“European biomass CHP in practice” is a project, which will contribute to the efficient – use of solid biomass, biogas, waste and landfill gas for combined heat and power (CHP) production.

From 2003 to 2006 the project will disseminate biomass CHP experience based on collected data from 60 existing CHP plants in Denmark, The Netherlands, Austria, Germany, Sweden and Finland.

BIO-CHP is partly funded by the European Commission Altener programme

Project objectives

  • Promote biomass CHP in Europe by displaying experiences from solid biomass (including co-firing), Municipal Solid Waste (MSW), anaerobic digestion gas and landfill gas fuelled CHP plants and highlighting plants with the best operation
  • Provide eg. authorities and future plant owners with information about expected performance in biomass CHP plants and about best available technologies. This will help ensuring high quality of future plants
  • Enable benchmarking and thus identify the improvement potential of the existing European CHP plants
  • Replicate best practices on the operation of biomass CHP plants by extensive dissemination activities
  • Create a network for exchange of good and not so good CHP experiences

Results

Major findings of the project include

  • Plant owners often overestimate the efficiency, which can be achieved – there are huge differences between the nominal efficiency for electricity and heat as estimated in project planning, and the performance achieved in the practical operation of the plants.
  • The internal comsumption of electricity in the plants is significant, and some technologies perform better than others in this context.
  • Operational stability and availability of the plants are not impressive; for some technologies it is critically low.
  • Utilization of the installed capacity is often low, either due to part load operation or to extended periods of plants being out of operation.

The results from the project can be found in the Best Practice Guide.

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