DISTRICT HEATING INDUSTRY NEWS
More energy from the existing S
By Andreas Liedberg, Marketing Manager, Valmet Power AB
wedish power company Mölndal Energi serves 95,000 customers in the city of Mölndal, whose
name it bears. The company’s goals are to be of good service to society, efficiently satisfy the needs of its customers and minimise the burden on the environment. Production in its new biomass-fired boiler has been greatly improved since it was supplied by Valmet in 2009. Valmet has helped with advice, studies and equipment upgrades, but the main driver behind the achievement is the philosophy of always trying to improve. This moves the limits of what’s possible.
Three-part strategy Christian Schwartz, CEO at Mölndal Energi, which is owned by the town, explained that the company strategy is focused on
getting more from the existing equipment. “The three parts of our strategy are increased capacity, better availability and a longer operating season. What we’ve done around our new boiler is a good illustration of this. We bought it from Valmet and started it as planned in January, 2009. During the project, I was often asked what our capacity would be and I always answered that I knew what the contract said, but that I would know what we would have in our yard only after the performance tests.
“We realised that we should increase our capacity, so after the warranty period, we turned to Valmet for advice. We got good help and today we can run the boiler at 80 MWth, instead of the 70MWth that we had in
the contract. That’s 15% more production every hour we run at maximum capacity. I always say that there might be another MW or so in there, so let’s see what happens next.”
Part two of Mölndal’s strategy is plant availability. This indicates how much of the planned operating time the plant actually spends producing. “During our first operating season, we had 98.4% availability. This was a good start, but we have been able to improve on that. Last year, we only had one outage of about one and a half hours. This gave us 99.96% – now that’s a very good number!”
Increasing the length of the operating season is a challenge
because this is controlled by the weather. “On warm days, the output from the turbine is lower, which means that we have to lower the load on the boiler. The boiler performance at low loads
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