Sugar production requires high quantities of steam. For fifty years, sugar industries in the Philippines have been burning bagasse in co-generation power plants to produce the steam and power necessary to the factory. Bagasse is the cane fiber remaining after the crushing of sugar cane for its transformation into sugar.
In most of the Philippine sugar mills, production equipment date back to the sixties and are not efficient, resulting in a lack of competitiveness in the industry in comparison to those in Thailand, India or even Brazil. Philippine sugar mills still exist because of importation tariffs on sugar that guarantee a better price for Philippine sugar on the local market. As these tariff barriers will disappear in 2015, sugar mills will have to lower their production costs before this date in order to survive.
Enertime was contracted by an investor in a co-generation plant in one of islands of the Philippines (Panay island) to conduct a feasibility study on improving the energy balance of a sugar mill and its associated co-generation plant. The study was in view to constructing a new cogeneration plant with higher performance that would not only supply the sugar mill with heat and power but also produce excess power that could later on be sold to networks (thereby, bringing more money to the plant operator).
The ever-increasing demand for electricity in the Philippines islands as well as the need of owners and investors to lower energy consumption costs in light of the dissolution of tariff barriers in 2015 gave relevance and urgency to the project.
As sugar mills run only during the sugar production season, which lasts between 5 and 7 months, the existing co-generation plant does not operate during the rest of the year.
The specific objectives of the study were to:
- significantly reduce steam consumption in the sugar mill through the modernization of equipment;
- replace steam mills by electrical mills;
- build a complementary biomass supply plan (from rice hulls, coconut waste, sugar cane straw…) to operate the plant at least 10 months a year, instead of the usual 5 to 7 months only;
- design a plant that produces steam for the sugar mill, which works in co-generation during harvest season and produces only power the rest of the time;
- evaluate investment costs of the project and build a business plan.
The study showed the possibility of lowering by half the sugar mill’s consumption of steam. With the appropriate co-generation plant and an annual plant operation period of 10 months, Enertime has evaluated the amount of power that could be exported to the grid at 20 MWe. In the study, the sugar mill would give away the bagasse used for the operation of the plant and in return would receive the steam and power that it needed. In this exchange scheme, the export of the supplementary power to the grid would be able to pay for the initial investment in 5 years.
