OREANDA-NEWS. December 30, 2009. Small-scale power generation will be more pronounced in Belarus in the next few years, said Prime Minister of Belarus Sergei Sidorsky as he visited the Pruzhany compact cogeneration plant in the Brest oblast.

“Every year we plan to build 20-30 compact cogeneration plants that will burn local fuels. It will rule out the dependence on imported raw stock, will maximize the localization of heating energy for regional towns. The decommissioning of ineffective heating generators will reduce budget costs by around 30-40%,” said Sergei Sidorsky. The projects will be implemented in area centers where one modern cogeneration plant can replace several outdated stations.

The Prime Minister said that over the last two years following an instruction of the head of state pilot projects have been implemented in Belarus in the area of small-scale power generation. Powered by local fuels using various technologies (Russian, Finnish, Austrian, Baltic ones), compact cogeneration plants have been built in Vileika, Bobruisk, Osipovichi, Pinsk, Pruzhany. The most effective project has to be chosen now to be replicated in numbers. The cogeneration plant in Pruzhany uses wood chips and peat as fuel and boasts the best energy effectiveness, with the performance factor close to 90%. The cogeneration plant can use wood chips with up to 60% humidity level without pre-drying it like other pilot projects require. Apart from that, it uses freshly-mined machine-cut peat.

The designed capacity of the Pruzhany cogeneration plant stands at 3.7 MW, the designed heating output – 11.85 Gcal/h. The project will allow saving around 900 tonnes of oil equivalent and 11 million cubic meters of natural gas per annum. Once the cogeneration plant is in place, the share of local fuels in the boiler and furnace fuels burnt in the Pruzhany region will increase from 46.5% (1 November 2009) to 75%.