[SOUND] Here we are at the Abbott Power Station in Champaign, Illinois. And this is a remarkable building because we are actually able to make a significant fraction of the electricity that the university uses right here on campus. And more importantly, the waste heat, the stuff that we've talked about that normally doesn't get utilized, that you're turning the losses in the heat engine, are utilized here to warm the campus. The excess heat goes through the steam tunnels to the radiators throughout campus. How many megawatts and the heating, cooling of electricity? >> [LAUGH] Total megawatts, I believe if this place were in full capacity- >> Full capicity. >> Full running, we have about a 80 to 85 MW capacity. Typically, I would say we're putting out about 40 to 45 MW. >> Okay, and that's thermal output, right? >> That's electrical output. >> That's electrical, we can do that much electricity. Remember when we were talking about how to make electricity, I said that we burn something, in this case, coal, and it boils water. And I made a quick statement, I said the walls of the furnace, of the thing they're burning the coal in, are made out of water. Well, really, they're made out of tubes that carry the water, all right? And here's a wonderful picture. Because if we get to look in the boiler itself, you don't really see this, but each of these are pipes. And inside here is where fire is happening, okay? And that's how you really get heat transfer to the water, which then turns into steam. One of these broke once, I remember, and that's bad. >> [LAUGH] >> Now, fortunately, it didn't hurt anybody. But a steam explosion, all power plants have some danger. And the biggest danger, usually, is when the boiler, the thing you're trying to make steam in, somehow gets over pressured and could explode. You have turbines, right? Well, the steam goes through the turbines, and it's got stationary blades called stators and ones that rotate called rotors. And this is one of them. There' six of these turbines along here. They're the large white cylindrical things that you see, half under the floor, half above the floor. Well, here's one that's taken apart. I believe these are all some of the original 1940s equipment. They used to all be green, now they've repainted them. It looks good. And, clearly, they go through periodic maintenance. So, steam is made in the boiler. That steam then comes through the turbine, which spins and relieves the pressure from the steam. Those turbines then go into generators. And the generators are right here with us. If you look carefully inside this turbine, you'll see all these grooves, and those are the grooves that have the stator and then the rotor, the stator and then the rotor. They're immediately connected on the shaft to the generator. And each of those generators are able to make 7.5 megawatts of electricity. So, once again, there's a permanent magnet, or maybe an electromagnet, and you move a coil of wire inside the magnet that pushes the electrons back and forth on the wire. And that's the whole deal, then we got electricity. And because this is a combined plant, this is a plant where we use that steam to warm buildings. The steam that comes out of the turbine is not put through a condenser and a cooling tower. That steam is used to actually deliver to your buildings where you live, go to the dorm. The dorm is the condenser. You are the cooling tower, right? You get the excess steam, the heat from it, which then comes back to the plant and is able to be boiled again. Okay, everyone, this is the coolest part ever. You're going to get to look into the burning gates of hell, all right? >> Right here, this is where the coal is actually burning, inside the boiler. I'll open the door and show you the size of the fire. >> What you're seeing is the coal actually moving towards us, all right? And it's burning, it's slowly a grate coming down, all right? Keep going past, so everyone can see, all right? And that's all the ash, the burn final coal, drops into the ash bin. The other coal is thrown on top of this. You can actually see and feel the heat from generating electricity. The walls of the contraption have those pipes, and that's where the steam is made, which then runs through the turbines, which spin the generators. You could take steam that goes through a system and keep it an infinite closed loop. That's very important, because the stuff that goes through the turbines has to be very clean. If it's not, you're going to have to eventually scale up the turbines and ruin them. But some of your dorms leak, right? You hear the steam traps, you've got drips. All of the steam doesn't come back as water. So you've gotta add water. And we think, city water, it's wonderful. No, it's not wonderful. It's full of chlorine, fluorine, all sorts of stuff. So they have to purify all the water first before they boil it. Otherwise, we'd eventually take these machines that have been running like clockwork for 75 years and destroy them. So that's the part that makes electricity. But half of this plant is devoted to getting rid of the pollution. They're getting rid of the stuff that doesn't burn, right? And we'll go on and see some more of that. What we saw there were things that were 1940s technology. The slowly moving grate bringing the coal. This is this century. This is the 2000's technology. This is using natural gas to spin a turbine. In fact, it's very much like a jet engine on an airplane. You put in the fuel and it spins. And it exhausts the exhaust. But instead of that exhaust simply pushing an airplane, that exhaust produces more circular motion by going through a turbine, by going through fans, and those turbines then spin a generator. So, here, we skip the step of boiling water. We don't have to boil the water to make the steam, it's the exhaust, it's the hot carbon dioxide in water vapor that you get from burning methane that turns the turbine that spins the generator. Now in the end, you still have hot gas. And these are combined cycle plants. So you then