How You Can Benefit From a PCEAC CHP Feasibility Study

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Pacific Region Clean Energy Application Center (PCEAC) offers a variety of services to promote Combined Heat and Power (CHP), district energy, and waste heat-to-power in its service territories of California, Nevada, and Hawaii. The center is co-located at UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, San Diego State University (SDSU), and San Francisco State University (SFSU). A key service offered by the PCEAC is an effort to assess the feasibility of CHP for particular sites. These "site assessment" studies are conducted by faculty, staff, and students of the Industrial Assessment Centers (IACs) at SDSU (http://iac.sdsu.edu) led by Prof. Asfaw Beyene (619-594-7143; http://beyene.sdsu.edu) and SFSU (http://engineering.sfsu.edu/centers_of_excellence), led by Prof. Ahmad Ganji (415-338-7736; http://engineering.sfsu.edu).

Since their establishment in 1991, the SDSU and SFSU IACs have audited over 800 manufacturing and other commercial plants throughout California with estimated total cost savings of tens of millions of dollars, and with recommendations that typically average less than two years in simple payback time. The IACs have to-date targeted small- and medium-sized manufacturing plants to help them improve efficiency and more effectively compete in the national and global marketplace. The operational goals of the SDSU and SFSU IACs are to provide both on-site and follow-up services in a timely and thorough manner that reflects their academic mission. Nationally, the IAC program has established a record of quality service that has cost-effectively improved national energy efficiency, with now over 14,000 site assessments conducted (http://www.iac.rutgers.edu/database/index.php).

Through the current PCEAC effort sponsored by DOE, these CHP and district energy feasibility assessments are now being offered to select commercial sector customers as well as industrial customers. The feasibility study has three distinct phases:

1. Pre-audit data collection: initial data onsite thermal loads, primarily utility bills for 12 consecutive months, a list of major equipment, etc.
2. A site visit by SDSU or SFSU engineers and staff for projects that pass qualification screening.
3. Written report with detailed recommendations and also information regarding incentives and regulatory issues.

Despite the great opportunities emanating from the use of available waste heat from onsite power generation or other processes, and in spite of the fact that CHP enjoys some level of support through State incentives, its implementation has been slow even for cases where the savings are large and the payback is short. According to the DOE, by 2010, in the U.S. had an estimated 82 GW of installed CHP capacity, about five percent of the total national electricity generation capacity. This is much lower than that of Europe, that has nine percent CHP, and Denmark at 40 percent. There is broad consensus that increasing the amount of CHP further can help to meet both environmental and economic goals. The PCEAC is pleased to be part of this mission.

Please visit the PCEAC website and/or contact SDSU or SFSU directly if you are interested in learning more about this site assessment service.