New Technology - Generation

Tri-State is funding research that examines how to improve the efficiencies of conventional and renewable power resources, as well as projects that look at how small-scale technologies can best serve a single end-use consumer.

THERMAL GENERATION

Core Research

 

• Water/Energy Convergence - A study that seeks a better understanding of water availability and the technical strategies to generate electricity with water constraints.

 

• Midwest Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership - An assessment of the technical potential, economic viability, and public acceptability of carbon sequestration.

 

 

Demonstration Projects

 

• Solar Augmentation for Fossil-fuel-fired Plants - This study examines how a solar augmented system would utilize steam generated by a solar field in a conventional fossil-powered steam cycle, thus potentially offsetting the amount of fossil fuel required to generate power.

 

• Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) - CAES plants use off-peak electricity to compress air into an air storage system. When electricity is needed, the air is withdrawn from the store, heated (usually with gas or oil fuel) and processed by an expansion turbine to drive an electric generator. The study looks at how compressed air may be stored in several types of underground media, which include porous rock formations, depleted gas/oil fields, and caverns in salt or rock formations; or, the air may be stored in above ground vessels or air pipelines. CAES also may help offset the variability of wind generation, thus improving its integration.

 

• Carbon Capture & Storage/Sequestration - This research seeks to develop technologies that remove carbon dioxide from power plant flue gases. It will also examine the feasibility of storing the gases underground or as a feedstock in a bio-fuel plant.

 

• ITM (Ion Transport Membrane) Oxygen - Low cost oxygen is critical to oxy-combustion and IGCC, which are two leading clean coal technology options. This research looks at the development of air separation technology to reduce the energy demand of oxygen production.

Distributed Generation

Core Research

 

• Renewable Resource Deployment - A project that will provide an objective up-to-date overview of the technical and economic status of key renewable generation technologies (wind, biomass and solar). It will also provide data to perform an initial technical assessment and a method for conducting a preliminary economic evaluation of commercially available renewable generation technologies.

 

• Methane Recovery - Waste products from animal feeding operations can be environmentally harmful to soil, water and air. This project shows that when the waste is processed by an aerobic digester to produce methane for an electrical generator, the treated animal waste can be applied in greater quantities, with less negative impact, to soil as a fertilizer. The electricity produced from the process is considered a renewable resource.

 

• Small Wind Guide - The project involved developing a guide that will enable electric co-ops to provide effective, consistent and well-documented answers to consumer inquiries about the use of small wind projects (1 kW to 100 kW) to generate electricity.

 

• Waste Energy Recovery - This project will provide a roadmap for electric co-ops to identify viable sources of industrial waste heat that can be cost-effectively converted to electric power with little or no environmental impact.