The Albany County Sewer District saw over 40 tons of equipment installed with the arrival of a turbogenerator at its North Plant in Menands on Wednesday, Sept. 21, as part of its Waste Heat to Energy project.
When everything is installed and up and running, hopefully by February 2012, it is expected to save the county a total of $480,000 per year through reduced energy bills, according to Richard Lyons, executive director of the Albany County Sewer District.
“It’s going to provide a tremendous amount of environmental and economic benefit for the county of Albany,” Lyons said. “We’re going to offset about 3.3 million kilowatt hours a year of energy we used to consume. Now it’s going to be produced by this generating equipment.”
The $8.5 million project, which will convert sewage sludge into renewable energy, was funded by the New York State Environmental Facilities Corporation with about $5.8 million and $2 million from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
The way the system works is through the disposal of the sewage sludge, which is done through combustion, Lyons said. They will then harness the energy and heat from the combustion by heating up oil, which will then spin a turbine that will produce the electricity.
“It’s self sustaining,” Lyons said. “So, that combustion of the sewage sludge and the heat produced, before it goes to the air pollution control equipment, it’s going to heat up that organic fluid, which is the oil, which is going to provide energy to the generating equipment… The process of the ultimate disposal of the sewage sludge won’t change. What will change in 2012 is the capturing of that energy to produce electricity.”
The construction process started in May 2010 and has created about 90 jobs dedicated to that task at the plant. Albany County Executive Michael Breslin referred to the generator as “the perfect machine” as once some heat gets into the system it begins generating power. With the amount of money the project will be saving the county, Breslin said it will realize its savings in under a year while reducing CO2 emissions.
“We will actually recover the investment the county makes in about a year with all the added NYSERDA and federal stimulus monies,” he said. “After that it is all gravy. It also means that there will be energy utilized in this process and won’t go up in the air.”
The energy produced through the system will be able to fuel almost the entire plant, which Lyons said serves Green Island, Cohoes, Watervliet, Menands, portions of the Village of Colonie and parts of the Town of Colonie, but it will still have to use other forms of energy as well. It will cover 200,000 of the 300,000 residents in Albany County, said Rich Adair, chairman of the Albany County Sewer District’s Board of Commissioners.
“It’s going to provide a tremendous amount of environmental and economic benefit for the county of Albany,” Richard Lyons, executive director of the Albany County Sewer District, said. “We’re going to offset about 3.3 million kilowatt hours a year of energy we used to consume. Now it’s going to be produced by this generating equipment.”
Lyons said the county produces around 8,000 dry tons of dry sludge annually, which will be used to fuel the equipment at the plant. The idea of this sort of process is not an old one, Lyons said. He started working on this idea around six years ago. Breslin said it really came to fruition because of all the funding through state and federal sources.
“I went from having an idea, presented it to the county executive, went into a feasibility study, which took about a year and a half, and based on that feasibility study, it was a go, it was something that could become a reality,” Lyons said. “Then we got the funding and it became a no-brainer, like the county exec said.”
Breslin said the county is expecting this generator to be a model for other counties in the state and the country.
“NYSERDA is saying, ‘we can do things better, let’s look at the best way of doing things,’” he said. “This is a great one. We want to be able to model and recreate it other places. This will be the model and inspiration.”
