POWER-GEN Asia 2018

Sessions Speakers Exhibitors Products Press Releases Floor Plan Buzz

Japanese Energy Turn – From Nuclear Towards Biomass (Room Garuda 7A, 1st Floor)

20 Sep 18
11:30 AM - 1:00 PM

Tracks: TRACK G - Renewable Energy Strategy & Technology

Very unfortunate nuclear disaster in 2011 changed Japan’s power production portfolio completely. Before the accident there were more than fifty nuclear power plants in operation and now six years later only few of them has passed safety inspection and are back in operation. Quite soon after that Japanese government created feed-in-tariff (FIT) for renewable electricity including biomass. Plant owners are applying FIT package at early phase of project development before starting to purchase the plant. The FIT system allows also the co-combustion of fossil fuel but higher FIT price is paid for biomass share only. Valmet and Japanese JFE Engineering started co-operation in CFB boilers for Japanese market two years back. JFEE has a long experience of delivering power plants to Japanese customers as EPC basis. Joint project development led to the first CFB power plant contract in Japan in fall 2016 followed by three other projects in Japan by the end of Japanese fiscal year 2016. Valmet's delivery includes a biomass-fired CYMIC (CFB) boiler and flue gas cleaning system. Capacity in three of these plants is 75 MWe and one is 112 MWe. FIT system urges on investing in high efficiency production. All these new boilers are equipped with reheater and steam temperature is reasonably high 560/540°C for main steam and reheated steam respectively. FIT system encourage to maximize the use of biomass since the higher electricity price is paid only for portion produced by biomass. Japan is lacking domestic biomass sources and most of fuels are imported. To avoid quick increase in wood biomass price the plant owners include also agro based biomass, such as imported PKS (palm kernel shell) and EFB (empty fruit bunch) pellets into the fuel portfolio. This paper introduces these four projects, their design features and discuss about big change in Japanese energy market.