A research team in Europe has finally put together what we’ve been waiting for – open access to all the ORC plants installed worldwide!
This brilliant piece of work was published online by Thomas Tartiere, Project Manager at Enertime and is a perfect resource for our members who want to know more about this technology and its associated markets. The site can be viewed at here.
The objective is to provide an overview of the ORC market, at the industrial level. This means that small ORC plants at the lab scale or that are not connected to the grid have been ignored. An exception has been made for demo plants that are not connected to the grid but have a significant power output of several hundreds kilowatts / several megawatts. Similarly, ORC plants with a total installed capacity lower than 50 kWe are not referenced.
The worldwide survey of ORC plants shows the extensive development of ORC technology over the last few decades – but it’s not exhaustive. Some manufacturers do not publish their list of references and declined to take part to that survey. As of January 2016, the remaining references do not represent more than 30 MW of installed capacity. Geothermal power plants still maintain the lead in terms of power output but an increase in biomass and heat recovery applications shows theres still growth in this market to come for our members.
Congratulations to the European researchers for providing the ORC community with such an open access informative ORC tool!