Manufacturing

How It Works

Any Cat natural gas fueled engine can be configured specifically for applications involving heat recovery. The engine drives a Cat gas generator to produce electricity, while jacket water and/or exhaust cooling circuits are fed through heat exchangers (radiators in the case where CHP is not employed) to transfer the waste heat from the engine to your hot water or steam circuit. That hot water or steam can then be effectively used for the purposes of a facility's process or HVAC requirements, including facility cooling (known as trigeneration) when implementing an absorption or adsorption chiller.

Caterpillar provides customized CHP package proposals, including the required mechanical equipment and controls to capture and transfer the engine thermal energy to an industrial facility. In addition, Caterpillar offers exhaust emissions aftertreatment for highly regulated emission environments and utility grade Cat paralleling switchgear to sell excess electricity generated to the local electric grid.

The total energy cost savings can more than offset total owning and operating costs, delivering a payback in as little as two to three years, depending on local energy pricing and policies.

How Distributed Generation and Standby Power Work

When power is produced locally without heat recovery from the engine, Caterpillar provides radiators for proper cooling to the engine jacket water, engine oil, and aftercooler water circuits. Cat paralleling switchgear is employed to allow generators to operate with one another or in conjunction with a local utility power source.

Although diesel fueled emergency power systems will always be the solution of choice for life safety emergency standby systems, there has been an increasing move toward natural gas fueled standby power systems in recent years. Typically installed with an automatic transfer switch (ATS) or paralleling switchgear control for multiple generators, these systems sense when a utility outage occurs and automatically start the backup power system and transfer power to the emergency source. When normal grid power returns, the control system automatically switches back and shuts down the emergency generator.