Alternative Power Generation Paper

APC, Alternative Power Generation Technologies for Data Centres and Network Rooms , APC White Paper 64, 2003... 

The paper deals with electrolysis side-stream desalting which offers an alternative solution to the problem of water and salt management in electric power generating plants where blowdown disposal is needed, and where the value of recovered water is considerable. An advanced electrodialysis technology is described. 4 refs, cited. 

The bio-oil used for the test programme was produced by BTG in Enschede (NL) with the Rotating Cone Technology from poplar as the bio-mass material. As alternative raw materials for pyrolysis wheat straw, Spanish thistle and other wood wastes have been investigated. The main objective of this paper is to demonstrate the power generation from bio-oil in a gas turbine, the optimisation of the combustion behaviour with respect to emissions and operation characteristics and the comparison of emission and operation data from bio-oil and conventional diesel fuel. For technical reasons the gas turbine had to be adapted to the operation in dual fuel mode with the possibility to switch between diesel and bio-oil. 

In the long term, some of the predictions based on current energy inputs may prove a little shaky alternative technologies for electrical power generation could affect some values, for example. The recycle of selected scrap, well established for aluminium, glass and paper, has possibly reduced overall energy use for these materials, but is now also being extended to some plastics. 

Perhaps even more to the point is that the principal alternative to nuclear power is coal burning, which causes hundreds oftimes as many deaths owing to its air pollution alone in generating the same amount of electricity.11 Every time a coal-burning plant is built instead of a nuclear plant, about one thousan d extra innocent people are condemned to an early death, and this estimate applies even if the nuclear risks are those proposed by the antinuclear UCS. All the calculations leading to the above conclusions were published in prestigious scientific journals and never criticized in other published scientific papers (or elsewhere as far as I know). But none of this material was ever transmitted to the public by the mass media. Likewise it was never explained to the public that radiation doses from nuclear power are very much smaller than doses from natural radioactivity to which everyone is exposed (and which varies substantially with geography), and very much smaller than doses from medical X rays. 

The paper discusses operating limitations imposed by the turbine exhaust element and the alternatives presently available to the electric utility industry. It also presents tools for estimating dry tower plot area, fan power and circulating pump power requirements. It shows the savings in fan power which can be expected with a decrease in turbine-generator load and ambient air temperatures. It discusses expected maintenance costs and the owner s possible exposure with a large 1000 MW dry cooling tower system. The paper ends with an evaluation of the potential for lower dry tower system costs in the future. 12 refs, cited. 

ABSTRACT In most cases, Model Based Safety Analysis (MBSA) of critical systems focuses only on the process and not on the control system of this process. For instance, to assess the dependability attributes of power plants, only a model (Fault Tree, Markov chain. ..) of the physical components of the plant (pumps, steam generator, turbine, alternator. ..) is used. In this paper, we claim that for repairable and/or phased-mission systems, not only the process but the whole closed-loop system Proc-ess/Control must be considered to perform a relevant MBSA. Indeed, a part of the control functions aims to handle the dynamical mechanisms that change the mission phase as well as manage repairs and redundancies in the process. Therefore, the achievement of these mechanisms depends on the functional/dysfunctional status of the control components, on which these functions are implemented. A qualitative or quantitative analysis method which considers both the process and the control provides consequently more realistic results by integrating the failures of the control components that may lead to the non-achievement of these mechanisms. This claim is exemplified on an industrial study case issued from a power plant. The system is modeled by a BDMP (Boolean logic Driven Markov Process), assuming first that the control components are faultless, i.e. only the faults in the process are considered, and afterwards that they may fail. The minimal cut sequences of the system are computed in both cases. The comparison of these two sets of minimal cut sequences shows the benefit of the second approach. 

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