Emerson's New Technologies Help Convert Low-cost Waste Into Renewable Energy More Efficiently - With Lower Carbon Emissions
July 06, 2010
New offering helps create renewable energy, reduce greenhouse gas emissions
Emerson’s technology and plant automation and control solutions are helping customers convert biomass or waste fuel – whether waste gases from a petroleum refinery, hydrogen from a chemical plant, biogas from potato waste at a french fry plant, or wood waste from a pulp mill – into steam and electrical power.
“Biomass-to-energy conversion is the fastest-growing segment of the energy business,” said Steve Sonnenberg, president of Emerson Process Management. “Faced with high energy costs and environmental goals, our customers recognize they can retrofit decades-old plants to convert their own waste streams into environmentally friendly and low-cost sources of power, which is a plus to both the environment and their bottom line.”
Emerson’s new combustion optimization technology uses Model Predictive Control (MPC) and other algorithms to determine the heat release of biomass and waste fuels. With this capability, the combustion can be optimized to the highest potential efficiency and the waste fuel can be maximized to minimize the cost of energy and reduce emissions. This provides the most affordable and environmentally friendly operation available in the industrial energy market.
“With this technology, many of our customers are operating on renewable energy up to 95 percent of the time,” Sonnenberg said.
Emerson’s energy solution includes biomass and waste fuel combustion optimization technology that provides automatic, real-time process adjustments based on changing quality and availability of alternative fuels, costs of alternate and fossil fuels, emissions, and process constraints. Emerson also provides energy monitoring and controls to spot unusual energy usage, identify opportunities to improve energy efficiency, and manage operations based on real-time energy costs.
Emerson also leverages its wireless measurement technologies in its energy management programs to reduce the installed cost of monitoring instruments and to allow more measurements in tougher places. In fact, wireless measurements are being installed at approximately a third of the cost of traditional hardwired implementations.