Commercial (and light industrial) are seen as potential growth markets for CHP in the U.S. The U.S. Department of Energy and developers have both invested in technology improvements for these applications, focusing on increasing efficiency, incorporating new thermally activated technologies to provide both heating and cooling services, and integrating components and controls into cost effective packages. Close to 40% of existing CHP is used in a wide variety of other commercial applications including hotels, schools, multi-family buildings, office buildings greater than 100,000 square feet in size, laundries, country clubs, health clubs, nursing homes, and other commercial facilities that use CHP to provide heating, cooling and power.
Hotels, Resorts & Casinos
Hotels and casinos have a number of characteristics that make them good targets for installing combined heat and power (CHP) systems and rooftop solar. The facilities generally have many open spaces and rooftops and operate around the clock year-round; a portion of the industry has significant thermal and electric loads even at night: they have significant air conditioning requirements that could be met with thermally activated technologies running off the waste heat of an on-site generator; and there are establishments in every state in the U.S.
Thermal energy generated by the CHP can be utilized to provide space heat, domestic hot water, can be used to heat pools, and to serve chillers for cooling applications. It significantly reduces the need to use existing boilers, especially during summer seasons. Further the hotel’s carbon footprint and CO2 emissions are considerably reduced. Electricity is generated at much lower cost, and demand charges are often completely eliminated.
Data Centers & Cold Storage
With the ongoing digitization of business processes resulting in the creation of more data than ever, it will come as no surprise that data centers consume enormous amounts of energy. Data centers use a tremendous amount of power. Estimates of the power consumed by data centers in the U.S. range between 1.5 and 2 percent of the nation’s total electricity consumption. In Europe, data centers’ electricity usage is expected to reach 104 TWh by 2020. Globally, the data center sector consumes around 2 percent of the world’s primary electricity supply, according to a recent report.
Much of this power—up to 50 percent in some cases—is used for continuous cooling. In addition to environmental concerns, the need for power and cooling 24/7 makes data centers an excellent potential market for combined heat and power (CHP) applications around the world. However, CHP uptake in the sector has been slow. Data center operators are considered late adopters compared to other commercial users.
While the cooling ability of CHP in other facilities, such as hotels, is often secondary, a data center’s primary use for thermal energy is for cooling. Data centers do not need much heating because almost all energy used in a data center in the form of electricity is then converted in processors, computers and data racks to heat. A conventional data center is grid-connected. Approximately 25-35 percent of a data center’s electric needs are for cooling, which is provided by electric chillers or compression refrigeration systems. A CHP installation at a data center uses an absorption chiller to produce cold water from the engine cooling water and exhaust heat, with the chilled water running through the facility in pipes.
Breweries
CHP or cogeneration has significant potential in the brewery industry, Electricity and heat recovered from a gas engine can be deployed at high efficiency for useful onsite use. This gives the ability to reduce operational costs and to reduce carbon emissions. Converting the heat into cooling via absorption chillers is called combined cooling heat and power (CCHP) or tri-generation and can be deployed to support the cooling requirements of the brewery.”
The processing steps of wort boiling and bottle washing require more than half of the thermal energy needed in breweries. Electricity is used for refrigerating purposes in storage and fermentation. Because the temperatures of CHP thermal discharges range from 113°F to about 356°F (exhaust gas), large potential arises from low-temperature heat consumers, such as bottle washing, which is done at a temperature around 194°F, and filtration. Two main criteria positively affect the efficiency of CHP facilities in breweries: A larger number of low-temperature processes and a constant heating and/or cooling demand.
The brewing process comprises three major processing stages, namely the brew house, storage and fermentation, and bottling. The processing steps within these stages require energy in the form of electricity, heating, or cooling. Although not every brewery requires sufficient heat to operate a CHP facility for their production, CHP also can be financially beneficial for smaller companies such as craft breweries.