Comment 52667

By mrjanitor (registered) | Posted December 04, 2010 at 20:39:19

District heating is very common in downtown Toronto, there is an extensive network of pipes feeding superheated steam to buildings for heating which then return the condensate to the central boiler plant. There is also a newly commissioned plant using Lake Ontario as a heat sink for both heating and cooling systems. I think most Hamiltonians are aware of the co-gen plant providing electricity and district heating/cooling that is beside Sir John A. MacDonald school.

Bob, I honestly think solar is a better option than a small home sized co-gen plant, the economy of scale required is just not there. You can buy natural gas fired generators that are installed permanently to your home gas and electric system. The unit detects the power failure and kicks the generator in automatically, I've seen them for sale at Rona and Home Depot for somewhere around $5000 (I think). There are compression engines (diesels) designed to run NG without liquid fuel, however I have only worked with engines that have about a 5/95 percent diesel/NG ratio (the ratios can be adjusted up or down as needed).

There are plans to run steam turbine driven 60 cycle power generators at my employer US Steel. We used to produce 25 cycle power which has long been obsolete. This project would create reliable electricity for the steel mill instead of pulling from the grid and almost eliminate any need of the coke gas (bright yellow flame) and blast gas (faint blue flame) flaring due to increased steam load. We try to burn the production gases for steam as much as possible but the amount created exceeds our ability to use it due to lower steam loads and limitations on some of our boilers. About $600,000 has been allocated on the engineering for this alone.

I am the love child of Karl Marx and Ayn Rand

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