Imagine you had access to a constant supply of wet wood chips or sawdust. You could be a processing green tree trimmings or operate a sawmill.
Most people might consider composting their green waste in the air rather than burying in a landfill – like large disposal companies suggest. Methane is up to 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas and aerobic processes like composting release less methane than anaerobic processes, which occur in a landfill, see this link.
Rather than composting the wood chips, they could be fed into a biomass boiler to collect the energy into a water heating circuit that is connected to the power generation module.
We have selected the K-500M1 biomass boiler, part of the M1 series range, to provide hot water for the ZE-40-ULH Energy Production Module, which is connected to a Customised Cooler System.
This means that a feedrate of around 150 kg per hour of wet wood chips would produce nearly 40 kWe each hour, or 350,000 kWh for the whole year. (These figures are currently under review and further information is expected any day soon.)
The Victorian State Government has a case-study of a saw mill that installed a biomass boiler in 2005, see this link. This particular mill installed the biomass boiler to raise steam for the kiln, replacing an LPG boiler, and apparently the pay back period for the boiler was 1.3 years. Another company used excess steam to generate electricity and provided the saw mill with cheaper power, saving an additional $10,000 per year.
CrossroadGREEN aims to become an on-line resource for information exchange and a market place specialising in bioenergy and waste-to-energy technologies. Among our growing list of examples we have a large biomass boiler producing steam installed in Bombala in 2019 – this link – and a biomass boiler and ORC based power generating module operating since 2014 at a sawmill in Italy – this link. We also have an example biomass boiler and ORC based power generating module operating since 2016 utiliseng green pruning residue – this link.
The pre-engineered system discussed here uses the most recent technology. It produces hot water to generate electricity, rather than steam. It is very similar to the example sawmill in Italy mentioned earlier.
Contact us if you want to discuss your possible application.
