Cogeneration on the rise!

by Blandine Pidoux on 22 June 2007 / 1690 visites

COGEN Challenge Achieves an Important Milestone – 500 Cogeneration Units from 19 European Countries Registered

As the 500th cogeneration unit is registered in the on-line database, the COGEN Challenge project team claims that cogeneration in Europe is more reliable and widely applied than previously assumed. The use of small-scale cogeneration in homes, swimming pools and hotels is better accepted than people may think. Policy-makers should therefore be more confident in the promotion of cogeneration and include it as a central part of their energy planning.

COGEN Challenge is the European information campaign on small-scale cogeneration. The project, which is financed by the Intelligent Energy Programme of the European Union, aims to have a database of 1,000 existing small-scale cogeneration units (<1MWe) by the end of 2007. In addition, the project partners offer guidance with the development of small-scale cogeneration projects through a complete set of tools and support materials.

The 500th installation to register with COGEN Challenge is a new small-scale cogeneration plant in Liège (Belgium). Verlac, the host company, needs both the electricity and the heat from the 50kWe for the production of plastic covers for brochures and magazines. The installation runs on rapeseed oil and receives a bonus of 150 Euros for each MWh of electricity, based on the green certificates mechanism in place in Wallonia – instead of about 30 Euros for a cogeneration system running on natural gas. In addition the micro-cogeneration saves 156,000 kilograms of CO2 emissions per year.

“Cogeneration is a very efficient way to produce energy”, COGEN Challenge project manager Stefan Craenen points out. “If you generate electricity and heat together the primary energy is used to the fullest. In the current move towards energy efficiency and CO2 reduction, cogeneration is a mature technology which can contribute significantly to EU aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20 percent until 2020. On the basis of the findings of COGEN Challenge the EU should be more assertive in promoting and accelerating its pro-cogeneration policy.”

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