Mini power plants: making a big difference

Miniature power plants, scattered throughout the City of Sydney will help to reduce greenhouse emissions by 70% for the local government area. Ben Cubby’s article, ‘Sydney to go it alone as power producer’ reviews the plan, and has made the front page of The Sydney Morning Herald.

The new power plants will initially be powered by gas, but have the potential to utilise forms of biogas. The SMH article explains:

Sydney will become the first Australian city to start weaning itself off coal-fired electricity, with the business district and much of the inner city preparing to switch to small, gas-driven power plants in the next 20 years.

The City of Sydney master plan, to be published today by the Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, will identify 15 “low carbon zones” based on trigeneration plants that create electricity and also generate heat and cold for airconditioning.

The switch could save up to $1.5 billion in state government spending on new infrastructure for bringing power from coal-fired plants, a report commissioned by the council said.

This innovative plan is part of the City of Sydney’s aim to make the city centre carbon neutral by 2050.

The full article can be read on the front page of The Sydney Morning Herald. It is also available online here.

The plan is further explained in ‘People try to put him down, but he’s just talkin’ about trigeneration’, also published in The Sydney Morning Herald today. The article by Nicky Phillips, explains how the City of Sydney could utilise Sydney’s industrial past. Unlike our “primitive past”, however, this new plan would not sacrifice health and the environment for growth and development. Phillips writes:

Allan Jones is the man Sydney council has hired to turn its Sustainable Sydney plans, under which the city would produce 100 per cent of its energy locally within 20 years, into reality.

”Doing a Woking” is how people in the industry describe Jones’s task, a reference to the small city in Surrey, England, that he took off the grid to produce 98 per cent of its own electricity.

As in that town, Jones wants to install a series of trigeneration plants throughout Sydney, which would produce 360 megawatts of power combined that would not only be greener but also cheaper than electricity from coal-fired power stations.

Trigen’s main draw card is efficiency. Using generators slightly bigger than a car motor, a trigen plant can simultaneously produce power, heat and cooling from a single fuel source – thus the name.

The article goes on to describe the various ways this plan would save power:

Coal-fired power stations, which supply most of Sydney’s electricity, lose up to two-thirds of the energy that goes into making electricity as heat, he says. In trigen this heat is not wasted. Instead it is captured and used to warm buildings or sent through a device called an absorption chiller to form cold water that can be used in air-conditioning, which accounts for about 60 per cent of the city’s present energy consumption.

Unlike coal-fired power stations, which are located outside big cities to be close to cheap and plentiful coal sources, trigen plants are placed within the city, often in building basements. They can supply heat, cooling and power to a single dwelling or group of buildings, called precincts.

With the electricity having to travel a shorter distance from the source to the end user, energy usually lost through transmission wires is also conserved.

The full article can be found here.