial, commercial and institutional settings. The Gulf
Coast Clean Energy Application Center
provides independent technical information
and project evaluations for CHP projects.
The event featured seminars and pre-
sentations on a wide variety of CHP uses and
technologies from more than 50 presenters.
Tours of the highly recognized Mueller
Energy Center at Dell Children’s Hospital and
The University of Texas at Austin campus
energy plant were also part of the program.
Juan Ontiveros, IDEA past chair and UT
Austin’s executive director of utilities and
energy management, spoke about how his
university’s investments in CHP have enabled
the campus to maintain 1977 levels of fuel
usage and emissions despite dramatic
increases in energy demands.
Olympic Park Energy Centre
Opens in London
The state-of-the-art Energy Centre in
London’s Olympic Park opened Oct. 19.
The combined cooling, heating and power
plant was built to supply sustainable energy
to venues across the park during the 2012
Olympic Games. After 2012, the Energy
Centre will support new buildings and
communities that develop in the area.
The gas-fired plant will generate electricity and capture heat from that process
for use in providing up to 46. 5 MW of
heating and 16 MW of cooling (initial
capacities) to Olympic Park buildings via a
16-km ( 9.9-mile) piping network. The plant
will also include biomass-fired boilers using
wood chips to generate heat. Cooling will
be provided through a combination of
electric ammonia-based chillers and absorption chillers driven by heat recovered from
the plant. The Energy Centre system has a
flexible modular design that will allow further capacity and new technology to be
added as the area is developed and
demand increases after the Games.
The system has been designed,
financed and built by Cofely, a subsidiary
of GDF SUEZ, which also operates the cen-
ter. Designed by John McAslan & Partners,
the Energy Centre fits in architecturally
with the wider Olympic Park – reflecting
the site’s Victorian heritage and drawing
inspiration from iconic London power stations. Part of the utilities infrastructure will
be housed in an existing Edwardian building that is being renovated and will include
space for a future visitors’ center.
The Energy Centre also blends in
aesthetically with other Olympic Park utility
buildings, including the electricity substation
and sewer pumping station. These main
utility buildings have all been designed to
be ‘grounded in the earth’ with a solidarity
to give them a separate identity from the
main Olympic Park sporting venues, which
are seen as lightweight and floating out of
the ground.
FAO Releases Paper on
Wood Fuels
The Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO) of the United Nations has released a
paper titled What Woodfuels Can Do to
Mitigate Climate Change. Highlighting the
centrality of wood fuels’ contribution to
global energy consumption, the paper
addresses approaches to improve efficiency
in the wood fuel sector and to manage the
resource more sustainably. It also examines
options for pellets, residues and feedstock
supplies, as well as options for combined
heat and power systems and cofiring of
biomass in coal-fired power plants. The
paper suggests that the use of biomass
for heat and power could save more than
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