An old coal-fired power station in Nijmegen blew up in early October. Is there no other option for discarded coal-fired power stations, such as converting them into biomass power stations?
The announced closure of sometimes brand new coal-fired power stations comes across as enormous capital destruction. Is there no other way? Can we repurpose coal-fired power stations? For example, by letting them burn biomass rather than coal? Can parts be reused? Or can we convert them into a hydrogen factory?
Five hundred people stood on a dike near the Gelderland town of Weurt this spring. The faces and cameras looked intently across the water of the Maas-Waal Canal to the other side. There is the gigantic silhouette of Gelderland 13, the old but familiar coal-fired power station for Weurt with an eighty-meter high boiler house and a chimney twice as high.
NASTY STREAM
A siren sounds in the distance. Before we even realize it, the chimney is surrounded about a third of the way up by a black ring of spraying grit. When a few moments later a few deafening bangs seem to hit my chest, the top of the chimney has already carefully started its 165 meter long journey down.
Five seconds later the chimney has disappeared in a cloud of dust. A wave of excitement goes through the audience. It's gone: the 'pipe' that was a kind of home beacon for a lifetime. "Now I can't find my way back to Nijmegen," jokes an onlooker. The two brand new wind turbines next to the coal-fired power station hardly fill the void.
Coal-fired power stations are the 'dirtiest' form of generating electricity. Even though many harmful substances are now filtered from flue gases, coal power produces more than twice as much carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour as, for example, electricity from gas. Dutch politicians therefore made a radical break with coal in 2019 and laid down in law that coal burning for electricity will no longer be allowed from 2030.
But what should be done with a coal-fired power plant costing billions that is less than ten years old? Breaking down? That is pure capital destruction. Is there really no other solution? The engineer looked at the possibilities.
CUTTING ON BIOMASS
The low hanging fruit has been picked. After old coal-fired power stations, such as Gelderland 13, which dates from the early 2s, have been closed, it is now the turn of the newer ones. From the perspective of greenhouse gases, this seems a logical choice. Take the Onyx Centrale Rotterdam. It alone accounts for almost 2 percent of total Dutch COXNUMX emissions.
Moreover, the construction of solar and wind farms is now really gaining momentum and they can partially compensate for the loss of the power stations. Onyx only became operational in 2015; The Dutch government announced at the end of last year that it wanted to compensate the owners for more than two hundred million euros to close the plant.
Can't that be done smarter and cheaper? For example, by keeping a power station and burning a less harmful fuel in it? This is already happening at various power stations. The most advanced is the Amercentrale in Geertruidenberg, North Brabant. A coal-fired power plant from 1993 that, according to owner RWE, now runs on biomass for 80 to 90 percent.
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