Take the case of MIT, which spent years researching and developing a 22-megawatt cogeneration plant for its campus.
As early as the 1980s, large industrial and commercial customers began installing onsite cogeneration systems for heat-intensive applications.
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Its cogeneration units produce 537 megawatts of electricity annually from sugarcane bagasse--enough to power a small city like Belgaum.
Its U.S. business, PPM Energy, operates cogeneration power plants and wind farms .
Natural gas and cogeneration projects also use PPAs to finance the upfront costs.
Rather than letting the heat escape, a cogeneration plant uses the excess energy to power a heating and cooling system.
But with cogeneration they can bring that 45% up to 90% assuming heat and air conditioning loads at the load site.
James Woolsey said in Chicago Thursday night, and America needs distributed generation as backup primarily in the form of natural-gas cogeneration and solar power.
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CHP, also known as cogeneration, is a specific genre of distributed generation, which is sited at or near the point of consumption.
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And with cheap natural gas now abundant in the U.S., Woolsey suggested using gas more often for cogeneration producing both heat and electricity on location.
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Walters, along with an old political pal, Donald Smith, chief of Smith Cogeneration, wanted a slice of that business and flew to Islamabad, the capital.
Natural gas-fueled micro-cogeneration and fuel cells are just starting to proliferate.
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Contrary to what many people may expect, most of these technologies, which include microturbines, fuel cells and high-efficiency cogeneration, rely on fossil fuels rather than renewable-energy resources like wind or solar energy.
The 80% efficiency seen in combined heat and power plants, known as cogeneration plants, is ideally suited for large institutions--universities, hospitals, airports--that have extensive electricity and thermal energy demand in a concentrated area.
CHP, or cogeneration, is not a single technology but rather a suite of technologies that can be mixed and matched in many ways to provide high-efficiency, low-emissions source of heat and power from a single process.
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