Optimizing Heat Recovery from Power Plants by Integrating Heat Pumps

摘要

Most of the world's electricity today is generated without recovering heat from flue gas. Unfortunately, this trend has continued despite the change to environmentally friendly fuels such as biomass. Electricity generation presently achieves around 25 to 50% efficiency. By incorporating simple heat recovery, however, it is possible to achieve energy efficiencies up to 80%. Even after heat recovery from the steam system, 20% of the energy is still being wasted through the flue stack. It is possible to recover the remaining 20% of energy from the flue gases by condensation of the flue gas. Most of the energy recovery is from latent energy in the flue gas, hence the importance of wet heat recovery over dry recovery.