Enel Commissions World’s First Geothermal-Biomass Hybrid Power Project
Support CleanTechnica's work through a Substack subscription, on Patreon, or on Stripe. Help us produce all of the high-quality, original content we publish week after week despite the challenges of content-scraping AI, antisocial media, inflation, and other hurdles.
Last month, Enel Green Power commissioned the world’s geothermal-biomass hybrid power plant in Tuscany, Italy.
Enel Green Power recently announced that it has added 5 MW of biomass-based power generation capacity to an existing 13 MW geothermal power plant in Italy. The biomass unit was added to the geothermal unit to increase the overall efficiency and power generation of the power project.
The project used locally sourced forest biomass that helps increase the temperature of the steam generated from the geothermal site from 150°-160° Celsius to 370°-380° Celsius. This increases the overall enthalpy of the steam, resulting in more output from the turbine and improved overall efficiency due to reduction in moisture content in super-heated steam.
The biomass unit has an installed capacity of 5 MW and will contribute an additional 30 GWh electricity every year to the overall power being generated. Greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to about 13,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions are also expected to be offset every year.
Use of such ‘combined cycle’ power generation is common in gas-based power plants, but this project may also serve as a template for other geothermal power projects across the world to increase their power generation capacity and become competitive with the other renewable energy technologies.
Sign up for CleanTechnica's Weekly Substack for Zach and Scott's in-depth analyses and high level summaries, sign up for our daily newsletter, and follow us on Google News!
Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.
Sign up for our daily newsletter for 15 new cleantech stories a day. Or sign up for our weekly one on top stories of the week if daily is too frequent.
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.
CleanTechnica's Comment Policy
