CHP—Combined Heat & Power
Combined Heat & Power, CHP, also known as Cogeneration, utilizes one primary fuel to generate 2 forms of power: electricity and heat. It is a type of power station that has been around since the time of Thomas Edison, but the efficiencies and control systems have improved immensely. They can run on a variety of fuels, but the systems that Bright Idea typically would install would run on low or high pressure natural gas or scrubbed methane gas from a landfill.
The available CHP Microturbines come in three different sizes:
→ 35 KW
→ 65 KW
→ 200 KW
A unique feature of these CHP Microturbines is the ability to stack the units. If your power needs are 1MW, it is possible to stack five of the 200KW units to fit your needs. In addition, the stackability also allows you to program your system to only run as many units as are needed at any point in time. If you operate at maxium capacity for 10 hours, all the units could be running. But if only 60% of maximum power output is needed for the next few hours, you can program a couple of the microturbines to shut down.
Examples of businesses with a high demand for electricity and heating and/or cooling that could benefit from CHP include:
- Food Processing Plants
- Manufacturing Plants
- Hospitals
- Waste Facilities
- Government Buildings
- Schools
- Retail Stores
CCHP—Combined Cooling, Heating & Power
Combined Cooling, Heating and Power, CCHP, is also referred to as Trigeneration. An absorption chiller is added to your CHP system which allows the steam output to have the capacity to air condition your facility. Although having the ability to chill water or a water/glycol solution from your steam output seems to go against all common sense, the basic technology of absorption chillers has been around for decades.
CHP is one of the most cost efficient methods to reduce carbon emmissions from fossil fuel combustion.
In addition, we have the ability to do larger scales cogeneration systems in the 3.2–7 MW range utilizing heat recovery boilers instead of the standard heat exchanger used in the microturbines systems. With rising power costs, the efficiencies possible with these systems cannot be ignored any longer. Let us do a facility survey to determine whether CHP would be cost effective for you.
