Challenge:
India sees a rapidly growing cooling demand, which is predominantly covered by electricity from coal fired power plants and costly diesel generators. Inefficient cooling technologies aggravate India’s power shortage, increase its peak power demand, cause frequent power cuts and more greenhouse gases emissions.
Objective:
Increased use of trigeneration based energy efficient cooling technologies help to reduce India’s power shortage and greenhouse gas emissions.
Target groups:
Buildings and industry with simultaneous demand for electricity, heat and cold, and energy service companies (ESCO) which can implement such projects.
Implementation partners:
Bureau of Energy Efficiency (Ministry of Power, Govt. of India)
Current Project phase:
December 2008 – November 2011
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Context:
India’s energy supply is not able to keep pace with the current growth rate of 6.7 % of the economy with frequent power shortages and power cuts. In order to keep import dependency in the conventional energy sector as low as possible, strategies for enhancing energy efficiency and utilising renewable energy are increasingly the focus of India’s energy policy.
Trigeneration technology - the simultaneous production of electricity, heat and cooling, is largely unknown in India and not sufficiently tested. Air conditioning is a major source of energy consumption with ambient temperatures reaching over 40°C in summer in most part of the country. Present cooling technologies are predominantly based on compression chillers which are driven by electricity from the grid. Due to losses in power generation and transmission, only 25% of the primary energy used in a coal fired power plant reaches the end user. In comparison a cogeneration or trigeneration system at the end users site, can reach overall efficiencies of 80%, as it can utilize the waste heat from power generation to cover the heating and cooling demand of the facility. In addition, there are no transmission losses. The benefits are even higher, since the decentralized cogeneration and trigeneration units are lowering peak power demand. They even could provide costly peak power and reduce damaging power cuts in India if they are allowed to sell to the grid.
Most promising areas of trigeneration application include hospitals, hotels, departmental stores, data centres, industries, etc. Overall it is estimitaed that there are several thousand potential sites in India where trigeneration could be applied economically within a range of 200 kWel to several MWel per installed system. |
