Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

What was waste will make power

At new plant, air heated to nearly 1,000 degrees by existing facility will be used to run turbine

Waste heat

Tiffany Brown

A new plant’s stacks will be built in front of these stacks at the Kern River Gas Transmission Co.’s natural gas compression plant near Goodsprings. Air now released at nearly 1,000 degrees will leave the new stacks at a cooler 270 degrees.

Air pouring out of smokestacks at a natural gas compressor station near Goodsprings is so hot its waves cast shifting shadows on the desert 60 feet below.

After more than a decade of escaping into the atmosphere from Kern River Gas Transmission Co.’s station, that nearly 1,000-degree air will finally be put to good use.

Nevada Power Co. announced last week that it will generate electricity from the heat, which is created by three giant turbines that speed natural gas along a pipeline from Wyoming through Nevada to California. Nevada Power’s new plant will use technology developed by Reno company Ormat Nevada and will be built on federal land leased by Kern River Gas Transmission for its pipeline about 40 miles southwest of Las Vegas.

It is expected to be up and running by mid-2010 and will produce enough power to serve about 1,200 Nevada Power residential customers, according to the utility.

Although small at 6 megawatts, the plant is the latest step toward increased reliance on renewable energy and is a true example of turning nothing into something, Nevada Power executives said.

An added benefit is that using the heat to generate power creates no new emissions, although the existing plant does release emissions, including the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, from burning natural gas.

The new plant will be wholly owned by the utility. Nevada Power now buys renewable energy from plants owned by their developers.

“Nevada Power wants to develop its own ... projects,” said Jack McGinley, renewable energy development director of the utility. “It’s a continuation of the company’s commitment to developing renewable energy.”

But environmentalists have questioned the utility’s commitment to green power despite the Goodsprings project and the announcement last week of a geothermal project planned for Northern Nevada. They say controversial plans to develop a large coal-fired power plant near Ely show Nevada Power and its parent company, Sierra Pacific Resources, are still more interested in developing traditional fossil fuel resources.

The Goodsprings project will be Nevada Power’s first nonsolar renewable energy project in Southern Nevada.

Steve Rypka, owner of green living and solar consulting business GreenDream Enterprises, said the plant is a great move for the utility and a great example of how utilities, businesses and homeowners can increase energy efficiency.

“I see this as an energy efficiency project, not a renewable energy project, though,” Rypka said, because it ultimately relies on natural gas.

The Nevada Power project at Goodsprings will count toward the state requirement that the utility buy 20 percent of its power from renewable resources by 2015.

Ormat says it would like to build similar plants at all of Kern River Gas Transmission’s 10 other compressors along the pipeline from Wyoming to California. In addition to the Goodsprings site, the company has a Nevada compressor near Dry Lake, at the Apex industrial complex in Clark County, near other Nevada Power generating plants.

Kern River Gas Transmission supplies most of the natural gas used in Nevada Power’s gas-burning power plants.

Ormat is a geothermal development company that builds power plants that use water heated by the earth to produce electricity as well as plants that run on waste heat. Ormat also supplies geothermal power to Nevada Power’s sister company, Sierra Pacific Power Co.

Colin Duncan, recovered energy manager for Ormat, said the company has not looked into locations in Southern Nevada other than Kern River’s compressors, where it might use the waste heat technology, but said there may be other places where Ormat could construct plants. Among potential locations are industrial and manufacturing sites that produce waste heat close to 700 degrees and landfills, which produce methane gas that’s now simply burned off.

Republic Services, the company that owns the landfill at Apex where the valley’s trash is deposited, has said it is interested in finding a use, possibly to produce power, for the methane.

“That is definitely an option after we get this Goodsprings project going. There is going to be interest in other applications,” Duncan said. “And as carbon credits and renewable energy credits ... start to be more marketable commodities with real value, then those things come into the economics of the project and make it more viable.”

Ormat has built plants similar to the one planned at Goodsprings in several U.S. states and Canada. The plants capture otherwise wasted heat and use it to vaporize a liquid, which then turns a turbine. The turbine powers a generator, which creates electricity sent through power lines to customers.

New stacks constructed on the site would emit 270-degree air.

The new power plant would be connected to the compressor station, a sterile building filled with loud, whirring machinery that’s hot to the touch, including three 15,000-horsepower turbines that push gas along Kern River Gas Transmission’s pipeline. But the power plant would be on an adjacent parcel north of the compressor in the desert, seven miles west of Jean.

The utility has declined to reveal the cost of the plant, which still must win approval from the Nevada Public Utilities Commission. Nevada Power is to pay Kern River a fee each year based on the amount of power the plant produces.

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