Innovation

The performance and efficiency of the wood gasifiers developed by our partner Burkhardt GmbH from Mühlenhausen have been constantly optimised and refined in the course of the past years. In these, the wood pellets are transformed into wood gas by a continuous co-current gasification process and a stationary fluidised bed that pass the gas on to a specially converted downstream combined heat and power station (CHP) for the generation of heat and electric power.

The interplay of constant raw material supply and high technical availability of the plant systems enables us to feed electric power to the public grid around the clock for more than 8,000 hours per year. With an efficiency of around 75%, we thus achieve an annual production output of 50 million kWh of electricity, sufficient for covering the power requirements of more than 15,000 households.

This base load capability predestines us for the production of balancing energy. As a result of this, we have been pre-qualified for the balancing energy market since 2015 and thus make an active contribution to compensating for fluctuations in the public power grid and/or the grid system frequency.

In addition to the generation of electric power, the wood gasification/CHP modules also produce around 60 million kWh of heat energy and process steam. The heat produced is transferred to a water circulation cycle by heat exchangers and transported to our customers by our district heating station.