Cogen beer
Posted by Sean Casten on August 15th, 2008
Cleveland brewery attempts energy recyling yet is foiled by regulation
Last week Cleveland Scene wrote about a local brewery that is recovering its waste heat. They set out to convert the heat into electricity and useful steam for their brewery. In a great quote, the owner Patrick Conway says:
“When our engineer explained this technology to us,” says Patrick, “it was like putting wheels on luggage.”
The brewery will use the heat to run chillers, and intends also to generate electricity. But there’s a catch:
For the time being, however, Ohio’s regulations and Cleveland Public Power’s archaic rate structures (CPP is Great Lakes’ electricity provider) prevent recycled energy advocates and entrepreneurs from reaping waste-heat recovery’s total benefits. “At Great Lakes, our unit will be able to produce electricity, but won’t.”
As a result, the brewery only generates heat, and will continue to buy dirtier more expensive power from their utility. It’s certainly a start. But keep those regulatory barriers to wheeled luggage in mind every time you hear that the only barriers to energy conservation are the invention of cost-effective technologies.
Note: This first appeared on Grist.
what are the initial equipments required for energy recycling.
There is no “one size fits all” solution. The key is to take a close look at facility energy needs and waste energy production – not just in terms of volumes, but also in terms of temperatures, qualities and voltages on the demand side and in terms of Btu content, consistency, pH, entrained particulate, etc. on the waste energy production side. Note that in many cases, that requires gaining access to historic data that was not well metered, so there is a bit of an art to figuring out how to make a sufficiently accurate forecast of future energy needs/production levels to invest long-lived capital in an energy recovery island.
Once that exercise is done, there are a host of technologies that may be appropriate – different heat recovery boilers, solid fuel boilers, gas turbines, steam turbines, organic rankine cycles, etc. However, the key to getting the right answer is to start by understanding energy flows and needs – starting with a technological/equipment list is bound to lead to a sub-optimal design (sometimes disastrously so!)