use that to also boil some water and put it through a normal steam cycle. This type of system uses that waste heat twice. First, you're turning the generator by the exhaust. And then you're turning the generator by making steam. You actually get a higher net efficiency. Think the efficiency is going to be on 40% or maybe a little higher than 40%. Whereas the coal-burners making electricity, it's more around 33%. We can't really see inside there because you've got an operating, jet engine airplane, bigger than any jet engine airplane, right? This doesn't fy. There we go, this is what's inside there, the Titan 130 gas turbine. Now, one thing you've noticed is the scale of this plant, right? It's huge. Keep in mind that an actual regular commercial power plant is about 20 times bigger. This is a peanut on the electric grid. The scale and magnitude of the effort made to make electricity in the world, or in the country, is truly huge. These things look big. Just imagine stuff 20 times bigger. When you have coal, a lot of it doesn't burn. At least 10% of all the coal is actually stuff that can't burn. It's not carbon, it's basically rock. Yet it gets pulverized and turned into ash. And some of that ash is so lightweight it's called fly ash, because it flies away. In the old days you'd simply put it up the smokestack and everyone near a coal powered plant would be covered in soot. And you get it in your lungs and that would be bad. It's got sulfur in it, sulfur trioxide in it. And the sulfur turns into sulfuric acid and you breathe it in and people near a coal power plants die and get asthma. Terrible. So pollution control is very important and that's been recognized in the United States for a very long time. And one of the easiest ways to get rid of that fly ash is with these awesome contraptions. These are called electrostatic precipitators and they use a static charge just like if you're shuffling your feet on the ground right, and then go up and shock someone. Shock you one, right? All right, the same way that you do that it puts an electric charge on the dust. And then the dust sticks to these metal panels that have the charge on it. And every now and then the dust gets so heavy, or do you guys actually have clappers that hit them? >> Got clappers. >> Yeah, yeah, hear that? I have a big hammer that hits the plate and the dust falls off. And it falls onto these chutes, right there. That's the clappers hitting the plates, knocking the dust off. 40s technology, all right. And this dust then is entrained and taken out to that big giant ash bin outside. Every night trucks come, probably two trucks of ash a day, I think? >> We'll get the trucks that bring in the coal. >> Right. >> Once I unload, probably two to four of them. >> And they're probably ten a day of coal, I think? >> Ten to 15. >> Ten to 15, so 10 to 15 semi-trailers each day bring coal to the power plant. Somewhere between two and four of them fill up with ash and take it back. Which probably gets put back into the mine or some other place that the coal came out of, right? It's the rock that's left over from the coal. So getting this out, getting the ash out with the electrostatic precipitator, is a wonderful way such that when you have the big chimney you aren't spewing ash everywhere else. There's also something that comes out along here and that's some of the heavy metals. Because, in coal is probably every element there is. And some of those elements you really don't want in the environment, like mercury. So, along with this ash is trapped some of those heavy metals as well. And I believe they're separated in another spot, aren't they? Can we see that, or? >> Scrubber building. >> Scrubber building. >> Scrubber building, all right. So we will go on to both the heavy metal recovery and very importantly, the sulfur dioxide, which is a gas. And that's the gas that causes acid rain. Let's go find out how to get rid of it next. In Illinois in particular, we have what's called high-sulphur coal. An avid power plant was designed originally to show the world that you can even take high-sulfur coal and burn it cleanly. So we have some of the most efficient scrubber systems that exists. And we're demonstrating to the world that Illinois coal is usable and is salable. And can be done safely and economically. Even though this pollution aspect is maybe half the cost of the plant, that's fine. Because it's very important to be able to use energy resources cheaply. And even though half the cost is the scrubber systems, it still is an extremely economic form of fuel. So what do they do? Well, all the smoke that you saw burning in that fire goes through this tank, comes in at the top before we got to the chimney. So it's gone through the electrostatic precipitators, gotta stop the dust. But that 5% of the sulfur turns into sulfur dioxide. Not surprising that as you burn carbon you get carbon dioxide. You burn sulfur you get sulfur dioxide. That's great, you get a little energy from it but sulfur dioxide is not very healthy. When sulfur dioxide goes up in the air, particularly if it's attached to pieces of dust, it turns to sulfur trioxide, which then if it meets water, turns into sulfuric acid. If you breathe this in, guess what? That little dust particles that have the sulfur trioxide on them. Where's the first water they're going to hit? Your lung tissue. Anyone that has asthma has a real problem living in an environment that has sulfur dioxide around. So we gotta get it out. But remember it is not a solid, it's a gas, so how are you going to do it? The only way to do it is to react it with something else. So there's another important input of the coal power plant. They bring in coal, obviously you have to have water that you turn into steam. That's a closed loop. The other thing you bring in is gravel, calcium carbonate, limestone. You take crushed limestone and it's sitting in the bottom of this tank. And that gas bubbles through it. It's a slurry. It's a water mix of this limestone. And the water, the gas comes through