The owner of this plant is a large agricultural and touristic structure located in a small town in the venetian countryside near Padua, which has installed a system to take advantage of the waste biomass (mainly pruning residues) created in the course of its activities.
Said biomass is reduced into chips and fed to a 1.6-MW movable grate boiler, built by Ahena Boilers. Most of the heat generated by its combustion is then fed, through two overheated water loops, to the couple of ZE-100-LT ORC modules at the heart of this plant, while a lesser part is used for heating and sanitary water production.
The two ORC modules used in this installation and mounted on self-supporting frames (skids) containing turbogenerators, heat exchangers an control systems, are in indoor configuration and hosted inside a specific building. The ORC modules operate in parallel and output a total of 200 kWe to the grid, thus giving a significant contribution to the structure’s overall energy balance and sustainability. Cooling for the condensation stage of the ORCs is carried out by an evaporative cooling tower placed outside the building.
The fuel used (pruning residues) is an environmentally-compatible, renewable resource made more competitive by state and regional incentives. It has zero CO2 impact, as its combustion just releases the same CO2 that was sequestered by the plants during their growth.
