Fleetsolve’s CEO Keith O’Connor features in this month’s Heating and Ventilating Review magazine, explaining why combined heat and power is the ideal choice for swimming and leisure facilities:
“It’s hard for pool operators to skimp on energy use. Swimming pools consume more energy per unit area than almost any other building type – five times more energy per square metre than, say, an office block. The reasons are obvious: the need to keep the pool at a consistent temperature and provide warm changing rooms with hot showers. Many pools are also part of a wider leisure centre, gym or spa which will have its own energy needs such as air conditioning, equipment operation and lighting. This means a hefty heating bill plus the need for a lot of electricity.
This has the potential to be extremely expensive and wasteful. When you buy electricity from the grid, a huge amount of waste has occurred before the power even reaches you. This is because a conventional power plant turns nearly two-thirds of the source energy into heat, which disappears into the atmosphere. Sites using grid electricity then need to either run electric heating systems or have a separate system for heating with its own waste issues.
Combined heat and power (CHP) is very different. It involves generating electricity on site and then capturing the resulting heat for an organisation’s heating needs. As well as drastically reducing thermal energy waste, this type of energy generation bypasses the grid and therefore avoids the usual losses in the transmission and distribution networks. CHP typically has an efficiency of over 80%, compared to around 50% for using grid electricity plus a gas boiler.
CHP operators typically save at least 20% on their energy bills. In some cases this could be as much as 40-50%. The higher electricity prices go, the higher the savings.”
Read the full article on p.22 of this month’s Heating and Ventilating Review.
