The highly increasing biomass industrial sector is now facing important challenges as the EU will implement stricter particulate matter (PM) emission limits under 20 mg/m³ by 2030. PM is considered the pollutant with the highest risk for health damage. The sector needs to decrease to maximum PM emissions, yet some countries (Germany, Denmark and UK) have already implemented the previous legislation. However, there are only partial solutions available including Electrostatic Precipitators (ESPs) and Fabric Filters, which offer 95-99% efficiency in PM emission reduction. Their main drawbacks include additional investment costs of as much as 100% with respect to the combustion system and a rise of operation and maintenance costs for heat production in 6-12%. Biomass is the principal renewable energy source used for heating, accounting for 66.1% of the renewable energy produced in the EU. It will move €3.77 billion by 2017, with 2.5% Compound Annual Growth Rate. We will focus on two sectors taking into account their growth expectative and easy market access to guarantee rapid market uptake. We will cover installations from 200kW-3MW including on the higher end district-heating (>1MW) and on the lower end the primary (farming, greenhouses) and tertiary sector (hotels, office buildings) with smaller installations (<1MW).
A strong complementary team with more than 70 years' experience has come together to upgrade, scale-up and market launch an urgently needed affordable integrated solution for emission reduction for biomass combustion plants (CYCLOMB). All EU countries will have to abide by new regulations (already implemented in Germany, Denmark and UK, other EU member states must follow until 2030) which fix particulate matter (PM) emission limits under 20 mg/m³. The CYCLOMB system achieves a 96-99% PM emission reduction, with variable filter geometry. Final emission levels are always lower than 20 mg/m³ while investing only an additional 26% in PM abatement technology with respect to boiler price. It thus provides a comparative performance to the most advanced electrostatic precipitators and bag filters but at a lower cost. The total annual operation and maintenance cost of biomass power plants is typically 5%-6.5% of the capital cost of small and medium capacity power plants. The implementation of CYCLOMB can reduce these maintenance costs at least 80%. The PM abatement technology solution will be optimized for the CYCLOMB integrated solution medium-scale range (200kW-3MW) ideal for medium scale district heating plants and applications in the primary sector (farms, greenhouses) and the tertiary sector (office buildings, schools, hospitals and hotels).
Based on this project, KSM has expanded the product range with 3 new, larger boiler models. This has helped KSM to maintain its total turnover and retain its employees, even though the market for smaller boilers for the private customer has declined sharply due to the conversion to heat pumps. KSM, on the other hand, expects an increase in revenue due to optimization of the large boilers for district heating plants.
In recent years, the requests for dust filtration systems for the biomass combustion sector have greatly increased. Before the project, TamaAernova could only rely on mechanical filtration systems such as sleeves, but with today, thanks to the results obtained, we will be able to present ourselves on the market with this new solution and with a larger market size to be able to serve. The combustion market, also thanks to the limitations that are being exacerbated by the individual states, is a market in continuous expansion and on which we can and must focus a lot in the coming years.
