Over the past 10 years the Biomass Power industry has been overlooked, ridiculed and lumped in with gas and oil as a source of green house gases.
Incentives went to the wind and solar producers and biomass was left as the orphan stuck somewhere between the Green Energy market and the petrochemical industry.
With the downturn in the oil and gas industry many of these facilities have been shut down due to the inability to compete. Others are hanging on due to long term purchase agreements or supplies of low cost high quality fuels.
The effort of continuous improvement is everyone’s’ job. The communications and understanding of where the challenges are and how they impact everyone is critical if a facility is to compete. As time goes on the subtly of these issues should become greater. Meaning that they are harder to recognize and hopefully fewer. Larger issues should be corrected either through upgrades or work a round. If work a round exist then the limits should also be made clear to everyone. A mechanical limit is a limit end of story if you are up against it then that is as far as you can expect anyone to achieve.
How to develop and track key performance indicators, to quantify how you are doing on an hourly, daily or monthly basis is a challenge. This may seen very straight forward but is it really?
Most facilities track the tons of fuel per MWh of production. Typically in green tons per hour vs megawatts generated. What is the moisture content? How is that measured and verified? What about quality and species of the fuel? Is that tracked or quantified in some method? What impact can be expected by purchasing a lower quality fuel vs production?
The challenges are not always obvious. Often a symptom is mistaken for the issue.
A simple case in point is the challenge of fuel quality.
Often quality correlates directly to the number of feed issues that are experienced. Poor quality may require substantially greater fuel flows to sustain production, greater fuel flow may impact fuel feed consistency dependent upon the fuel handling system arrangement. Is there truly a savings if using a lower cost lower quality fuel your production is impacted? Is the fuel being used to its full potential or are large quantities of carbon being passed through the unit unburnt. This I always count as a double hit, the fuel has consumed all the energy required to prepare it for burning but has not returned that energy and has just passed through as an energy sync instead of a source. Fuel quality and consistency can often only determined once it has been fired and the results are recorded. But how much carbon was lost? What was the efficiency of the furnace? How many feed issues did the crew have to deal with on a daily basis?
Is the quality issue truly a quality issue or another system attribute that makes it appear that the quality is an issue?
Is the fuel being underutilized and not getting the maximum energy release and capture through the firing process?
Is the mode of operation creating a greater amount of wear on equipment than necessary?
The challenge of running these plants effectively and efficiently are many. These are only the tip of the iceberg so to speak. The frequency of issues, the overall impact and how to best deal with them on the short and long term can all be tracked, corrected and moved to be a historical incident rather than a current irritant.
Identifying issue areas and their impact is just a start.
We are available to help move you along that path of improvement. The recognition and mitigation of variance in feedstocks through our established techniques and methodology will create a maximized output from your process.