District Heating Biomass Benchmark A unique district heating project is serving residents of a small B.C. community. By John Tenpenny implementing a dis-trict energy system, speed is not always the first thing you think of. Add in biomass and some people become even more skep-tical about undertaking such a project. But in the case of Fink District Energy in the Okanagan in British Columbia, the reality was quite different. After Burkhard Fink, founder and owner of Fink Machine Inc. in Enderby, B.C., got the go ahead in 2011 from the city to imple-ment the first privately-funded biomass dis-trict energy system in western Canada, only eight months passed between groundbreak-ing and the system becoming operational. Stephen Bearss, a renewable energy rep-resentative with Fink Machine, calls it a “benchmarking system. “Some people, es-pecially when they hear biomass and district energy, think it can be a long and drawn out process because of the technology, but the reality is when everyone is on board, the systems themselves can actually go together W HEN relatively quickly,” he says. “It’s a cost incen-tive from a construction standpoint that it doesn’t take two years to build.” Fink Enderby District Energy is the first privately-funded biomass district energy system operating as a Private Utility under 1 MW in western Canada (it is registered with the British Columbia Utilities Com-mission). The district system currently serves eight commercial, institutional and residential customers, including the local Lions Pool, which was the first building connected to the system and Fink Ma-chine building. Three more customers will be online by the spring of 2013, while there remains capacity for future growth. (The hotel is currently only using domes-tic hot water, but they intend to add space heating in the near future.) BOILER POWER water and pool heating for district cus-tomers. The fully-automatic Pyrot utilizes the an advanced combustion technology, triple-pass heat exchanger and modulat-ing output control to achieve an efficiency of 85 percent while keeping emissions to a minimum. Continuous gasification is car-ried out on the moving grate with mini-mal primary air. The combustible gases rise into the rotary combustion chamber and are mixed with secondary air that had been diffused by the rotation blower and given spin impulse. This guarantees a perfect mixture of secondary air with the combustible gases. A monitoring system and safety equipment ensure safe and reliable operation, while a 300 kW gas-fired boiler provides backup and additional capacity during peak loads, which Bearss says hasn’t The Fink Enderby District Energy project includes a custom-built boiler house with wood chip fuel storage Zmfc]jYf\oYdcaf_Ûggj^]]\kqkl]e& A KOB Viessmann Pyrot 540 wood-fired boiler (rated at 540 kW) is the primary source of space heating, domestic hot Canadian BIOMASS 15 Photos by Carrie Bearss/Imedge Photography
Canadian Biomass September/October 2012: Page 15
