Would you rather be spending less to pay your energy bills and more to improve your business?
Are you concerned about the impact of a power outage on your facility?
If so, take the “Combined Heat and Power (CHP)”quiz!
- Do you pay more than $.06/kWh on average for electricity?
- Are you concerned about the impact of current or future energy costs on your business?
- Are you concerned about power reliability? Is there a substantial financial impact to your business if the power goes out for 1 hour? For 5 minutes?
- Does your facility operate for more than 3,000 hours per year?
- Do you have thermal loads throughout the year (including steam, hot water, chilled water, hot air, etc.)?
- Does your facility have an existing central plant producing steam, hot water or chilled water?
- Do you expect to replace, upgrade, or retrofit central plant equipment within the next 3-5 years?
- Do you anticipate a facility expansion or new construction project within the next 3-5 years?
- Have you already implemented energy efficiency measures and still have high energy costs?
- Are you interested in reducing your facility's impact on the environment?
- Do you have access to on-site or nearby biomass or waste heat resources (i.e. landfill gas, farm manure, food processing waste, excess industrial heat, etc.)?
If you answer "yes" to three or more of these questions, your facility may be a good candidate for CHP! The U.S. DOE Midwest CHP Technical Assistance Partnership offers technical assistance to evaluate your site for CHP feasibility. http://www.midwestchptap.org/support/documents/CHP_TAP_Technical_Assistance_Offerings.pdf
Combined heat and power (CHP) is an efficient and clean approach to generating electric power and useful thermal energy from a single fuel source. CHP places power production at or near the end-user’s site so that the heat released from power production can be used to meet the user’s thermal requirements while the power generated meets all or a portion of the site electricity needs. Applications with steady demand for electricity and thermal energy are potentially good economic targets for CHP deployment. Industrial applications particularly in industries with continuous processing and high steam requirements are very economic and represent a large share of existing CHP capacity today. Commercial applications such as hospitals, nursing homes, laundries, and hotels with large hot water needs are well suited for CHP. Institutional applications such as colleges and schools, prisons, and residential and recreational facilities are also excellent prospects for CHP.[1]
For more information on CHP click here