Radio Havana Cuba's Science, Technology and Environment Program:
BREAKTHROUGHFor broadcast Sunday, December 10, 2000
Written and narrated by Arnaldo "Arnie" Coro, RHC's Science Editor
Hello and once again welcome to Breakthrough, our Science, Technology and the Environment update, I am Arnaldo, Arnie, Coro, RHC's Science Editor and today I have a really very interesting news item to share with you. Cuba is about to start the nation's first-ever sugar cane harvest in which a sugar mill will NOT, and I repeat this, will not make SUGAR, but instead WILL BE USED TO GENERATE ELECTRICITY from the biomass.
During more than 80 days of the upcoming harvest season, using renewable biomass fuel, the sugar mill Eduardo Garcia Lavandero, located in Artemisa, Havana province, will start the first-ever production run to exclusively generate electricity during the national electrical system's peak load hours. Some one hundred and forty tons of sugar cane leaves will be transported to the mill and, together with the bagass that comes from crushing the sugar cane, will be ground and cleaned to remove the soil, in order to make it adequate for burning in the mill's steam generators with high efficiency.
This "electrical harvest," as some engineers are describing it, will have a significant economic impact in that industry's annual budget, as they will sell all the available electricity to the National Electrical Industry at a profit. The first tests, which took place starting December 3, were succesful. According to Frank Lopez, the sugar mill's manager, the plant will generate electricity from biomass online 4 hours every day for 80 consecutive days, and they will thus help do what is known among electrical power company engineers as "peak shaving," that is helping the system to cope with the hours of maximum demand from its customers which. here in Cuba during our winter season, span from 6 pm to 10 pm.
The Eduardo Garcia Lavandero sugar mill will need to start up its boilers or steam generators two hours before the peak begins, so they will need to have biomass fuel available for six hours per day, according to Lopes. Some 30 workers will handle the operation of the machinery and equipment needed to operate the sugar mill in this mode, during which it will generate some four megaWatts of electricity per hour. But not all those four thousand kilowatts will go to the national system -- they will be able to sell just about 2.3 megaWatts, because their plant will use the rest to power up all the equipment. Although this may not sound too efficient, in actual practice, and under Cuban conditions it is... every kilowatt hour of electricity that is generated from biomass and not from fuel oil saves the nation foreign currency, and also reduces the atmospheric pollution.
Now we will have to wait and see how this experimental project works. Frank Lopez and his workers are very enthusiastic about it; they will try hard to make it as efficient as possible, and above all reduce the state-provided subsidies to the industry that, for several reasons, cannot run this year a regular sugar manufacturing harvest season. Instead of leaving the plant idling, the novel idea of using the installation to generate biomass-fuelled electricity is a good example of how Cuban engineers and technicians are helping the nation's economic programs with their ingenuity and creativity.
According to world-renowned renewable energy experts, Cuba has a tremendous potential to increase the production of biomass, which is already providing the national economy with about twenty percent of all its needs, but which can be substantially increased if higher efficiency co-generation technologies can be incorporated into the sugar cane industry.
And this was Breakthrough for today -- how Cuban engineers have just tested and have ready to go a sugar mill that this year will generate electricity from biomass as its only output. From Havana I am Arnaldo, Arnie, Coro, RHC's Science editor now wishing you nice reception of our programs.
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