Vancouver: Nexterra Systems Corp., the University of British Columbia and GE announced the successful completion September 13 of an energy-from-renewable-waste combined heat and power system located at UBC’s Vancouver campus. The partners called the facility North America’s first commercial demonstration of a transformative system that combines Nexterra’s gasification and syngas conditioning technologies with one of GE’s high-efficient Jenbacher internal combustion engines.
GE’s Jenbacher gas engine will produce 2 MW of electricity that will offset UBC’s existing power consumption, enough to power approximately 1,500 homes. The Nexterra system will also generate 3 MW of thermal energy, enough steam to displace up to 12 percent of UBC’s natural gas consumption, reducing UBC’s greenhouse gas emissions by up to 5,000 tonnes per year.
Using Nexterra’s gasification technology platform and gas clean-up and thermal cracking method, the system converts locally-sourced waste wood into a clean, reliable gas that is suitable for use in a high-efficiency, industrial-scale gas engine to produce heat and power. Nexterra says the system will deliver global electrical efficiencies that are 25% higher than traditional methods for producing biomass-based electricity at this scale.