The wood chip fired heating plant in Moheda is now being upgraded to a combined heat and power plant. Alvesta Energi AB has ordered a new type of small-scale steam turbine (ORC turbine) for electricity production from the existing hot water boiler on the heating plant.
”We have chosen this as our first step in creating local, small-scale and renewable electricity”, ”says Mats Karlsson, CEO of Alvesta Energi. ”We do this with the help of an ORC turbine unit connected to our hot water boiler and we expect to produce half our own annual electricity demand at the heating plant in Moheda. The simplicity of the ORC unit and minimal rebuilding of the existing facility are the major advantages.”
During the summer of 2019, the turbine will be installed at the heating plant in Moheda. The technology is based on Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) that extracts electricity from the low-temperature hot water from the wood chip boiler.
The ORC turbine will have an output of 49.9 kW electricity, which
corresponds to 140 single-family homes with solar PV cells. On an annual basis,
approximately 170 MWh of electricity will be produced at
the plant. The installation on the heating plant consists of piping from the
boiler circuit, piping from the district heating circuit and connection of the
electric cable.
Thanks to minimal maintenance and the low cost of the turbine the installation is profitable despite the relatively low electricity prices in Swedish market. The ORC turbine becomes the number nine turbine in Sweden that the Norrköping based company Againity installs, where the majority of the turbines are connected to biomass fuelled hot water boilers.
