Sustainable energy production from wood
Combined heat and power (CHP) systems provide electricity and thermal energy under an integrated unit. Unlike most conventional power stations where heat is wasted, CHP systems offer the potential for recycling produced heat and hence, increasing the system's efficiency. A key criterion when selecting CHP system is the electrical efficiency of a validated technology. Apart from economic benefits, CHP systems can play a significant role in combating global warming due to associated reduction of NOx, SO2 and CO2 emissions. In addition to that, the use of CHP consumes lower fossil energy than conventional systems and offers a reduced load on the grid through distributed generation. However, there are still technical, economic, market, institutional, political and legislative problems involved along with social and environmental barriers. Although steam turbine based CHP technologies are significant for small-scale applications the lower efficiency and scale economy still limits their wide spread use. In addition to that, there is a fuel supply uncertainty in CHP units fed by woody components that renders them not inappropriate. Alternatively, Stirling engines, hot air turbines, and Organic Rankine Cycles (ORC) show increased potentialities for further utilisation. Having studied electricity costs for both small and large scale systems comparisons between various systems were performed. In traditional thermal plants co-firing of wood with fossil fuels has become very popular in large scale applications. For small-scale wood power production, the externally fired Stirling engine technology is very promising for economic future power production. The project work exploited a set of advanced modelling for CHP technologies including techno-economic, supply, hybrid, economic, cost of energy calculator, optimisation, taxation, and adoption and diffusion models. Support tools available for CHP planning included decision support, a checklist for basic actions and SWOT analysis. For more information click at: http://www.echaine.org/
