September 15, 2008

Cogeneration technology proven, but mostly untapped

Construction Corner

Korky Koroluk

When a giant condominium apartment tower complex adjacent to the Canary Wharf project in London, UK is finished next year, it will use recycled energy for heating and hot water, greatly reducing its carbon footprint in the process.

Recycled energy? Some people call it cogeneration (cogen) or combined heat and power (CHP). But whatever you call it, it’s an energy source that, historically, we waste, sometimes by dumping warm process water back into a stream or lake, but more often by simply letting heat pour out of smokestacks or cooling towers.

That heat is energy, and an awful lot of it is simply thrown away, so Ballymore Properties, the developers of what they call the Peninsula Towers development, decided to do something about it. They hired a firm of engineers and an electrical/mechanical contractor to design and install a system to capture heat that would have otherwise been vented into the atmosphere.

We’re not talking small potatoes here. The twin towers are 48 storeys each, sitting on a central podium that includes retail space, community spaces, a gymnasium, a private theatre and a handful of other amenities. There will be 762 apartments, with prices for the small ones starting at about half a million bucks.

Some of the price, of course, represents the up-front costs of the CHP system. But there is a payback in the form of energy savings down the line.

An example: There is, in Virginia, a set of coke ovens near a steel mill, and those ovens have been throwing heat into the atmosphere for more than 40 years. An energy company came in and spent $165 million to attach a series of heat recovery boilers to them.

The upshot is that in 2004, the first full year of operation, those boilers recovered 1.6 billion kilowatt hours of clean energy while burning no additional fossil fuel. That’s as much energy from a single installation as all the solar collectors connected to power grids worldwide produced in the same year.

That’s why some people are starting to refer to CHP as one of the “core” solutions that will help us out of our climate-change predicament.

But Thomas Casten, who for 30 years has been something of an evangelist for CHP, has noted that it’s not something the general public is aware of, and governments haven’t pushed the idea.

A study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency showed that the U.S. “could generate 20 per cent of (its) electricity needs simply by using industrial energy that’s now being thrown away,” he says.

That represents about 54,000 megawatts of capacity that could be built beyond the 10,000 MW of CHP already in place. So “it’s not a brand new idea that nobody’s ever tried.”

“It’s in the steel business, pulp and paper. ... But there’s 54,000 MW that’s not been done.”

The investment needed would be large, though, “somewhere north of $100 billion” for projects large and small. Many could be fairly simple CHP stations built adjacent to factories, for example, using the factory’s waste heat as feedstock.

Casten has started and managed a series of profitable companies, including, most recently, Recycled Energy Development. He has founded and still consults for non-profit organizations. He writes about recycled energy. He speaks about it at conferences.

His own studies, he says, have shown that if the U.S. went all the way with power recycling, the fuel used for generation could be cut in half while reducing emissions of carbon dioxide by 20 to 30 per cent.

“And we could make money on it with today’s technology. In the process, the technology would improve and we would be able to go farther.”

Casten notes there is a whole new generation of business people out there who want to do something about the environment without bankrupting their companies in the process.

“And do you know what they’re finding out? They’re making money doing it.”

Korky Koroluk is an Ottawa-based freelance writer. Send comments to editor@dailycommercialnews.com

Print | Email | Comment