this water, bubbling through ferociously. After all, we've got 40 megawatts of electricity being made right now. 120 megawatts of thermal power. All of that smoke comes through here, bubbles through, and in that reaction the sulfur dioxide combines the calcium carbonate and makes calcium sulfate. Calcium sulfate is also known as gypsum. Many of you had a house that had drywall. Almost all walls of American houses are drywall. Drywall is gypsum. We're making something that's really inert, very safe. You could even make wall board out of it. Actually they just landfill this stuff because it's not valuable enough. To make wall board out of. But we will see the gypsum coming out. So we take gravel plus the smoke, turn it into gypsum. That gets something like 99% of the sulfur dioxide out of the smoke. And then the rest can go up. So, here we are at the end of the scrubber unit. And this stuff, this is the gypsum, this is the calcium sulfate. And this, if you dried it, compressed it, maybe cleaned it a little more, right, is wall board. This is the stuff in dry wall. Now, how did it get here? Remember those large tanks? This takes all of the exhaust, all of the pollution, all of the smoke, and it bubbles it through a water limestone mix. That sulfur that's in that water gets converted to calcium carbonate, which is a solid. And this stuff sinks, sinks to the bottom of the. And then there's a pump, pump's it out, it comes up over here. And now, you've got water still, right? And if you touch this, which I think is fine, right? Yeah, you guys can touch this, too, right? Have a handful, okay? It's warm because, of course, everything here is making heat. But they suck the water out of it with a vacuum pump, return the water, and the solid material, endlessly comes through. This was all once sulfur that was in the. And then it was turned into a gas, and then back into a solid. And it drops through this conveyor belt to the last thing we'll see on our tour, which is a giant pile. And just like some of those trucks take away the ash, some of those trucks take away the gypsum. Coal and limestone comes in, gypsum and ash goes out. That conveyor belt you saw dropping things, it's dropping it right there through that chute into that pile. Clearly, a truck came recently. I've seen this room when it's been six feet deep in here filled with gypsum. You might ask where does this stuff go? Right where it came from, the mine. It's got pollution in it, and it's got, the black stuff there's from the mercury separate, it's got higher heavy metals. All those heavy metals were in the mine, right? All of them where in the coal. So if you take the coal out and you put all this stuff back right where you got it, what's the harm? Okay, there can be slight harm. If you have rain water getting in, now it's not trapped in rock so it can get in to downstream of coal mines. So, coal mines do have to be careful with water management. You can't have the whole valley drained through the coal mine and go into another river, that would be very bad. But generally, you don't have water in mines anyway because, after all, you're trying to take coal out of them. So, putting the gypsum, the ash, back into the mine is probably one of the safest disposal methods. And after all, there's enormous quantities of it. Unlike something like nuclear power, where the amount of uranium you use in one year fits in a cube this big, all right? Coal, even a small plant like this is using on average 12 semi trucks of coal per day. And imagine a power plant that's the regular size, thousand megawatt power plant, 20 times bigger. It uses not a train car per day, but a train, a hundred car-long train of coal every single day to run a major scale power plant. And that means you'll have, accordingly, a certain amount of ash and gypsum that's coming back out as well. I said there are 10 to 15 semi trucks a day that bring coal. Here's one of them. And when they bring that coal, here we go, good Illinois number five coal, all right? This coal is dumped into this grate here on the ground. That grate then goes by conveyor belt up, up, up and is thrown into the boilers. Literally, thrown into the boilers and fall on those grates that you saw. So this is where the coal starts. This power plant was originally set up to be able to use train cars of coal because we're right next to the train tracks. And you might notice that building there was designed so that a train car could pull in it, and if it was frozen they could put it inside in a furnace and suddenly blast it with flames to get the coal to drop out into the conveyor belt system. It's turned out that it's too expensive to buy it by train car because this plant isn't that big. You don't need a whole train's worth, you just need a few cars. To put them off on a siding to get it all in here, much cheaper, more cost efficient to bring trucks. All this white stuff you see going out, that's steam, that's water vapor. Coal has as much hydrogen as carbon in it. It's about a one to one ratio, right? And we're turning that hydrogen into H20. So when you see the smoke coming out, it's almost all just steam. I agree that this is coal, unlike natural gas. Natural gas complete combustion, the coal doesn't have absolutely complete combustion, that's why you have the precipitator to take out the particles. That's why you've got the scrubber to take out the sulfur dioxide. It misses some, right? There is still some carbon particulates and still sulfur dioxide in there. But there are regulations and monitors. The Clean Air Act in the United States, the EPA monitors the amount of sulfur dioxide that you're allowed to put out. The amount of dust and ash in there, you're allowed to come out. And Abbott is one of the premier, best coal plants around in terms of their delivered amount of pollution, well under the EPA standards. When I mentioned the ash, that large building right there, that is the ash silo. So this truck will fill up with ash and take it back to wherever they dug the stuff out of. [MUSIC]
