A Manhattan police precinct building has left the utility grid and installed fuel cells that supply all its power needs. Macdonalds has installed microturbines at several of its fast-food outlets, tiny gas turbines capable of generating 40-100 KW, sufficient power for each outlet’s requirements.
Both are part of the trend toward distributed generation, a trend sparked by deregulation and fueled by economics, technological advance and a desire for energy self-sufficiency. Defined as electrical power generation in close proximity to the end user, distributed generation has the potential to explode into everyday life much like personal computers and cellular phones. Some market projections indicate growth in the U.S. alone to 25,000-30,000 MW by the year 2015.
On-site industrial energy development
For large energy users, like steel, textile or paper mills, economics is the driving force behind distributed generation, and cogeneration is often the ideal solution: a dedicated on-site power plant that satisfies both thermal and electrical load needs, perhaps even supplying excess power that may be sold to the local utility. Strategic investments in energy like this assist manufacturers to retain their competitiveness in the global marketplace.
a waste treatement pump station
While large users want to lower the high costs of energy during peak times; energy providers want to decrease demand at the same time. So they are developing programs in which customers run on-site generators and use that electricity to ease the burden of the energy provider. In turn, the customer saves money by avoiding peak energy charges.
Increasing the output or addition of on-site generation, and operating sometimes as little as 50 to 200 hours per year can earn customers annual incentives from the energy provider worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Meanwhile the generation and transmission systems meet the facility demand without large capital investments to upgrade or buy equipment.
Third-party development of energy facilities
Large industrial users and utilities are just two of the players in today’s distributed generation market. Deregulation has opened up the field. The economics of larger projects with fast-track timeframes are attracting energy development teams--consortiums of engineers, builders, equipment manufacturers and energy companies--working together on greenfield power projects.
campus heating plant
But unlike traditional design-build ventures, these teams have stakes in the success of the project beyond the EPC stage. They’re inking deals not only to build but also to manage added generation on-site at manufacturing facilities. This new source of steam turbine generator energy enables plants to shut down existing boilers, improving environmental performance and lowering operations and maintenance costs, while providing "base load" to the energy provider.
Deregulation of power generation and distribution is an international trend. The developers, vendors and engineering firms who attend the annual Power-Gen International Conference in New Orleans come from North and South America and Europe. Large utility grids, with their attendant bottlenecks and brownouts, may soon be history.
