Novi Sad to get its second cogeneration facility

The public heating utility Novosadska Toplana is planning to build a second cogeneration energy plant this summer to produce electricity and heat energy as part of the reconstruction of the TO Jug heat facility with production of heat and electric energy expected in May 2019, Balkan Green Energy News was told by that company.

This will be the second cogeneration facility to operate as part of the communal services company providing central heating in Novi Sad. The value of the project is estimated at 500 million Dinars.

The motivation to build another cogeneration facility was the idea to make full use of the potential under the Decree on Incentive Measures for Electricity Generation from Renewable Energy Sources and High-Efficiency Cogeneration of Electricity and Heat and the extremely good results achieved in the first 17 months of operation of the cogeneration power plant at the Zapad heat facility, the Novosadska toplana said.

The cogeneration facility Jug will be powered by gas engines allowing for highly efficient combined production of heating and electric energy. There are also plans to build all the accompanying infrastructure and subsystems needed to produce both types of energy.

The technological concept from the cogeneration plant Zapad will be used for the Jug plant. The Zapad power plant, which started operating in October 2016 produced 107 million kWh of electricity and the same amount of heat energy in the first 17 months of operation which is enough green energy to keep a constant supply of electricity to around 18,000 households.

The new cogeneration plant Jug will have installed power of 4 MWe i 4MWt with a planned annual production of 30 million kWh of electricity and the same amount of heat energy.

The plan is for the Novosadska toplana to place electricity produced at the new plant onto the national power grid at subsidized prices as a preferential electricity producer and to use the heat energy produced by the cogeneration plant to prepare sanitary hot water. In that way significant funds will be secured over a 12 year period which will allow for increased efficiency, investments in modernizing the technical system and further lower costs and prices for consumers which is of great significance for the city of Novi Sad as the founder, the Novosadska toplana and for the population, the company said in its statement.

The gas engines in the new facility will enable highly-efficient combined production of heat and electric energy.

The construction will be financed solely with Novosadska toplana funds. The company has gotten the site conditions, drawn up a project solution, received an opinion on connecting the plant to the power distribution system and is currently working on getting energy permits and preparing tender documents, the Novosadska toplana said.

Automatization of substations

The JKP Novosadska toplana company will this year implement its project of automatization in 423 primary heating substations and will link them up to a system of remote monitoring and management which is 177 MW or 20 percent of consumption.

The project has received approval for a donation from Slovenia’s Center for International Cooperation and Development and the project itself has been assessed to be highly efficient, economically and sustainable because it secures significant savings in primary energy, a modernization of heat substations, increased reliability and availability, controllability, flexibility and higher quality of energy.

The project includes an automatization of all heat substations in public facilities in Novi Sad (public institutions, schools, nurseries, medical centers….)