OT We have a long way to go

Last week I was working in one the the bigger steel mills in the US, while I was doing my job (installing new types of position transducer on a rolling mill) I couldn't help but think what a Terrible waste of energy these plants are. Just this one rolling mill which run around the clock uses 3000ton hydraulic cylinders (two per stand) and 5000Amp motors (two per stand) to reduce the thickness of coils of steel, each of the five stands reduce about 20% of the needed reduction. So what you have is a coil of steel going in at one end then being coiled up on the other end with a smaller thickness and longer length and this is happening at 2000ft per min. which generates lots of heat (@850deg) which they are just separating out the pollutes then venting outside. It would seem using that heat to generate some of their electrical needs or even heating&cooling of the office spaces would be a no-brainer, but they are not.

Tommy

The company I work for has heat as a by product from its CHP plant. As a result, they grow tomatoes all year round in Europes largest glasshouse!

Aaaah one of my great frustrations. I get pretty frustrated with the American industrial stupidty. As an example the last two outfits I worked for ran 50 HP compressors thru the weekend with the building empty. Could not convince them to turn them off.

Use the energy and dump it we got lots and we can pass the cost on to the consumer. Short term penny wise and long term pound foolish but that is America.

Dan Bentler

markie said:

The company I work for has heat as a by product from its CHP plant. As a result, they grow tomatoes all year round in Europes largest glasshouse!

Click to expand...

Markie,

CHP usually stands for Combined Heat and Power. Are you folks using the waste heat for something else also? Or just the hothouse? Just curious.

A good example

I was in Finland recently. The waste heat of a coal plant power heats surrounding homes. I was told it was it works well until it doesn't. That is a lot of piping to get steam to the surrounding area. What surprised me more is that I was told it was a coal plant and not a natural gas plant. I thought coal plants were dirty. I haven't seen many coal plants since here we have damns, a shut down nuclear plant and a natural gas plant that gets started up every once in a while.

Peter
Those big concrete things in the rivers with all that water are called dams.

Buddies who still worked at Trojan said the favorite thing to do was go skinny dipping in the reservoir at the bottom of the cooling tower. That was before the decommission of course.

Dan Bentler

milldrone said:

Markie,

CHP usually stands for Combined Heat and Power. Are you folks using the waste heat for something else also? Or just the hothouse? Just curious.

Click to expand...

The company business is processing sugar beet. As you rightly say, the plant produces heat and power, but waste heat is used to heat the greenhouse. The following link tells all!
http://www.britishsugar.co.uk/RVEffbf81e84b1d4f3daea19a45f2c2b22b,,.aspx

Peter Nachtwey said:

I haven't seen many coal plants since here we have damns...

Click to expand...

It was interesting how fast the environmentalists changed their tune on hydroelectric dams once they declared war on green house gas emissions. Prior to that they were demanding the removal of dams on the Columbia and Colorado, and probably others that I'm not aware of. Now hydroelectric power is green.

Speaking of dams, more OT: I took a few days vacation last week and drove down to Phoenix - crossed Hoover Dam. The arches for the new bypass bridge are nearly complete. Its freaky to see the two massive arch halves hanging out in space a thousand feet above the river supported by nothing but a few cable stays with a 100' gap between them. The cranes and cables are massive, but the sheer size of the arches overwhelms the proportions and makes the cranes and cables look flimsy by comparison.

Anyways... I agree it is dismaying to see the energy wasted in US industry. Compressed air is one of the worst offenders. We recapture heat for the buildings in the winter but there are still opportunities for us. We do indeed have a long way to go.

Looked at the web page. British Sugar sounds like a pretty smart outfit. Taking the dirt from the beets and selling it - like it. Wish American industry was that smart.

Dan Bentler

We have a decent system, in a nut shell...

We have to incinerate our VOC's/pollutants before we dump anything into the atmosphere, this is done to 1400deg f, we have a heat recovery system that takes the 1400 and runs it through two heat exchangers.

The first is a oil heater that heats our process oil to 535f this is the oil that we use in all of our processes and the second is a air to air preheat, this takes the air going into the incinerator and heats it 475f, our output air is normally 700-800 so we are capturing about half of the heat (but the curve really starts to drop after that anyway)

They are both done with a block and by-pass damper system that diverts the air through or around the heaters.

It was built and designed by a German company (NESS) they did a very good job but need to think more about expansion with heat, 1400 tends to make things grow a little... but this is not the problem, its when it cools is when the ah **** happens

http://www.ness.de/GB/NWT/Lieferprogramm/ThermischeNachverbrennung.htm

Here in Wisconsin we have Milorganite.

http://www.milorganite.com/about/history.cfm

I just spent $8.50 per 2500 square feet to put dried, de-activated people feces on my lawn. This has got to be the best recovery plan since someone convinced people bacon is a good idea.

BTW, genius, what was the ROI in the heat recovery system? It seems like a no-brainer. I'm surprised it doesn't come as standard on TO systems.

Keith

Peter Nachtwey said:

I was in Finland recently. The waste heat of a coal plant power heats surrounding homes. I was told it was it works well until it doesn't. That is a lot of piping to get steam to the surrounding area. What surprised me more is that I was told it was a coal plant and not a natural gas plant. I thought coal plants were dirty. I haven't seen many coal plants since here we have damns, a shut down nuclear plant and a natural gas plant that gets started up every once in a while.

Click to expand...

It's pretty normal to use district heating in citys mainly for high-rise buildings but more and more for normal houses too.

Many times the thermalpowerplant is build for thermal energy and the electrical power is jut "byproduct". Shame its both thermal and electrical power that are needed more in winter time. As more u produce other less u can have other.

In place i work we use lot of thermal energy and its big issue to recover as much of it as possible. It's big money in it.

Originally posted by Peter Nachtwey:

The waste heat of a coal plant power heats surrounding homes.

Click to expand...

They actually use waste heat for that? I was discussing this with Pandiani a while back. In his case the home heating is a budgetted energy consumer. They burn extra for the express purpose of heating homes. As I remember he said the efficiency of the power plant is so much higher than anything else they can get their hands on that it makes sense to do it that way.

Keith

kamenges said:

They actually use waste heat for that? I was discussing this with Pandiani a while back.

Click to expand...

Are you saying the local coal plant also generates steam or hot water for home heating? This is all new to me.

Those big concrete things in the rivers with all that water are called dams.

Click to expand...

Well duh, the point I was trying to make is that I didn't know that power came from anywhere else until I was in college and they were just build Trojan. What a flop that was, it bet someone screwed up their boiler chemistry. I din't leave the northwest until I joined the navy. And don't forget WPPS or 'whoops' as it came to be to known.

What is really insane is that our local news was blaming the wind farms along the Columbia river for harming fish. According to the stupid ABC new reporters the wind farms generate too much energy. The dams don't need the water to generate power so they must let it spill. Apparently this hurts the fish more than using the water to generate power.
Go figure. It seems to me that the same amount of water must flow from the dam whether the water is used for power or not. If the water isn't flowed by the dam then the water level will change.

Peter,

I just noticed the change in your location. I feel the same.