Monday, 27 September
Ormat receives DoE grant for North Brawley
Ormat Technologies announced last week that it received $108.2 million from
the US Government Section 1603 Program for its North Brawley geothermal power
plant in California. Section 1603 of the Recovery Act passed by the US Congress
in February 2009 enabled qualifying renewable power projects to elect to receive
a 30% cash grant in lieu of pre-existing production tax credit(PTC) or investment
tax credit(ITC). The wind and geothermal energy sectors were the major beneficiaries
of the scheme. Four projects had already received grants as of March 2010 to
the total of US$152m for a total installed capacity of 125 MWe (Salt Wells and
Stillwater projects by Enel, Blue Mountain by Nevada Geothermal Power, and Thermo
1 by Raser). The North Brawley was also eligible but for the grant but Ormat
delayed application until it solved the sand issue. This project which was supposed
to start operation a year earlier was delayed due to problems with large quantities
of sand contained in the geothermal brine. The plant uses shell-and-tube heat
exchangers to evaporate isopentane on the shell side with the heat supplied
from geothermal brine flowing trough the tubes.
Apparently, it was the shift from disposable filtration to the high efficiency
hydro cyclones that did work in separating the sand. Hydrocyclones are commonly
used in minerals processing to eliminate the sand and other contaminants in
a water stream. It would have been good to learn more about the type of hydrocyclones
Ormat uses in the North Brawley plant but I found no reference to it in the
company literature. In any case, the result was a substantial reduction in the
the operating expenses and increased power production from 17 MWe in January
2010 to 25 MWe in in September 2010. "The funding we received today will go
toward our continued expansion, including the construction of new projects that
will be eligible for future funding under the ITC cash grant program," commented
Dita Bronicki, Chief Executive Officer of Ormat.
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