More details on one of the world’s largest biomass fired plants
Sawmilling South Africa confirms that the massive biomass-fired combined heat and power (CHP) plant being built on the shores of Värtan, a strait in Sweden’s capital city, by Fortum Värme, a company jointly owned by Finnish energy firm Fortum and the city of Stockholm, is on schedule to begin operation this autumn.
Värtan CHP8 (130 MWe, 280 MWth), which began construction in 2013, will begin commercial operations in the fall. According to its developers, the plant will use forest residues and wood waste—sawdust, bark, and logging residues from local and regional sources around the Baltic Sea—as well as recovered heat from data centers to produce district heat for nearly 200,000 households. The plant is also designed for fuel flexibility to allow it to use new fuels from the developing bioenergy market, Fortum said. Daily consumption of wood chips will be about 12,000 m3.
Building the plant in the middle of Stockholm—a city with a population of about 1.4 million people—involved multiple challenges, including working with limited space and requiring closed-fuel systems to avoid dust emissions and noise. The plant uses an old rock cavern—previously used for oil storage—that was converted into a massive underground wood chip storage facility. It is able to store about 60,000 m3, or five days of fuel demand.
While the Värtan site has full access to road, rail, and sea transportation, the current fuel procurement plan is based on getting 40% by rail from Nordic biomass suppliers and another 60% by ship from the Baltic Sea region and Russia. “The aim is to ensure the security of supply and access to a wide geographic biomass market over time,” Fortum explained.
To ensure adequate supply by sea, the company built a new 200-m pier in the harbor area to accommodate two vessels up to Panamax size. On average, the plant requires three to four shipments per week to meet its fuel demand, as well as five trainloads per week, each with a capacity of about 4,600 m3. All fuel is unloaded and processed indoors within a closed system before delivery to the power plant. All logistics are coordinated in-house to control supply risks.
The company’s decision to use biomass was complicated by an emerging debate in the European Union (EU) about how sustainable the fuel source is. Fortum noted in an April 2016 energy review that biomass is now the most common form of renewable energy in the EU, and it is the only source that can replace every type of fossil fuel in all energy markets—heating, cooling, electricity, and transport—but concerns are growing about competition for resources and security of supply.
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