The Renewable Energy Center is in the process of getting all the boilers up and running to full capacity.

Chad Weber, campus mechanical engineer, said they have three of the four boilers in place, and the three that have been in place have been up and running. The fourth boiler will come over from the current power plant.

Weber said they are working at getting the boilers up to the specified performance, and it will not be long before the facility is in full operation.

In the future, there are plans to burn other bio-mass fuel sources such as willow trees, but that will not be for a while, Weber said.

“During the first performance year of the facility it has to run on wood chips,” he said.

Weber said that the university is investigating whether it would be profitable to sell the ash, but it is not known if there is a viable market for it.

Weber said when things are up in full swing, trucks of wood chips will come in, be weighed and then be hoisted up right at a 60-degree angle to dump the chips out of the truck.

From there the chips are screened to remove any foreign materials.

He said then they will sit in the building until needed at which point a conveyor will move the chips along the way and into the gasification unit and finally into the boiler units.

Marcus Smith can be reached at 581-7942 or masmith6@eiu.edu

Construction workers work on the roof framework of the Renewable Energy Center Sept. 22, 2010. (File Photo

(more…)