Improved version of Herning Power Station ready to supply heat and power

In snow and sleet, Kristian Jensen, the then Danish Minister of Finance, turned the first sod for the conversion of Herning Power Station on 1 March 2018. The combined heat and power (CHP) plant was to be upgraded with a flue gas condensation plant, utilising the residual heat in the flue and making the plant more efficient. The conversion has now been completed. 

“With the new plant at Herning Power Station, we’ll be able to reduce our fuel consumption by around 20 per cent. That’s very good news for our climate and for our district heating customers, as our wood chip-fired CHP plant will now become even greener,” says Ole Thomsen, Head of Production in Ørsted’s bioenergy business. 

The conversion project was launched at the same time as Ørsted signed a 15-year agreement with the local Danish energy companies ‘Eniig Varme’, ‘Energi Ikast Varme’ and ‘Sunds Vand og Varme’ to continue supplying district heating from Herning Power Station.

• “The new plant has been a prerequisite for signing the new, long-term heat agreement. Both now and in the future, the objective is to operate an efficient as well as cost-competitive and environmentally sustainable district heating company in Herning where pricing and green heat profile are very important for our customers here and are important incentives for their choice of a future heat source,” says Erling V. Klemmensen, Head of the heat division at ‘Eniig Varme’. 
  
  
• “It’s very satisfactory that we’ve once again succeeded in realising a major conversion of Herning Power Station based on local collaboration between the heat suppliers in Sunds, Herning and Ikast and a rewarding collaboration with Ørsted,” says Jørgen Mosegaard, CEO of Energi Ikast.
  
  
• “It’s very satisfactory that the conversion of Herning Power Station generally was carried out within the planned timeframe and within budget. At ‘Sunds’, we’re very pleased that the environmental and financial prerequisites are now in place, enabling us to continue collaborating on local district heating. This means that the inhabitants of Sunds can safely choose district heating as their preferred type of heating and Sunds Forsyning as their local multi-supply utility,” says Stig Østergaard Nielsen, Chairman of the Board of ‘Sunds Vand og Varme’.
  
  

A green journey
Herning Power Station dates from 1982 and was originally a coal-fired power plant. In 2000, it was converted to using natural gas as fuel, and two years, later it was converted once again to using primarily wood chips as fuel. 

Since 2009, Herning Power Station has been able to run exclusively on biomass – primarily wood chips supplemented with wood pellets. The establishment of the new plant makes it possible to use the residual heat in the flue, resulting in an even more efficient power station that can lower its fuel consumption significantly.

Goodbye coal
Ørsted’s seven largest CHP plants, of which Herning Power Station is one, cover about a quarter of Denmark’s district heating consumption. Five of the CHP plants have already replaced coal and gas with wood pellets and wood chips from sustainable production forests, and since 2006, Ørsted has reduced its coal consumption by 82 per cent. At the end of 2022, all of Ørsted’s CHP plants will have phased out coal entirely.