Sustainability and Incentives with Combined Heat & Power

Combined Heat and Power or CHP refers to using the waste heat in the exhaust of a turbine or engine to make steam or hot water. Preferred is getting active in CHP projects with Williams & Davis boilers of Dallas, TX. Their specially designed boilers can accept the exhaust from a diesel generator to make steam or hot water. For this project, Preferred supplied an API-AF burner to fire the boiler to full steam capacity when the engine isn’t running or isn’t producing enough waste heat to meet the plant’s thermal demand.

CHP projects make sense anywhere electricity is very expensive, fuel is cheap, and customers have a relatively constant demand for steam or hot water. Instead of purchasing electricity off the grid, a plant or building owner can purchase a natural gas- or diesel-fired generator, and use the hot exhaust to make steam or hot water for building heating. The Preferred burner allows the steam or hot water production to be independent of building electrical load.

Electric utilities actually encourage this practice because when customers provide their own electricity, they are peak shaving for the utility. During peak electricity usage periods, like hot Texas afternoons in August, the utilities are running all of their generating plants to meet demand, including their oldest, least efficient plants. The utilities lose money selling electricity from their oldest plants, so they incentivize customers to make their own electricity during these periods in the hopes the utility won’t have to fire up their oldest generating plants. In the aftermath of hurricane Sandy, people living in buildings with back-up power and heating became very popular for friends to come by, charge up their devices, take a hot shower, and have a hot meal.

CHP covers a lot of different ways to provide both electricity and steam or hot water to a facility. This approach with Preferred and Williams & Davis is geared towards customers that have steam or hot water loads between 200 HP and 1,000 HP, and need the flexibility to fire the boiler at any load regardless of generator load. If you have customers that may be interested in this CHP approach, contact David Eoff for more details.

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