Steaming ahead: Are community boilers the answer?

DW (English)

Many of India's 10 million small-scale industrial producers rely on their own low-efficiency boilers to generate steam for their production process. Shared community boilers can cut costs and emissions.

Transcript

00:00Violet, purple, yellow, green.

00:05To get colours like these to bond with the fabric and be properly durable, you need a

00:10lot of hot steam.

00:12Temperatures in this factory reach 120 degrees Celsius.

00:18Each of these fabrics is run through a cycle of steam for up to 12 minutes.

00:24Basically it forms a loop kind of thing.

00:27The loop stays inside and the steam fixes the colour in the yarn and then develops it.

00:34So this is the final product that comes out of it.

00:37We are at Uday Fashion, a textile company in Surat, the second largest commercial hub

00:43in the state of Gujarat.

00:45Steam is a key source of energy here.

00:48There are about 2000 different manufacturers in the city's industrial area, many of which

00:54are small scale.

00:56Around 80% are powered by process heat, steam.

01:01However, many of the boilers used to produce the steam are coal fired, old and inefficient.

01:08The machines are often far larger than necessary, especially for small production units in the

01:14informal sector.

01:16And there's a lack of knowledge about how to operate them properly and efficiently.

01:21The combined effect of all of this is that you don't have boilers running at optimal

01:26efficiencies.

01:27And often they don't even run throughout the whole day.

01:30So you have a lot of starts and stops and overall inefficiency in the system, which

01:36means you are using excess fuel.

01:38Often there's a lot of wastage in terms of heat loss or steam loss.

01:43And therefore, when you think in terms of environmental impact, the emissions are more

01:47than what they optimally should be, both in terms of greenhouse gases as well as air pollution.

01:54But efforts are being made to improve the situation.

01:57Not far from the textile factory, Steam House runs a community boiler system.

02:02It serves nearly 45 companies in the industrial area through a 12-kilometre network of pipes.

02:09The system is continuously monitored to ensure it is running as efficiently as possible.

02:14The boilers are equipped with filters to reduce the emission of harmful particulate matter.

02:20The pollution control starts from the procurement of the fuel, I will say.

02:24So since small industries generally buy coal on retail, they don't have much of quality

02:29control.

02:30They cannot control the quality of coal that they are buying.

02:32While we are buying on shiploads or we are buying it on a bulk load, where we involve

02:37a third party inspector and we see that the coal that we have designed or we desire for

02:43is actually achieved.

02:45We go for low sulphur and low ash coal.

02:49Steam House currently operates community boilers in six industrial clusters across Gujarat,

02:54distributing hot steam to nearly 180 customers.

02:58Uday Fashion has also been a Steam House customer for six years.

03:03The manager says the advantages are clear.

03:06He only buys as much steam from Steam House as his factory needs at any given time.

03:14If you are installing your own boiler, you are producing your own steam.

03:18So there is a fixed cost for the amount of coal used to fuel it.

03:22Then it doesn't matter whether you use the steam, it produces or not.

03:26You have to bear the expense month after month.

03:30But so far, there are only a few companies in India that operate such large-scale boiler systems.

03:37There are several reasons for this.

03:39Firstly, the investment costs are high.

03:42Secondly, not all industrial parks have enough space for such a large plant.

03:47Also, businesses from different sectors have different needs.

03:52If someone somewhere, let's say in Surat, has utilised a community boiler,

03:58let's say for textile application,

04:00but someone who is in food processing, their process needs are very different.

04:03So they may need the steam at a different temperature or pressure,

04:07at different times during the day,

04:10and they may have a different set of sizes and combinations of processes.

04:17We head to a dairy 50 kilometres away.

04:21Steam house on Surat's industrial park is now too far away to be able to supply steam here.

04:27But the dairy needs around 45 tonnes of it every day.

04:35At our dairy, we are handling just under 450,000 litres of milk per day.

04:40So we need a lot of steam to pasteurise the milk.

04:44Steam is very important for the dairy business.

04:47As well as boiling the milk, we also need it to clean the containers we use.

04:56Instead of burning coal to produce steam, the dairy has been using biomass briquettes,

05:02fuel made from crop waste, for more than 10 years.

05:06The coal they used to use was transported over long distances and was often of poor quality.

05:12They have saved a lot of money by switching to biomass fuel.

05:19It is readily available.

05:21We can get it from the surrounding area and the local farmers also benefit.

05:26If we use waste from their sugarcane crops, they get something out of it too.

05:34But if you rely on agricultural waste to produce fuel, consistency is an issue.

05:40Biomass fuel burns and heats at different levels, depending on what it is made from.

05:47The quality of fuel.

05:49The bio coal industry is not so far so grown and very efficient.

05:53There are a number of quality deviations.

05:56There is ash content, clinker formation.

05:59These are the few constraints that we have to constantly monitor on the bio coal.

06:03We have to establish our own bomb calorimeter to check the quality of coal very frequently.

06:10Meanwhile, in Vapi, Steam House India is testing the use of waste paper to generate steam.

06:17It would be more efficient to produce it with electricity, preferably from renewable sources of course.

06:23India is a long way from that.

06:26But switching to community boilers is a first step in the right direction.

06:33For more information, visit www.fema.gov

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