Electricity from CHP on the rise despite renewables boom

Global CHP electricity output increased by 692TWh in the decade between 2013 and 2023 and during that period, CHP heat output also went up from 9560TWh to 13821TWh.

That's one of the main findings of the COGEN World Coalition's Global CHP Market Overview. Now in its fourth iteration, the report also shows that while total generation figures are on the up, the share of CHP in total electricity generation has slightly decreased by just over 1%.

This result is driven mainly by the uptick in renewables such as solar PV and wind, as well as growing rates of electrification. “We see that trend continuing,” said Simon Minette, Technical Advisor for COGEN Europe, who presented the report findings in a webinar.

However, he stressed that despite this drop in overall share, there will be a continued need for dispatchable, firming power as climate-dependent renewables increase.

“There's a role there for CHP and also when you're looking at the industrial market where it's difficult to electrify some parts of industry.”

Smith sees the role of CHP continuing to grow especially in markets with a mature decarbonisation agenda, where fossil fuels will give way to non-fossil fuels, hydrogen, biofuels and small modular reactors.

The global picture  

The report shows that in European Member States, electricity from cogeneration declined from 600TWh to 550TWh in 2023. Natural gas continues as the dominant CHP fuel at 46% of the mix. Germany dominates the European market with 80TWh of electricity from CHP, with a mix of industrial and district heating use cases.

Asia has once again proved to be the largest CHP market, reported to be five times larger than the Americas. Electricity output from CHP increased from 1,965TWh to 2,716TWh in the reported period, although CHP’s share of electricity has decreased steadily since 2013 from 18% to 16%.

Asia’s main fuel remains coal, and this is due to China’s very high consumption of coal to power CHP. The rest of the fuel used in Asia is almost exclusively natural gas.

In the US, the results showed little variation of electricity output (between 294 and 319TWh) in the reported period. Thomas Smith, President of COGEN World Coalition and President of the CHP Alliance also spoke at the report launch.

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“From the US, we have never seen a more active time in the CHP marketplace,” he said, adding that there is a great deal of interest in electric power, as well as thermal energy. This is driven by two major trends namely, the rise of data centres and the increased use for commercial and industrial applications.  

“Data centres that are going in now are more focused on speed to market than they have been on efficiency.

However, Smith suggested that as the focus swings to efficiency, CHP will become more popular.

“About 50% of the energy that's used in a typical data centre is used for cooling and by using combined heat and power with absorption chilling we double the efficiency of the power that's getting generated and in a lot of cases cut the emissions in half.”

Smith added that strong industrial growth is also bringing back traditional CHP markets in commercial and industrial applications.

“It's a tremendously exciting time. The industry has been around for over 140 years since Thomas Edison put the first plant in. I think we're going to be seeing a very interesting next 140 years.”

Watch the report launch below.