Small and nontraditional power engineering in Russia

Small and nontraditional power engineering in Russia

Small and nontraditional power engineering are of great importance for power supply of Russia. They allow to generate about 5% of electricity and more than 25% of heat in the country.

The small power engineering plays a considerable role in heat supply of population and industrial enterprises, but creates the increased load on environment in cities and settlements of Russia. It is determined by the fact that more than 25% of total fuel consumed for heat generation and 12% (22 bn. m3) of natural gas are burned in the boilers with small power. The low chimneys that don't provide the necessary diffusion of flue gases are installed at small boilers, the modern automatic control for the optimal regime of fuel combustion is absent, and the installations for cleaning flue gases are practically not used. In this case the efficiency of boiler operation at the object of small power engineering (the total number of boilers with a unit capacity 3 Gcal/h exceeds 100,000) is lower than the designed one on the average by 20%, while the specific consumption of fuel for such plants is by 40-50 kg/Gcal more than for thermoelectric power plants and large boilers.

The economically based resources of nontraditional and renewable energy sources (RES) on Russia is estimated as 20-300 mn. t of equivalent fuel (tef) including: small HPS - 65 mn. tef; geothermal sources - 100-120 mn. tef; wind - 10-20 mn. tef and solar sources - 12-15 mn. tef.

Application of RES substitutes the consumption of organic fuel that allows:

• to improve the environment,
• to reduce the greenhouse gas emission approximately by 500 mn. t of CO2 a year,
• to use in optimum the fuel resources.

But it creates the difficulties appearing due to the nonregularity of RES coming, the small concentration and the problems of storage.

The analysis of modern status and prospects for development of the objects of small and nontraditional power engineering allows for formulate a series of priority directions providing the increase of their ecological and economic indicators. They include in the area of traditional power engineering:

• Application of automated boilers of block-modular type (container, movable) working with gas fuel.
• Implementation of modern technologies of combustion of local types of solid fuel. For example, the combustion of coals in the circulating fluidized bed furnace allows to reduce substantially the sulfur and nitrogen oxides and solid particle emissions with the sufficiently high economic indicators of small power plants operation.
• Application of modular gas turbine power plants with power from 200 kW to 25000 kW. The new generation of power plants has high efficiency, good life testing, reliability, modern level of automation, convenience of maintenance, ecological indicators and efficient utilization of flue gas heat. At the present time the methods of combustion are developed and the constructions of low-toxic combustion chambers are created The allow to obtain the low concentrations of nitrogen oxides (no more than 20-50 mg/m3) for the operating regimes of gas turbine plant with minimum unburned carbon and CO emission with variable regime. With combustion of liquid fuel the injection of water is necessary in the zone of combustion for receiving the low concentrations of Nox.