FEATURE ENERGY MANAGEMENT
Why businesses should consider generating
their own electricity If I said you could use £12 worth of electricity and only pay £6.50 for it, you would think it sounded too good to be true. However, businesses that choose to generate their own electricity through combined heat and power (CHP) do just that. Here Luke Worrall, business development manager at heat and power solutions specialist NerG, discusses the benefits of CHP and explains why businesses should change their approach to installing the systems.
N
ewsflash — businesses like saving money. And yet, too often when
businesses implement combined heat and power (CHP) solutions to supply cheaper electricity, systems are incorrectly sized and therefore they don’t reap the full benefits of the technology. CHP systems take one input, namely natural gas, and turn it into two outputs — electricity and heat. The primary purpose of CHPs is to
generate electricity as efficiently as possible. The heat is a secondary output and, in an ideal world, most of this will be used in other applications to maximise efficiency. However, it is often the case that systems are implemented to match the heat base load for the building, not the electricity base load, which means the full financial benefits are not realised.
CHANGING STRATEGY The key to success is choosing the correct sized unit. When CHP systems are supplied to meet the heat base load, it leads to the system being incapable of fulfilling a facility’s electricity demands because it is too small. This means it still needs to take significant levels of electricity from the grid to supplement that supplied by the CHP system. See the heat produced by CHP for
what it is, an added benefit of the system, not its main purpose. Instead, CHP systems should be supplied to match the facility’s full electricity profile. Only systems that are designed to offset as much grid electricity as possible reap the biggest financial rewards.
36 SPRING 2021 | INDUSTRIAL COMPLIANCE / INDUSTRIALCOMPLIANCE Innovative heat and power solution
specialists can put the extra heat output from the larger system to use across several applications depending on the facility in question. This can include anything from the pre-heating of raw materials before they are processed to providing cooling through absorption chilling. Electricity usage profiles can be
obtained by analysing half hour meter data which is easily obtained from your electricity supplier. Once demand profiles are established, it is a straightforward process to calculate
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