Cutting Tool Manufacturer Reaps Economic Benefits from Cogen System

According to Turwitt, large and small factories alike can benefit from using cogeneration as means for controlling and significantly reducing energy costs. He adds, “Units can be customized from 50 kW to 10 MW. The sky is the limit.”

Ray Martino, the president of Simonds International, said that the facility is the largest and is inherently energy intensive of their 12 plants worldwide. The company runs operations 24 hours a day, every day, and it doesn’t help that the state of Massachusetts has one of the highest electricity costs in the country.

Martino knew that the company had to lower the energy costs to remain competitive within the market. He said, “We first looked into biomass and solar installations, but ultimately settled on CHP, which is the process of taking natural gas and going through a conversion process to generate electricity.

The by-product, heat, which would normally go ‘up the stack’ is captured and converted into heat, hot water, cold water, and air conditioning for the factory and office. It’s a closed-loop system that reduces waste, emissions and cuts our electrical costs by more than 40 percent.”

This worked for the company because the technology best suits manufacturing facilities that have a level load and steady demand for energy coming from the system. It took two years to implement the system from start to finish.

Since the installment, the cogeneration process has resulted in overall electric and thermal efficiencies close to 90 percent, compared to most utility power plants operating in the 33 percent efficiency range. It is estimated to save the company approximately 40 percent in annual energy costs in the facility where the plant was installed while drastically reducing CO2 emissions and water use.

Martino touts the benefits of the cogen system. He said, “It lowers our costs, which helps our customers, but ultimately it demonstrates the forward thinking nature of a 180-year-old company that continues to be innovative. It gives our customers confidence that we’re always looking for ways to do things better.” He adds, “The project has exceeded our expectations: cost of natural gas has declined since we originally justified the project. So the actual raw material going into the CHP is less expensive.”

Simonds’ plant managers and engineers want to continue with their green initiatives and reducing waste. In the company’s Fitchburg plant, they recently installed a SWARF recovery system. Martino says, “Metal waste which is difficult to recycle due to being contaminated with oil is put through a briquetter that extracts the oil and puts it back in the tank for re-use. This dramatically reduces the amount of oil going into the waste stream and allows us to recycle the metal waste.”

Simonds International, 135 Intervale Road, P.O. Box 500, Fitchburg, MA 01420, (978) 424-0100, www.simonds.cc.

2G CENERGY Power Systems Technologies, Inc., 205 Commercial Drive, St. Augustine, FL 32092, 904-579-3217, Fax: 904-406-8727, www.2g-cenergy.com.