POWER October 2019 - 32

TOP PLANT
Almost No Heat Is Wasted
at This Highly Efficient
German CHP Facility
Courtesy: eta Energieberatung GmbH
This modern Bavarian factory produces 105,000 tons of wood pellets, enough
to heat tens of thousands of homes. To help manufacture them, it integrates a
uniquely designed combined heat and power facility that consumes nearly all
its waste heat, as well as produces enough power to meet regional demand.
Sonal Patel
T
rees are prominent on the alpine
hills and mountain ranges that jut
and fall across the landscape in Upper
Franconia, a region in the northernmost
reaches of the state of Bavaria in
southern Germany. The region is home to
many wooded regions, including the scenic
Franconian Forest, where evergreen
spruce dominates, with their thin trunks
rising tall over moss-covered forest floors.
The forests are sustainably managed,
and several sawmills or wood processing
businesses operate nearby. More
than 1 million cubic meters (m3) of sawdust
left behind from these operations is
then shipped, dried, and pressed in pellet
form at the WUN Pellets GmbH and
WUN Bioenergie GmbH facilities, which
sit side by side in Holenbrunn, a town
in Wunsiedel district. The WUN Pellet
plant alone processes 800,000 m3 of
sawdust, as Sebastian Kleins, project
manager at Pfaffenhofen-based energy
consulting firm eta Energieberatung
GmbH told POWER. " Dried and compressed,
this huge pile delivers 105,000
tons of wood pellets. These in turn are
used to heat approximately 30,000 detached
houses, " he said.
But the operation is energy intensive.
That's one reason WUN Bioenergie,
32
which produces about 35,000 tons of
wood pellets per year, was brought online
at the end of 2011 as an integrated
biomass-fired organic ranking cycle
(ORC) combined heat and power (CHP)
plant, a project that eta Energieberatung
designed.
In December 2016, WUN Bioenergie's
plant manager, Thomas Koedel, approached
eta Energieberatung with a
proposal to design and manage WUN Pellets,
which was envisioned as an integrated
engine-CHP facility. As Kleins recalled,
the company wanted more production
capacity than WUN Bioenergie's already
highly efficient ORC-biomass project using
similar equipment was providing. But
it was also looking " to cover almost the
whole electricity demand of the electric
grid in the supply area of the SWW
Wunsiedel GmbH, which is the municipal
utilities company that has been a strong
partner in WUN Bioenergie, " Kleins said.
When it approached eta Energieberatung,
the WUN Bioenergie team had
already picked key contractors, Kleins noted.
Koedel and his team envisioned the
new facility, WUN Pellets, as a dedicated
cogeneration power plant that would be
equipped with three 4.5-MW TCG 2032B
V16 engines, which are highly efficient
gas gensets manufactured by MWM, a
www.powermag.com
German company that Caterpillar bought
from British private equity firm 3i Group
Plc in 2010. Developers chose the MWM
gas engines because they showed " excellent
efficiency and reliability observed in
the first pellet plant, " which uses smaller
1.2-MW MWM gensets, said Kleins.
The building would be built by local
contractor Karl Roth Baumeister GmbH
& Co. KG. The belt dryer would be supplied
by Swiss firm W. Kunz dryTec AG;
the dry sawdust silo by Wolf Systembau
GmbH; the wood pellet production
and conveying machinery by Albert
Knoblinger GmbH & Co. KG, Ried im
Innkreis; the pellet mills by Dutch firm
CPM EUROPE B.V., Zaandam; and pellet
bagging machinery by Austrian company
OBL Systemvertrieb GmbH.
By July 2017, the project was underway,
spearheaded by a newly formed company,
WUN Pellets GmbH (formerly known as
WUN Energie GmbH), whose shareholders
comprise four companies: WUN Bioenergie,
a gas provider (Gasversorgung
Wunsiedel GmbH), a multiple energy
provider (GHD Bayernwerk Natur GmbH
& Co. KG), and wood pellet wholesaler
(BayWa AG). After detailed planning was
completed and necessary permissions
were acquired, construction began in September
2017, and by May 2018, installation
POWER | October 2019
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POWER October 2019

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