Siemens Energy Case Study – Climate-Friendly Process Steam Supply - PITCCH

The challenger

Siemens Energy is one of the world’s leading energy technology companies. The company works with its customers and partners on energy systems for the future, thus supporting the transition to a more sustainable world.

With its portfolio of products, solutions and services, Siemens Energy covers almost the entire energy value chain – from power generation and transmission to storage. The portfolio includes conventional and renewable energy technology, such as gas and steam turbines, hybrid power plants operated with hydrogen, and power generators and transformers. More than 50 percent of the portfolio has already been decarbonized.

An estimated one-sixth of the electricity generated worldwide is based on technologies from Siemens Energy.

Challenge

Siemens Energy launched the challenge “Climate-Friendly Process Steam Supply”.

Siemens Energy manufactures highly efficient steam turbines. Their turbines are part of many industrial power plants. The required steam is already partly provided by climate-friendly energy supplies such as concentrated solar power or biomass, but fossil fuel-fired too. To change this, they were looking for innovative technologies, that could provide climate-friendly process steam.

Solution Provider

ENERGINEERING LTD is an energy system technology R&D company that serves industrial plants and large organizations by designing and delivering feasible, end-to-end, innovative technology implementations that achieve sustainability goals through proven energy efficiency techniques.

The impact achieved by the ENERGINEERING approach poses reductions of energy costs, required for heat driven industrial processes or air conditioning needs of large buildings, while achieving intense decarbonisation and attracting third party investors.

Solution Proposed

Energineering and Siemens Energy teams agreed that the scope of the project should remain focused on the waste sludge/biomass destruction technology that produces positive useful heat output in the form of high pressure (~20bar/210ºC) green process heat steam. The teams have identified specifications and technical requirements of two such use cases, collecting relevant data that were used for the technical, feasibility and financing model analyses.

Regarding the Görlitz turbine testing centre, it was agreed that, due to the complexity and size of the project, it was preferable to assess the proposed technology separately in a focused R&D project. For this reason, grant-funding sources have been assessed and pursued. The scope of this project is the use of composite Phase Change Material – thermal storage to condense and store the output thermal storage after the turbine (eliminating the need for the evaporative cooling – condenser) combined with the use of a very high temperature heat-pump (VHTHP) to produce real-time Green Process Steam. The impact of this approach eliminates the need for the fuel-combustion-based steam generator, fossil fuel consumption and consequent carbon emissions.

Based on ENERGINEERING’s patent pending very high temperature heat pumping (VHTHP) technology and their agreement with the company that has developed the patented biomass/sludge destruction technology, a simplified calculation tool has been developed based on subcomponent manufacturers’ guaranteed performance specifications. The tool was used to estimate the processor’s mass and energy flows, which are dependent on the type/content of the input biomass/sludge flow.

Conclusions

Both companies, Siemens Energy and Energineering, have exchanged significant information, data, scenarios, and have progressed the collaboration towards the development of a combined technology for destruction of waste biomass/sludge and the carbon free production of green process steam that can be offered to Siemens Energy B2B industrial plants’ clientele.

A report of use case technical analyses and mock-feasibility analysis is ready to be shared with the use case plant managers, so they can assess the scope and share a second round of plant data in order to update the Investor Confidence Project (ICP) development maturity and ask for certification and third-party investor feedback on financing of the technology implementation at large scale.