Metso to supply combined heat and power biomass boiler plants to Finland and Latvia

Metso will supply boiler plants for the combined heat and power (CHP) cogeneration production to Fortum Power and Heat Oy in Järvenpää, Finland and to Fortum Jelgava SIA in Jelgava, Latvia. The plants will provide district heat to the towns of Järvenpää and Tuusula in Finland and Jelgava in Latvia, as well as electricity to the grid.

For both Järvenpää and Jelgava, Metso’s EPC delivery is a full-scope solution from fuel feeding to flue gas cleaning. The plants are designed to use biomass fuels including peat and some clean recycled wood, replacing natural gas and oil in the existing plants. The investments help to reduce CO2 emissions and increase the use of local biofuels in both the regions of Järvenpää and Jelgava.

The two boiler plants with approximately 70MWth steam capacity will use bubbling fluidised bed (BFB) technology. The boilers will produce high pressure steam of 117 bar(g) and 527 °C. The annual production of the Järvenpää plant is about 280GWh of heat and about 130GWh of electricity, whereas the Jelgava plant produces 230GWh of heat and 110GWh of electricity.

Fortum is currently expanding its CHP business in the Baltic Rim area. Their first CHP plant in Estonia, supplied by Metso, was started up in 2009, and they continued on to complete several other projects in the area. In these CHP plants Fortum invests in renewable energy production with high power-to-heat ratio. The Jelgava plant is the first biofuel plant of this scale in Latvia.

Biomass combined heat and power and cogeneration is particularly well-suited to Northern First Nations communities in Canada which have abundant biomass resources but limited or non-existent access to natural gas for heating or electricity from the grid. In Saskatchewan, I would expect that the First Nations Power Authority would be looking carefully at biomass combined heat and power projects for northern First Nations communities. There are numerous other opportunities across Canada for combined heat and power and cogeneration projects in the far North of Canada where heat and electricity is generated from diesel in many remote locations.