Power Plant

An effort to achieve higher productivity and increased energy efficiency, the company established its own power plant division. The division started Operations from September 2002 with a 35 tonnes waste heat recovery based Captive power plant (CPP). A year later it undertook expansion with a 70 tonnes coal based power plant utilizing coal fines and coal rejects from the sponge iron process as fuel. Again in the year Jan 2006 capacity was further enhanced with the help of 56 tonnes waste heat recovery boiler increasing the generation capacity to 30 mw. And finally generation capacity was further enhanced by 25 MW in Apr 2007 with the addition of two 51 tonnes boiler taking the total generation capacity to 53 mw.

The electricity produced is used to partially meet the power requirement of GPIL plant itself and the surplus power is exported through Chattisgrah State Electricity board (CSEB) transmission and distribution (T&D) lines to meet the power requirement. The net result is a reduction in electricity demand from the Chattisgrah state grid which is a part of the Western regional grid and hence reducing GHG emission.

WHRB

The Energy Information Administration projects strong growth for worldwide energy demand - a 57 percent increase over 26 years. But governments are establishing limits on the emission of carbon dioxide, Nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, particulate matter and mercury and so power companies are looking for ways to bring new alternative power processing plants onto the grid more quickly. GPIL’s first WHRB captive power plant (capacity-7 MW) also became the first one in the world to be registered with CDM Executive Board for entitlement of carbon credits under the Kyoto Protocol.

The main activity of GPIL involves production of Sponge Iron and Steel Billets. Sponge iron is manufactured through rotary kiln .The Fuel gases available at high temperatures of around 950 C from the sponge iron kiln constitute a significant amount of heat energy. With the WHRB, a modern Technology, GPIL has achieved about 75% recovery of waste heat from flue gas of sponge iron kiln and utilization of same heat to produce steam. The steam is further utilized to generation electrical energy.In absence of the waste heat recovery steam generation system (WHRSGS), the same heat energy would have been lost in the atmosphere through stack emission of the fuel gases of sponge iron kiln at GPIL’s Sponge Iron Division (SID) located within the same premises.

Electrical energy thus produced is consumed for in-house operational purposes and surplus is exported through the Chhattisgarh State Electricity Board (CSEB) grid for power trading. The Waste Heat Recovery (WHR) based captive power plant at GPIL utilizes the heat content of waste fuel gas of sponge iron kiln to generate electricity for its captive requirement.