UK to Gather Energy from Gas Pipelines Using Mini-Turbines
Mini turbines will be installed inside the UK’s gas pipeline grid later this year in an attempt to gather energy from pipeline pressure. The set-up will be tested in east London and should produce 20MW by 2010. If successful, future installations across the country could produce up to 1GW. That’s the same amount of power produced by a coal or nuclear power station.
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The UK’s National Grid and a company called 2OC have teamed up to install the turbo expanders, which generate electricity when gas pressure is reduced. Each expander is only 20cm in diameter, but can generate a relatively impressive 1MW of electricity.
The technology for turbo expanders has been around until the 1980s, but up until now it was too expensive to pursue. With rising energy prices, the expanders have become a viable option.
Costs may also be reduced by combining the turbo expander with a combined heat and power (CHP) engine that can generate electricity and heat. This could boost the CHP’s efficiency to over 70 percent. The CHP engine could potentially run using vegetable oil from local rapeseed or synthetic oil made from wood.
None of these ideas have been tested on a large scale, however, so tangible results are probably many years away.
Photo Credit: Flickr user rickz under a CC license
This is a good idea, my company does this with water pipes - when we want to reduce pressure in a waterline, we install a big apparatus that not only reduces the pressure, but uses that pressure to spin a turbine and generate electricity. We generate around 12M kWh/yr.
Its not free energy (we had to pump the water uphill to create the gravity-based pressure - and at a higher energy cost), but its better than letting the energy go to waste.
Sounds great Anthony! What’s the name of your company and what’s their industry? I think that they should be lauded for their efforts and a little extra publicity definitely sounds in order.
This is a great scheme - another nail in the ‘nuclear is still an option’ lobbies’ rather tarnished coffin!
this is so unbelievably dumb. I am continually astounded by the scientific ignorance of the “green” community.
ever hear of the first law of thermodynamics? in layman’s terms, it’s a law of physics called “no free lunch” - you can’t get more energy out of a system than you put in, and you in fact always get less due to friction, heat loss, etc.
pipes are (or should be) pressurized to the most efficient pressure to push all the gas or liquid from source to farthest destination. if you put a turbine in the pipe, you are going to lower the pressure beyond the turbine so the gas or liquid at the end of pipe is no longer pressurized. So now you have to increase the power to whatever pump is pushing the gas at the source (and thus us MORE energy). Since both the turbine in the pipe and pump at the source cannot be 100% efficient (nothing is 100% efficient), it means you are actually WASTING energy and HEATING the planet more with your waste heat from friction.
in simple terms: if your turbine is generating 1kWatt from the gas flowing in the pipe, you are probably taking 2kWatts of energy out of the gas flow (assuming a very good 50% efficiency). So to make sure that the guy at the end of pipe is still getting some pressurized gas, you need to increase the energy injected at the source to compensate for the 2kWatt loss. But the pump at your source is only 50% efficient, so it burns 4kWatts to inject the 2kWatts of extra energy in the form of pressure into the pipeline.
In reality the inefficiencies and losses are even greater, so you’d be burning up more than 10kWatts for every 1kWatt of “Free Green!” energy you are getting from this dumb idea….. and guess where the other 9kWatts goes? into waste heat that goes into the air!
the “greenies” need to take some baby physics courses before they destroy the planet.
@ bula53, well said. But it makes me sad, realizing again there is no free lunch. I got so excited when I first read this article I went to my bedroom to get my perpetual motion machine which I store under my bed. But guess what… it still doesn’t work. Damn friction!
@ bula53, Nothing wrong with your physics but must point out that the gas is NATURALLY coming out of the earth at 50 - 300 bar which is more than enough to get it to where its needed. It is then reduced in pressure so that joe bloggs in his house can operate his heating at a safe pressure. All this idea does is to capture the excess energy released when that pressure (which was provided by good old mother nature) is reduced. No extra energy is required to “re-pump” the gas as it is reduced in pressure just before getting to the end user. Check out their website http://www.2oc.co.uk/ some good info on it.