Bagasse energy cogeneration potential in the South African sugar industry

The paper explores the potential energy cogeneration effect of bagasse in the South African sugar industry. At the present moment very few sugar mills are exporting surplus electricity generated to the national grid. There is a need to take advantage of the abundant bagasse that is produced from the sugar industry through more efficient combustion processes to co-generate process steam and electricity for the supply to the grid. The industry also needs to take advantage of available technologies to efficiently generate electricity from bagasse using high pressure steam boilers. Using the current available technology the industry has a potential to produce about 3000 GWh per year and this is about 1.3% of the current generating capacity in South Africa. This translates to a generating capacity of 343 MW. Application of Integrated gasification combined cycle can result in 11000 GWh and this is about 5% of the current generating capacity at Eskom. In terms of MW this is equivalent to a generating capacity of 1255 MW. The other benefit derived from cogeneration is the1.619 kilo tonnes reduction in the use of coal which also translates to 2.84Mt of carbon dioxide. The cogeneration project will also improve the competitiveness of the sugar industry provided a viable price per KWh of electricity is agreed upon