A Tiny Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Turbine Can Power 10,000 Homes
18th July 2024
The familiar steam turbines in wide use at power plants today are based on 19th century technology. They typically range in size from less than 100 kilowatts to more than 250 megawatts, depending on the use case. When used to generate electricity in a central power plant they are massive beasts the size of a bus or larger.
Supercritical carbon dioxide turbines are different. They don’t deploy steam as a working fluid. Instead, they use a concentrated form of carbon dioxide — sCO2 for short — that hovers somewhere between a gas and a liquid.
The Energy Department anticipates that new supercritical carbon dioxide turbines can shave energy consumption at power plants by 10%, but that’s just for starters. They have a much smaller footprint than their steam-driven cousins, resulting in manufacturing efficiencies all along the supply chain.
Which supply chain, alas, does not yet exist.
The independent R&D organization Southwest Research Institute is a leading partner in the project along with the firms GTI Energy and GE Vernova. Construction of the building shell took place between 2018 and 2020, followed by the startup of a supercritical CO2 compressor earlier this year.
In the latest update from SwRI, the team has just marked the completion of the mechanical work on the system, including new turbines that are about 1/10 the size of a conventional steam turbine.
Though only about the size of an office desk, household refrigerator, pony, credenza, or golf cart, the new turbines are powerful enough to generate the electricity equivalent of 10,000 typical homes.
Or will, once they get it into operation, which doesn’t seem to be happening all that quickly.