POWER February 2017 - 32

COMBINED HEAT AND POWER
operate on ultra-low-sulfur fuel oil.
The industrial sector has long been a
strong proponent of CHP generation. Though
CHP makes up a small fraction of total U.S.
electric power generation, the overwhelming
majority of industrial and commercial generation
(about 85% as of 2012, according to the
Energy Information Administration [EIA])
incorporates CHP. This has traditionally been
because some of the largest industrial loads
also have very large needs for process heat
and steam. Chemical plants, petroleum refining,
and paper processing remain the largest
users of CHP, with significant demand also
coming from food processing, breweries, and
biofuel producers.
Fuel Shifts
But the sector is no longer as staid and settled
as it once was. Many of the trends that have
remade the wholesale electric power sector
have also reached into industrial CHP. While
total industrial generation has changed little
since 2005, according to the EIA, the relative
percentages of fuels used have changed quite
a bit. Between 2005 and 2014, coal use fell
33% and fuel oil use plummeted more than
85%, while natural gas use grew by 17%, rising
from 50% of the total in 2005 to 60% in
2014. The use of waste products, biomass,
biogas, and similar fuels has fluctuated but
remains close to 2005 levels as the secondmost-common
source of energy. As with the
power sector at large, falling natural gas prices
and tightening emissions standards have
been the main drivers.
Such shifts are also taking place globally.
China has been struggling for years with
endemic air pollution in major cities like
Shanghai, and the nation's traditional heavy
reliance on coal has been challenged headon
by new government policies seeking to
cut emissions, reduce the carbon intensity of
the power sector, and meet the nation's ambitious
goals under the Paris climate agreement.
While major advanced coal plants and
China's massive build-out of its nuclear and
renewables capacity have grabbed headlines,
industrial generation is feeling the same pressures.
Much of China's pollution problems
stem from thousands of small, inefficient
coal boilers that the government has moved
to shut down. But those generation sources
have to be replaced with something.
One example can be found in the SAIC
Volkswagen Automotive Co. factory in Anting,
northwest of Shanghai. SAIC Volkswagen
was founded in 1984 as a joint venture
between Volkswagen Group and China's
SAIC Motor Corp. The facility, one of the
largest in the country, manufactures automobiles
for the Chinese market under the Volkswagen
and Škoda marks.
32
2. Clean sweep. SAIC Volkswagen's new CHP plant at its factory in Shanghai, supplied by
MAN Diesel & Turbo, replaced a set of old, inefficient coal-fired boilers and helps reduce serious
air pollution in the area while substantially improving efficiency and reducing power costs.
The new plant supplies power and steam to both a car plant and a neighboring gearbox plant.
Courtesy: MAN Diesel & Turbo
The plant originally used coal-fired boilers
to generate electricity and process steam,
but these boilers were ordered shut down by
the government, and with regulations prohibiting
any new coal-fired generation in Shanghai,
SAIC Volkswagen looked to natural gas
and small CHP.
The new CHP plant, supplied by MAN
Diesel & Turbo, a member of the Volkswagen
Group, comprises four MGT 6200
gas turbines with a combined total output
of 26.5 MW (see Figure 2 and the header
photo). The plant produces 60 tons/hour of
steam and 4.42 MWt of hot water. This is
enough to supply 100% of the electricity
needs of Car Plant 3 and a neighboring gearbox
plant, and most of their process steam
(the balance is supplied by auxiliary gasfired
boilers).
India is also working to improve its air
quality and move away from dependence on
coal and fuel oil (see " India Refocuses Coal
Future " in the November 2015 issue). Like
China, its industrial base relies on numerous
small diesel gensets and coal-fired boilers.
But that, too, is beginning to change. Kanodia
Technoplast, outside the capital of Delhi, supplies
a variety of packaging materials domestically
and internationally and is typical of the
many companies that have sprung up as part of
India's economic boom since the 1990s. In an
effort to reduce power costs and improve reliability
at its Kundli plant, it recently installed
a gas-fired GE Jenbacher trigeneration system
supplied by Clarke Energy. The 1.5-MWe system
provides 1.4 MW of electricity as well as
450 kW of heat for the thermic fluid used in
the plant and 200 tons/hour of refrigeration.
The plant had previously suffered from frequent
outages on the local grid.
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Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, most industrial
CHP is fired by crude oil-despite
the country's large gas reserves-because
of constraints on the domestic gas market.
But a shift toward gas is under way there
as well. In December, ENGIE and Doosan
announced a partnership to build a $900
million CHP plant at the Fadhili gas plant,
85 kilometers northwest of the Jubail Industrial
port in Saudi Arabia's eastern province.
The Fadhili gas plant is itself part of the
kingdom's multi-billion-dollar initiative to
make more natural gas available for power
generation. The 2.5-Bcf/day gas-processing
plant is expected to come online by the end
of 2019 and will cost a staggering $13.3
billion altogether. The 1,500-MW Fadhili
Combined Cycle Plant will supply 400 MW
of its output, plus process steam, to the gas
plant beginning in November 2019, while
the remainder of the power goes to the national
grid.
Industrial CHP Goes Digital
The same technologies that are being used to
improve efficiency and output in the larger
power sector are coming to industrial CHP as
well. GE has been pushing hard to deploy its
" digital power plant " solutions to large gridconnected
facilities (see " Big Data and the
Industrial Internet Meet the Power Plant " in
the January 2016 issue and " Disruptive Digital
Technologies Are Key to Power Industry's
Future " in the June 2016 issue), but some of
the same tools can also be applied to smaller
distributed generation.
GE announced in November 2016 that it
was working with Clarke Energy to deploy
its Predix-based Asset Performance Management
(APM) software across Clarke's
POWER | February 2017

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POWER February 2017

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