TURBINES

Do you mean new or used?

In SA we have gas but no oil and it will make economical sense to use it to generate power.

There are also plants going up all over the world to extract methane etc from landfill waste sites.

Replacing crude use is always a good idea.

Finally - A financial / economic / sustainability investigation is done before buying.

"...why oversea's buyers ..."

It'd help us ponder if you gave us a clue as to which bit of Earth you're from (there are people here from most bits). Then we'd have an idea what you meant by "oversea's".

The answer is basically that there is huge demand for gas turbines all over the world right now, and buyers will go buy them from where ever there is capacity to build them. (The same is true for wind turbines by the way. The wait list for a wind turbine is about two years right now).

Your are correct in my opinion regarding the turbines. If one looks at the recent production of military jet aircraft you will see that the production cost are un-real. Therefore the turbine engine mfg's have cut production of those size engines. Even the large passenger jets sport two or only three engines where there were three and four. As the useful life of the earlier production engines expire the aircraft lifespan is being extended. These are mostly in third world countries. But the need for replacement engines is there. I suspect that there is already a booming after market for new replacement parts and where possible the rebuilding market is also booming. Of course we know about the general use of said engines where natural gas and methane are available. But don't forget that jet engines can use an inferior grade of fuels also. These fuels likely can be easily produced in third world countries.

toomuchfun

1) because they don't have the local capacity or technology.

2) gas is much easier to use than other fuels

3) more flexibility to meet changing load / demand in cycle (easier to bring online/offline for example than coal;

3) less need for environmental remediation of combustion products.

4) they have gas or access to gas.

5) 'huge' today is 'median' tomorrow; they know that demand is likely to grow.

milo

One reason the US may be experiencing a surge in demand is our dollar has devalued and the rest of the world can buy our machines at a huge discount

Of course, it's another reason. At the beginning of 2002 when we start using € coins and banknotes, exchange rate was nearly 1$/€ then fall up to 0,8 $/€ and now is about 1,6 $/€: It's twice!!

I've noticed in some other US manufactured products (Vishay strain gages) that € prices have lowered in few months.

Anyway, when the rate was 0,8$/€ we bought GE Schenectady gas turbines too.

Kwetz.traditional.

Good insights.

milo

Thank you Milo. Well, I know a little bit. Surely I will have to go to Schenectady in a couple of months to witness the final tests of one of this gas turbines...

Kwetz

If you use the gas directly in the turbine, you don't need to have a boiler, a cooling tower, all the pumps, the chemical treatment, and the maintenance needed on the boiler. When you use gas insteas of syeam, the turbine is more expensive but the operating costs can be lower. It all depends on your local market.

And, what do you do with the exhaust hot gases from gas turbine? Perhaps simply throw them to atmosphere? Maybe to a condenser?

There are maybe some hundreds CCPP around the world and we're participating as engineering, turn key suppliers and/or construction and start up supervision of some dozens of CCPP in different countries of different continents.

Perhaps the problem is of local market, but I don't know this "local"

Best regards

Dear sir

we are looking for steam driven turbine manufacturers , so for manufacturers and or suppliers please contact us .

H. kashani / Lebanon

.e.mail : lebanonmushroom@hotmail.com

Sorry, I made a horrible mistake I've realized when read my previous post. Exhaust gases don't use to go to condensers, just steam... I tried to say coolers

Sorry again

Kwetz

I am interested in putting a pressure cooker sized turbine on the parabolic mirror contraption Chandu of APIX-SEP made, that will generate electricity, instead of cooking rice. It needs to be linked to a battery for 24 hour power for the poor or rich off grid geek. It would be good if the whole device was collapsable for shipping on the DIM weight airfreight scale.

Let me know of all small turbines that run off solar steam please.

Thanks, Transcendian

That sounds good in principle but it is not because the parabolic mirror obtains a high temperature that you will obtain a lot of electrical power. We get less than one kilowatt per square meter from the sun. You may get 20-30% conversion efficiency if you are extremely good at it. This means 200-300W of electricity could be produced during the best part of the day. The typical house uses many KW for more hours than the daylight period. You will need to learn to live frugally unless you have access to 10 or 20 Sq meters of solar concentrator.

The intent is good but you will never get a payback unless you are not connected to the grid. The maintenance and water supply needed to operate this will not be small either. This is why these system need to be large to be viable when another source of energy is available. Is it your case?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_recovery_steam_generator

Ahh, because it is too difficult and expensive to make them locally so only a few company's around the world make them.

We got eight 1MW gas turbines for a landfill site power generation project from Holland (of all places). Still works out economically and environmentally considering we have a guaranteed constant free gas supply of a few decades for this particular site.

if your country has huge reserve of Gas then you can recover the capital cost and R&M Cost from the cheap energy cost if you don't have gas reserve don't ever go near Gas turbine.

crm

My country hasn't huge gas reserves (in fact we have none) and we imported all gas. Well, not all... we have a pilot plant for coal gasification which maybe cover about 0.0001% of needs.

The cheaper energy now in my country (in €cents/kWh) is nuclear. But nuclear energy isn't popular, the investment cost in €/MW is higher than gas plants and the construction time is much longer than gas ones. That's the main reason we've erecting a lot of gas fired CCPP.

Of course some companies are erecting huge (by surface, not power) solar plants but just because the price paid for solar kWh to the companies is about 10 times the market price (trough payments by authorities with our taxes), otherwise those plants would be non profitable. But it seems "so green" and give votes...

NOTE: I do declare I'm rather environmentalist. But environmentalism according to my opinion goes through saving "all" resources as possible, and people use to forget that money is a resource too and shouldn't be wasted.

Best regards

We sell a lot of them because:

Our dollar is weak compared to most world currencies.

Some nations like China have a lot of US$ from the trade imbalance.

The citizens of these nations want to live like we do - multi auto households - electricity - central A/C -appliances etc.

These units can be up and on line in a couple of years with the right planning and scheduling.

Combustion efficiencies are higher than any internal combustion engine and most boilers that burn gas or oil.

Most combined cycle plants can start a turbine and be at peak KW output quickly - 10 to 20 minutes in most cases. A lot of these plants are used for "peaking" and may not be online 24/7.

Contrary to some other opinions here:

There still is a fair amount of auxillary equip. required. You need clean gas - so if you use industrial, landfill or other off gas - you need scrubbers and a filtering system and a gas compressor to feed the gas into the combustor. You may also need a deionized water plant to provide water for NOx control.

It makes little sense not to have some sort of waste heat recovery - so you will need what is basically an unfired steam or high temp hot water generator and all the associated auxillary equip and a customer who will buy this heat.

Ed