DISTRIBUTED ENERGY OFFERS ADVANTAGES IN FOOD PRODUCTION

With the nine MWM gas gensets, longterm complete maintenance contracts were signed for all plants.

“Iltekno’s experienced teams of technicians are located in many regions of Turkey, so we have never had any major problems with our plants, both during planned maintenance and during breakdowns in general,” says Tanrıkulu, praising Iltekno’s service.

Beypilic uses the CHP plants to supply their electricity to the company’s various divisions and cover almost all of the electricity requirements of the individual factories.

One of Turkey’s largest chicken meat producers covers a large part of its energy requirements with combined heat and power plants for generating electricity and heat. Iltekno, MWM’s distributor in Turkey, planned and supplied the plants.

Beypiliç, is one of Turkey’s largest chicken meat producers, a food company located in the province of Bolu. Beypiliç produces a wide range of poultry meat products at several plants in Bolu and near Ankara. Founded in 1979, the company is one of Turkey’s 100 largest industrial companies and employs almost 3,300 people.

In 2010, Beypiliç invested in a turnkey cogeneration plant with two MWM gas gensets, each with a capacity of 4.3 MWe, for its plant in Bolu. Iltekno, Caterpillar Energy Solutions’ regional distributor, supplied and installed the CHP.

With this CHP, a close partnership between Beypiliç and Iltekno developed which has lasted more than twelve years. Between 2010 and 2022, the co-operation was consolidated by further commissioning seven MWM gas gensets at several locations. In Bolu, for example, the capacity of the existing CHP plant was expanded by the purchase of two MWM TCG 2032 V16 gensets. This means that nine MWM gas gensets generate electricity and heat for Beypiliç. Poultry rearing facilities, slaughterhouses, feed production, and food production - all these divisions of Beypiliç require large amounts of energy and heat.

Hamdi Tanrıkulu, a member of Beypiliç’s board of directors, explains: “During our evaluations conducted in early 2010, considering that distributed energy systems would be more important in Turkey, we decided to invest in gasengined cogeneration power plants.

“Gas-engine systems have high electricity generation efficiency, high availability rates, and low maintenance costs, and they are suitable for stop-start operation, which attracted us as a much more suitable system than other distributed energy generation systems.

“Gas engines reach high efficiency and become very advantageous financially in the presence of points where the hot water obtained from the jacket water can be used within the facility.”

The thermal output of the CHP plants is mainly used to provide process steam for food production.

The electrical efficiency of the plants is 43.8 %; when heat is used, the overall efficiency is over 90 %.

Using cogeneration, Beypiliç has saved around 150,000 tons of CO2 since commissioning, compared with conventional energy supply. This is roughly equivalent to the amount of CO2 a passenger car would emit if it circled the earth 150 times.

Hamdi Tanrıkulu reports: “We have expanded our gas engine cogeneration power plant investment, which started in 2010, over the years, and reached nine engines in total.

“One of the important factors in making such big investments was our confidence in Iltekno and MWM, which has more than 150 years of experience.”

He concludes: “Our power plant investments of more than 12 years enabled us to make financial savings and provided us with uninterrupted and clean energy, which resulted in a serious competitive advantage in our favor.” www.mwm.net