Photo credit: Cogenra
Cogenra Solar has announced that it will be installing the first solar cogeneration project at a healthcare facility in the U.S. at Tucson Medical Center in southern Arizona. The application will provide solar electricity and solar hot water for the hospital’s power plant using cogeneration. By combining photovoltaic panels capturing sunlight to generate electricity and solar thermal technologies to trap the excess heat coming off the panels to produce hot water, solar cogeneration maximizes the efficiency of a solar installation while significantly cutting utility costs for customers.
By utilizing a 46 module, 115kW system on the roof of the power plant, the hospital expects to reduce natural gas consumption by 7,000 therms as well as save $8,500 annually on energy costs. The system will produce 31,600 kWh of electricity for the building(s) and will heat 5,300 gallons of water per day for hospital to feed to its reverse osmosis hot water boiler. “We use thousands of gallons of hot water every day. As a community hospital, decreasing our natural gas consumption and energy bills is very important, and solar cogeneration offers a way to address those needs,” said Richard Prevallet from TMC.
This technology is certainly catching on in commercial settings, as the Kendall-Jackson Winery recently installed the nation’s largest cogeneration system and Maui Brewing Company has decided to install a similar system on the roof of their building. In an interview with Alternative Energy Magazine, Cogenra’s CEO Gilad Almogy said that a typical solar cogen system averages a 4 to 6 year payback period, which is about one half that of a typical solar-only installation.
Here’s a handy infographic on how solar cogeneration works:
