The industry that turns otherwise wasted heat into electricity is poised to expand due to technology advances and rising infrastructure costs for centralized power, says an industry expert.

Technology to enable capture and transfer of waste heat has improved, Joseph Kiss, vice-president and general manager of Calgary-based Genalta Power Inc., said in a talk to the Sustainable Industrial Development for the 21st Century independent business-industry networking group in May 2012.

At the same time, the costs for infrastructure such as transmission lines are increasing in Alberta and elsewhere, Kiss said.

“We see a trend in energy costs and the cost of electrical power being fairly steady. But with the proposed infrastructure spending and capital investment that’s required on the transmission side of the business of the industry, there’s going to be significantly increased costs …”

Also, use of wind and solar energy is increasing. Kiss said that he supports both wind and solar power, but he noted that their intermittent nature requires that industry have a back-up that provides base-load power. Utilizing waste heat and fuel for power generation is an ideal “clean source” for base-load power, he said.

Waste heat-to-power has the potential to replace as much as 15 per cent of generating capacity in the U.S. where there are an estimated 420 trillion BTUs of “industrial waste heat,” he added.

About 50 per cent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal, according to the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. The U.S. emits close to 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year from coal-fired power plants, or 27 per cent of the country’s total emissions, C2ES says.

About 45 per cent of Alberta’s installed power-generation capacity consists of coal-fired plants. Electricity/heat generation accounted for 21 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions in the province in 2010 - the same percentage as the oil sands, according to Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development.

Former Alberta premier Ed Stelmach, who recently joined Genalta’s board, calls the company “an Alberta success story.” “Meeting the growing demand for energy and maintaining our natural environment are extremely important goals both here in Alberta and internationally,” he said.

“Developing innovative technologies that capture and convert waste energy into electricity provides solutions and helps the company’s clients meet these goals. I look forward to contributing my skills to this team,” Stelmach said.

The world-wide potential for waste heat recovery is enormous. “More than half of the energy consumed worldwide is wasted, most of it in the form of excess heat,” according to a news story on Gizmag.com

Not all waste heat is economically viable to recover. However, the Gizmag story says that research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology indicates it might be possible to harvest much of the wasted heat produced by everything from computer processors to car engines and power plants, and convert it into usable electricity.

Genalta is currently involved in converting waste heat to power in the oil and gas industry. The company plans to expand into other industries, including the chemical, lumber and manufacturing sectors as well as the cement manufacturing and other kiln-based industries that generate a lot of waste heat. The firm has opened an office in Ontario to establish links to that province’s manufacturing base.

Kiss pointed out that in addition to recovering energy from waste heat, energy also can be recovered from waste fuel and “waste pressure.”

“Say you have a pump that’s running in a facility that’s dealing with sweetening natural gas. Typically at the pump … we can recover the wasted energy associated with throttling down the pressure from high pressure to low pressure,” he said.

Genalta does all the design, engineering, and construction, with a 10- to 20-year power purchase agreement or operations agreement with the client.

“In many cases we own 100 per cent of the facilities, with the waste energy provider cooperating on the power participation agreement. Or in some cases we joint venture with the waste energy provider,” Kiss said.

The company, which has significant investment from Enbridge Inc., has grown to 23 employees from 10 in 2011 and plans to double staff again in 2013.

Genalta currently is in the construction stage for facilities producing a total of about six megawatts, with another 45 MW being discussed for the engineering stage, and another 50 MW in the bidding process for each stage, Kiss said.

The company does as much construction as possible offsite, which makes for an efficient building process, he said. He pointed to the new 3-MW Cadotte Waste Fuel to Power Project at a Husky Energyheavy oil battery that flares between 750,000 to one million cubic feet of natural gas per day. Genalta will turn much of that waste gas into power for the local distribution grid, while reducing flaring at the site by more than 80 per cent.

All the facility’s modules were preassembled, with the lease developed over the same time frame, Kiss said. The facility essentially was built over a couple of weeks in April 2012, he said. “We still have to do electrical interconnection, but in essence everything is there.”

There are several challenges for the waste heat-to-energy industry, including having to work with a complex regulatory framework that requires a lot of expertise, Kiss said. Genalta has hired an expert in the area who has been very successful in dealing with the protocols, he said.

The industry also is a capital-expensive business with a long payback that requires a 10- or 20-year term for power payments, Kiss said. “We’re utility … so there’s a very high upfront capital outlay for R&D.”

There is also a long business development cycle, with often two to three years between the initial contact with the fuel-providing company and the final negotiations. Access to capital also has been a challenge because Genalta owns and operates the power-generating facilities, Kiss said.

Also, with the rapid growth of the company and the high activity in the oil and gas industry in Alberta, Genalta has had to go as far as Ontario to recruit staff.

Despite the challenges, Genalta has competitors in the space such as Calgary-based NRGreen Power Limited Partnership, an independent power producer related to Alliance Pipeline.

Under a 20-year power agreement with SaskPower, NRGreen Power has built four, 5-MW waste heat power generation units in Saskatchewan. NRGreen Power will be adding its fifth waste heat recovery unit in western Canada, to be built at Alliance Pipeline’s Windfall compressor station near Whitecourt, Alberta.

The Whitecourt Recovered Energy Project will utilize General Electric’s patented ORegan power system to generate 14 MW of electricity, with no new emissions or water use.

The $64-million project is scheduled to be operational in the third quarter of 2013.