4 December 2008

Trigeneration at the airport

| johnboy
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The Federale Minister for Resources and Energy, Martin Ferguson, has pushed out a media release congratulating Canberra Airport Group for a ground breaking environmental initiative at the Majura Office Park.

    Minister Ferguson said: “This trigeneration plant sets new standards for buildings and infrastructure showing that increasing energy efficiency can provide significant savings for business.

    “Success here at the Majura Office Park will demonstrate the potential for this technology to be rolled out more widely. The Canberra Airport Group is leading the way in energy efficiency technology and is setting an example for other businesses to follow.”

    Trigeneration uses the waste heat from electricity production to heat and cool buildings, improving energy efficiency and reducing greenhouse gas emissions compared with traditional systems.

    Using state of the art absorption chillers, trigeneration plants also have the potential to produce a power surplus which can be sold back into the grid.

If it works, and they can make power while cooling the building it’s a huge breakthrough.

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It’s interesting what they can do. Years ago, a member of our ski club had us all frowing over our chateau cardboard one saturday night, as he tried to explain what his company did. They set up heating/cooling systems for houses, using stuff like water in dams, or heat in the ground, or something.

the systems would heat and cool, but when they were designed, they’d have an in-built bias to the thing that was more important to the owner.. they’d be better at heating, or cooling.

It was based on thermal exchange or something, and involved lots of black irrigation pipe. The bloke explained it several times, and as you can see from the above, I never understood it. But apparently it was viable and the only costs were in the setting up.

Power is about to get a lot more expensive (I got a weird rambling letter about it from country energy a while back), so exploring alternatives is important.

trigeneration is explained well here – it has worked for a large UK town and is being seriously considered to re-jig london’s whole energy use:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/from-hot-air-to-usable-heat/2008/07/21/1216492347746.html

be fantastic if canberra can start – i wrote to CM imploring him to mandate this into any new power station (data centre) in act…

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