Combined Heat & Power (CHP)
Combined Heat and Power (CHP) is equally known as cogeneration. All thermal power plants emit a certain amount of heat during electricity generation. This can be released into the natural environment through cooling towers, flue gas, or by other means. By contrast, CHP captures some or all of the by-product heat for heating purposes, either very close to the plant, or—especially in Scandinavia and eastern Europe—as hot water for district heating with temperatures ranging from approximately 80 to 130 °C. This is also called Combined Heat and Power District Heating or CHPDH. Small CHP plants are an example of decentralized energy.
Cogeneration was practiced in some of the earliest installations of electrical generation. Before central stations distributed power, industries generating their own power used exhaust steam for process heating. Large office and apartment buildings, hotels and stores commonly generated their own power and used waste steam for building heat. Because of the economies and high cost of early purchased power, these combined heat and power operations continued for many years after utility electricity became available. Cogeneration is still common in pulp and paper mills, refineries and chemical plants.
In the United States, Con Edison distributes 66 billion kilograms of 350 °F/180 °C steam each year through its seven cogeneration plants to 100,000 buildings in Manhattan—the biggest steam district in the United States. The peak delivery is 10 million pounds per hour (corresponding to approx. 2.5 GW).
By-product heat at moderate temperatures (212-356°F/100-180°C) can also be used in absorption chillers for cooling. A plant producing electricity, heat and cold is sometimes called trigeneration[7] or more generally polygeneration plant. Cogeneration is a thermodynamically efficient use of fuel. In separate production of electricity, some energy must be rejected as waste heat, but in cogeneration this thermal energy is put to good use.
Thermal power plants
Thermal power plants (including those that use fissile elements or burn coal, petroleum, or natural gas), and heat engines in general, do not convert all of their thermal energy into electricity. In most heat engines, a bit more than half is lost as excess heat. By capturing the excess heat, CHP uses heat that would be wasted in a conventional power plant, potentially reaching an efficiency of up to 80%,[8] for the best conventional plants. This means that less fuel needs to be consumed to produce the same amount of useful energy.
Steam turbines for cogeneration are designed for extraction of steam at lower pressures after it has passed through a number of turbine stages, or they may be designed for final exhaust at back pressure (non-condensing), or both.[9] A typical power generation turbine in a paper mill may have extraction pressures of 160 psig (1.103 MPa) and 60 psig (0.41 MPa). A typical back pressure may be 60 psig (0.41 MPa). In practice these pressures are custom designed for each facility. The extracted or exhaust steam is used for process heating, such as drying paper, evaporation, heat for chemical reactions or distillation. Steam at ordinary process heating conditions still has a considerable amount of enthalpy that could be used for power generation, so cogeneration has lost opportunity cost. Conversely, simply generating steam at process pressure instead of high enough pressure to generate power at the top end also has lost opportunity cost.
Some tri-cycle plants have used a combined cycle in which several thermodynamic cycles produced electricity, then a heating system was used as a condenser of the power plant’s bottoming cycle. For example, the RU-25 MHD generator in Moscow heated a boiler for a conventional steam powerplant, whose condensate was then used for space heat. A more modern system might use a gas turbine powered by natural gas, whose exhaust powers a steam plant, whose condensate provides heat. Tri-cycle plants can have thermal efficiencies above 80%.
The viability of CHP (sometimes termed utilisation factor), especially in smaller CHP installations, depends on a good baseload of operation, both in terms of an on-site (or near site) electrical demand and heat demand. In practice, an exact match between the heat and electricity needs rarely exists. A CHP plant can either meet the need for heat (heat driven operation) or be run as a power plant with some use of its waste heat, the latter being less advantageous in terms of its utilisation factor and thus its overall efficiency. The viability can be greatly increased where opportunities for Trigeneration exist. In such cases, the heat from the CHP plant is also used as a primary energy source to deliver cooling by means of an absorption chiller.
CHP is most efficient when heat can be used on-site or very close to it. Overall efficiency is reduced when the heat must be transported over longer distances. This requires heavily insulated pipes, which are expensive and inefficient; whereas electricity can be transmitted along a comparatively simple wire, and over much longer distances for the same energy loss.
A car engine becomes a CHP plant in winter when the reject heat is useful for warming the interior of the vehicle. The example illustrates the point that deployment of CHP depends on heat uses in the vicinity of the heat engine.
Cogeneration plants are commonly found in district heating systems of cities, hospitals, prisons, oil refineries, paper mills, wastewater treatment plants, thermal enhanced oil recovery wells and industrial plants with large heating needs.