Trigeneration

Overview

Trigeneration or combined cooling, heat and power (CCHP) expands the basic idea of cogeneration by additionally producing cooling energy when generating electricity and useful heat simultaneously in one combined process. Information provided in this article is based on the Cogeneration & Trigeneration Guidepublished by GIZ.

Applications

All fields of Cogeneration application can be considered as a potential application of trigeneration, when -in addition to electricity and heating demand -there is a need for cooling. For instance, trigeneration plants are commonly found in centralheating and cooling systems for hospitals, hotels and industrial plants.

Technologies

Trigeneration systems are typically a combination of cogeneration plants and chillers to produce electricity, heat and cooling energy in one process. Waste heat is thereby converted to chilled water, either by absorption or adsorption chiller technology.