It was intended that by the end of the project the high efficiency performance would be validated. Regrettably, this will now occur 4 months after M36. It is known the initial A400 will only achieve 75-80% of the original specification relating to electrical output and efficiency. The necessary changes and enhancements will take until mid-2023 to be implemented. Notwithstanding this, the A400 does perform and is uniquely operating on synthetic gas. The A400 successfully undertook customer acceptance testing at Aurelia’s facility.
A400 is the first turbine in the world that successfully addresses the power and heat demand of small-scale process and SME industry. The energy consumed by SMEs - our target market - represents globally around 13% of total energy consumption, while in Europe this value reaches 20%.
The A400 has been designed with the strategic innovation of being able to operate on a wide variety of fuels. Growing interest in exploiting renewable fuels makes the A400 an obvious choice, being able to run on biogas, hydrogen-rich synthetic gases from industrial processes, biomass gasification, “lean gases” (high proportion of inert gas content, such as nitrogen and CO2) and even pure hydrogen. This means that the A400 is ideally suited to be coupled with renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power, where “power to gas” (P2G) is being used to store excess capacity, the resulting hydrogen or methane being suitable fuels for the A400.
CHP solutions are inherently designed to boost the efficiency of companies’ energy efficiency, to reduce costs, and in turn fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. FUTURBINE is completely aligned with this objective of the EU Green Deal and the REPowerEU initiative, providing a high-efficiency CHP solution, specifically targeted to a market segment that is underrepresented in taking advantage of this technology; that being SMEs, as well as helping achieve sustainable power generation without relying upon fuel supplies from a country under the control of an authoritarian and exploitative regime.
At its most dramatic, FUTURBINE gives companies the ability to reduce their CO2 emissions to zero, or close to it, by using hydrogen fuel (from P2G for example), or biogas (which is considered to have no net additional CO2), or industrial process syngas and allow the EU to start to execute of its desire to become self-sufficient on energy production away from Russian gas.
