Looking for a Renewable Energy Solution on Jamaica
I had a pleasant surprise yesterday, when an old friend from my wife’s horse-breeding business (in fact, the very first person who ever bought a horse from us) unexpectedly contacted me on 2GreenEnergy. He’s an affluent Jamaican who was looking for a renewable energy solution to offset roughly a megawatt of electricity that he needs for a significant amount of restaurant refrigeration, for which he’s paying $0.40 per kilowatt hour.
“Wow, my friend. That’s $400 an hour, 24X7. Yikes,” I proffered sympathetically.
“Ya mon, it’s keeeeling me, Craig,” he responded. He offered to pay me to come back to Jamaica — a land my family had visited when we all became friends through our horse connections in the 1990s – this time to scope out the situation and make a recommendation vis-à-vis clean energy. I’ll very likely take him up on his offer, but first I’d like to do some homework in advance.
“If you give me the exact address, I’ll look up your wind resources. I would love to be able to recommend mid-sized wind; I represent some really good approaches in this arena on our list of renewable energy investment opportunities. You can see them there on the website.”
We’ll see where this goes. More soon.
When I started playing with energy, one of the first things I learned was that efficiency was first and better efficiency meant that less generation equipment was needed. I have long felt that the restaurant industry could sincerely benefit from this.
Before calculating how much energy needs to be generated to meet this need, perhaps some investigation into how to save energy would be in order.
Clearly the best insulated refrigeration units would be paramount, but beyond that, using/redistributing the energy he already has would also be very helpful in reducing the overall need for energy.
As you know I have a drainwater heat exchanger which works very well for me. I have envisioned that using this in a restaurant environment would save considerable energy. I can’t imagine they have much natural gas there and what they do have must be shipped in so I am guessing he heats his water with electricity. Considering the volume of water that a restaurant uses and the amount of energy required to heat water and the additionally high water temperature the food service industry is generally required to use, this cost has to be significant.
From my high school days working as a dishwasher at the Casa Conti restaurant in Glenside, I recall the 3 stage continuos industrial washing machine used very hot water. The process was as follows. Fresh clean hot water was introduced at the end of the machine for the rinse cycle where the racks of dishes were rinsed prior to exiting the machine. This water was allowed to drain into the wash cycle where soap was added to wash the dishes. The wash water was then allowed to drain into the pre-rinse cycle where the dishes were pre-rinsed to remove the bulk of the food. This is also where the drain was and the dirtiest “coolest” water was allowed to drain out of the machine. This made the most efficient use of the water. I said coolest in quotes because I can clearly remember how often I got burned by this “coolest” water as I shoved the racks of dirty dishes into the front of the machine.
This hot water could clearly be used the same as in my house to preheat the water going into the water heater for a savings if 30% or more.
Now onto the refrigeration portion of the system. Dissipating that heat from the refrigeration, and for that matter the AC, into the 80-90 degree air that is typical of Jamaica has to be expensive especially when you consider the volume and degree of cold you are trying to achieve. Since heating water takes a tremendous amount of energy it would stand to reason that dissipating heat into water would remove a tremendous amount of energy. The company I got my heat exchanger from also sells a unit designed for AC to dissipate this heat into water for preheating your pool or water heater water as well as reducing the amount of energy required to remove this heat from your house. If nothing else this could be fitted to the refrigeration and AC units and ground water could be pumped through to reduce the amount of energy needed to come up with all this cold. However, I went a step further and imagined that this heat could be dissipated into incoming cold water to preheat that and then after that sent through the drain water heat exchanger to take advantage of the dish water heat to further preheat the water before the water heater.
My thought was to first dissipate the AC heat then the refrigeration heat then the dishwasher heat to make the best use of the energy.
Of course I have no specific number to run calculations on but I can imagine a significant savings on both ends of this system. After that you can then figure out how much energy he needs to generate to meet that lowered demand.
Bear in mind that none of this stuff requires any maintenance or uses any energy to operate. It is basically free once installed and operates without notice or intervention.
Here is the link.
http://www.swing-green.com/index.php/products-solutions/achr/airfox
I just thought you might be interested in looking into this.
As an aside, there is a green restaurant listing here in the US.
Brian
Excellent points here, Brian. Thanks. Some of these opportunities don’t exist, as this is a collection of fast-food restaurants that wash little or nothing. Having said that, efficiency is absolutely the first place to look.
Another renewable resource could be run-of-river hydro; they have terrific rivers coming out of impressive elevation.
I remember Casa Conti very well; we had my grandmother’s 80th birthday party there.
The good thing about a situation like this is the price point is so high that there’s no chance that some form of alternative solution won’t be economically competitive.
At $400/MWh, your friend could literally put up 2 MW of PV solar and install a 12 MWh’s worth of battery storage – an option that is nothing shy of economically disastrous in the U.S.
Remember to factor in the threat of tropical cyclones when you’re calculating out the LCOE for a mid-sized wind resource. Jamaica has good wind (a small, flat bump in an otherwise perfectly flat sea), but a category III hurricane could turn a “wind turbine” into a “kite”, a fact that would undoubtedly increase the cost of insurance for such a system.
Still, at that price point this should be easy, whatever choice is made.
Brian is absolutely right that efficiency will be the cheapest option.
Excellent points. Re: the price-point, in my recent conversations on microwind, I was astonished to learn that commercial users of electricity in the metropolitan areas of Brazil pay as much as $2.00/kWh on-peak! Now THAT will justify almost ANY alternative solution.
Craig,
I can’t understand how those ultra-high price points could hold… If I was paying $2.00/kWh, I’d go on a cold canned-food diet until I could afford a single 2 m2 solar panel and a cheap inverter which I’d install myself. That would pay for itself in less than six months, so I’d be able to get another one… and then I’d be able to get the third in 3 months, and the 4th in 2 months, etc… until I got to a point where I’d sell excess power to neighbors.
Someone less environmentally concerned could simply buy a flex-fuel home generator and go to the gas station a few times a week, and immediately sell power to their neighbors. But there’s plenty of very fast ways to generate your own power that cost FAR less than $2.00/kWh.
Is that really a constant peak price, or is that just the price that it can climb to when the system is really overloaded. If it’s the latter, then that’s the same here in the states. ERCOT has seen price spikes higher than $2000/MWh at least 10 days every year this decade, and will likely continue. During last summer’s super-heat wave, MISO hit $3000 in all nodes.
But the average price in both MISO and ERCOT is very far below that. If Brazil really has cities that have a daily peak at $2/kWh, then we need to consider buying land near one of those cities and start talking to banks and contractors.
😉
Good point; let me look into that.
Speaking of generators…….what’s he doing with his waste vegetable oil?
Here’s another thought, if run of river hydro is close enough to be viable, perhaps it is feasable to bring river water into those heat exchangers I mentioned. Water is still a better place to dissipate heat than air and will remain fairly constant in temperature. You could still see a significant and constant savings. If you were to use the pool exchanger then a 2″ pipe would do the trick and it would be less susceptable to clogging from debris. Both AC and refrigeration could take advantage of this.