Easy Hydro, a spinout from Trinity College Dublin, has been awarded a €49,000 Booster grant from the EU consortium EIT RawMaterials to build a pilot energy recovery installation at Tara Mines in Navan. As a part of a collaboration between Easy Hydro and the site owner Boliden, a novel type of water turbine will be commissioned to recover energy from the underground water mains carrying fresh water down the mine.
The site
It has been decided to place the Easy Hydro turbine in parallel to an existing pressure reducing station on a DN150 pipeline carrying clean water from the surface.
With an average flow rate of 22 l/s and a pressure drop of 21 bar, the turbine will output up to 30 kW of clean renewable energy resulting in yearly savings of over 200 MWh of electricity otherwise imported from the grid. Such amount of energy corresponds to the annual consumption of nearly 50 average Irish households.
The proposed installation will directly offset over 60 tons of CO2 per year, and such technology if replicated over a number of other similar locations within the same mine has the potential to significantly reduce the current carbon footprint of Tara Mines.
Besides, the expected payback time of the installation is between 2 and 3 years and considering an equipment life of 25 years the generated energy will feature an extremely low Levelized Cost Of Electricity (LCOE).
This work is highly relevant to our wider sustainability agenda and compatible with the underground mining operations carried out by Boliden Tara Mines
Paschal Walsh, Boliden’s Environmental, Health, Safety & Energy Manager
This project in collaboration with Boliden and EIT RawMaterials is an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the applicability of the unique Easy Hydro energy recovery technology in the mining sector
Daniele Novara, Easy Hydro’s Managing Director
Description of the technology
Small-scale and modular hydropower turbines which can be installed along existing pipe networks. Such turbines can be placed in a bypass of an existing valve, e.g. pressure reducing valves, control valves, tank inflow regulation valves. The turbine can thus transform the dissipated pressure into usable electricity, with power outputs ranging from a few kilowatts up to hundreds of kilowatts.
The type of turbine adopted is reliable and widely tested and consists of standard pumps running in reverse as turbines (PAT – Pumps As Turbines) which only cost a fraction of a conventional custom-made hydro turbine.
Features:
The turbines consist of standard water pumps running in reverse mode
Range of power output from 1 to 300+ kW, range of flows from 15 to 3,600+ m3/h, range of pressure from 1 to 300 bar
Benefits:
Low installation cost, just a fraction of a conventional turbine (Francis, Pelton, Crossflow…)
Easy maintenance, as pump spare parts and skilled technicians are easily available
Modular system, plug and play
Fail-safe bypass and hands-off operations
Values:
Exploiting an untapped potential within an existing pipe infrastructure
Reducing the electricity needs and CO2 emissions of a mine
The rights to use the pump-as-turbine selection software has been granted to the Venture by Trinity College Dublin.
The selection software enables an accurate selection of the most suitable hydraulic pump (end-suction, inline, multistage, split-case) to work as a turbine for any given site. Until now, the available alternatives were either experimentally testing many different pumps in reverse or performing a numerical CFD simulation to predict their performances – both extremely time and resource consuming methods.
Screenshot of exemplary results from the software.
The 3 kW peak pico pump-as-turbine designed by the Easy Hydro team has been operating for the last 12 months. The turbine is located at the inlet of a gravity-fed raw water supply line, and contributes to reducing the energy demand of the adjacent treatment works by nearly 20%.
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