The client who commissioned this plant is one of the largest Italian multiutility companies. It is a fully public company, owned by a consortium whose shareholders are fifty-odd municipalities of the Veneto region, and its core business is to supply environmental services, water and power to its shareholding municipalities.
In its managerial and operational center two biomass-fueled boilers generate a total thermal power around 1,3 MWT used for heating and sanitary uses as well as for power generation through two Turbec hot-air turbines which can produce up to 160 kWE.
The supplied system – a standard ZE-50-ULH Low Temperature Organic Rankine Cycle module – adds a further 50 kWE to the overall grid output of the aforementioned system, raising the total power output to 210 kWE and increasing overall power output by 30% with respect to the “naked” system.
The versatility of our ORC modules made it possible to run the system in mixed mode : during pitch times, when the hot-air turbines are operating, it runs on waste heat recovered from the turbines, while when the turbines are offline it runs directly on heat produced by the biomass-fed boilers and fed to it by the automated control system. The compactness of this standard skid-mounted ORC system allowed its installation in a technical space (a steel-grating mezzanine) within the same building which hosts boilers and turbines
All produced electric power goes into the national distribution grid and contributes to make the complex entirely self-sufficient from the energy standpoint together with a photovoltaic array. Residual thermal energy is also used to heat – through a small district-heating network – the different buildings which make up the managerial complex
The boilers are fueled by wood chips obtained from forest cleaning and mowing. As all biomass-fueled systems, this plant is CO2-neutral, as the CO2 released by combustion is equivalent to that captured by the plants during their growth.
