Cogeneration Heating Power (CHP) Plant an energy efficient measure for cold countries.

​One of the great approaches for cold climate countries to improve the efficiency in buildings where photovoltaic system could not be generate sufficiently, is through CHP (cogeneration of heat and power) plant.

​How it works?

​A CHP plant is a natural gas engine where the heat generated is extracted to heat fluid used in for room conditioning or domestic hot water use. The process consists in a boiler where the water passing boiling points is transferred to a steam turbine and make it rotate. This motion is then converted into electricity with a generator.

Why?

​This approach for energy generation has been present for many years, but only recently the full potentials has been used. A steam turbine converts the energy from combustion with a rate of 40-50% of waste in heat, whereas the CHP use that heat to heat fluid for building usage losing less than 10%. These systems performance is increase which gives an efficiency of above 85% with and average distribution loss of 10% when used to heat district or cities. Traditional heating boiler have efficiency of 80% which is lower than the CHP and since the electricity normally cost more than natural gas per embed energy it is more than beneficial.

CHP Plant Schema - Courtesy of Pinterest*

Applications

​There is various use of the CHP plant, but most of them are used where there is a large demand in heating such as cold countries where large plants produce the heat that is distributed to buildings just by connecting to the network. Additional to natural gas, the water could be heated from biomass or even landfill waste could be incinerated to be used in another form by people. The CHP could be used for campus, hospital, or industrial complex in order to be independent from the grid. Our team, have work on an industrial project in Mexico desiring to be self-sufficient in electricity even if heating is not required, however they have a 24h manufacturing cooled facility. Thus, the CHP heat is converted into chilled water for conditioning with an absorption chiller and the electricity produced helps reduce their consumption to 45% while lowering the maximum demand load number.

​Modeling and LEED

​Our energy modeler experts have documented various LEED projects that take advantage of CHP plant at local or district level. The preferred approach is to model the plant directly as a heating and electricity source, this is more than simple using IESVE. The information required are the efficiency curves, the network distribution loss, and the maximum heat output from the plant. This component is connected directly to the hot water loop, or chilled water loop when using absorption chiller, to provide the required heat at each second while generating energy. We highly recommend to model the CHP instead of manually inputting the contribution to your energy results, to be able to visualize CHP plant operation and how the electricity maximum load evolves.

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​* CHP Technology, https://no.pinterest.com/pin/425027283577204903/