Thinking about this with a software engineering hat on I am breaking out in cold sweat. You attach these waste heat generators to random other industrial machinery and now suddenly you can't do any maintenance or power cycling for fear of disrupting the power supply to whole regions. It also seems organizationally very complicated to have co-located hardware owned by completely unrelated organizations. I guess if it was all nationalized or belonged to one huge multinational it may be less of a concern.
> You attach these waste heat generators to random other industrial machinery and now suddenly you can't do any maintenance or power cycling for fear of disrupting the power supply to whole regions.
It's not that you can't. But you have to coordinate with another party, particularly if you're generating large amounts of energy this way. But the grid is evolving towards increased storage to accommodate renewables, so this will mitigate the impact of shutting generation down to run maintenance on the heat source.
But if we don't want to couple random industrial plants to the supply side of the power grid, I wonder if we couldn't be using this with some self-contained carbon recapture devices. Heat -> power -> less CO₂ in the air. If that kind of tech will ever be workable, that is.
All this to say, when I put my software engineering hat on, I'm starting to get sick thinking of all that capacity being wasted.
The engineering miracle of the electrical grid is exactly this sort of coordination. Think of this as being like solar energy - except it's generating 95% of the time rather than 25% of the time. That's considered baseload electrical, and although it's not awesome if a 10MW plant drops off the grid, the system is capable of handling it.
Then why bother selling the electricity back to the grid? If the wholesale price is less than retail price, it would make more sense to use the power to offset the original consumption.
It seems like the only reason a setup like this would really make sense is as an efficiency improvement for the industrial customer. Maybe financing for these types of upgrades is hard to come by, in which case it kinda makes sense to have a 3rd party own and operate the equipment. But that seems like a short term niche. As soon as it is proven and de-risked financing should be quick to follow.
I think that point extends further. This entire idea goes away when efficiency in the tooling is enhanced over time. Sure you can get some extra power back from your waste, but next time you retool, the tech might make that proposition useless.
It's like if you invested in a system to get energy back from you car exhaust, but then the next model year is so much more efficient as to make the tech obsolete.
7MW is pretty small. Any generation gear may trip off the grid at any moment; provided it doesn't do so too frequently or in sync with other failure, this is not normally a problem.
That's roughly the load of an electric train. Eurostar are 16MW.
It's also the sort of problem that batteries providing grid stability services help a lot with.
I’m ignorant on the topic, but seems more like a great cost- & carbon-reduction technology for the industrial plants, rather than a power generation technology for the masses. For what it is, it sounds great though.
It never meets economic hurdle rates for industrials on their own, which is why we're building them as independent power plants. We prefer to sell the electricity back to the host facility, but we often sell into the grid.
are your advantages that prevent industrials from installing their own cogen know-how and economies of scale in project management, procurement, frabrication, installation and commissioning? I wouldn't have thought a company like fortis would ignore 7MW for 30 million * however many compressor stations they have that are near the distribution lines.
