# SIZING OF DIESEL GENERATOR



## Moses_Shiwa (10 mo ago)

Hello Team,
I am very curious and I would love to hear from you ,during sizing of a generator does AVR and UPS considered as electrical Loads?


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## SWDweller (Dec 9, 2020)

AVR? Automatic voltage regulation? 
An Uninterruptible Power Source is a load of what ever size it is.
The load is how you size a generator. Remember you are dealing with a finite amount of power not infinite like the utility.

Automatic voltage control and Hertz is usually only above 25kw. Other wise it is speed driven by the motor. 3600 rpm machines are junk, toys, or what the industry considers them, portable. Not really a machine that will last a long hours under constant use, usually.
What you need to learn is the amount of exhaust that an emergency generator puts out per hour. Can be in the tons of pollution. I was tasked to turn a 900kw machine into a peak shaver. The county pollution people laughed me out of their office. The machine did not qualify for being a peak shaver. All of the customers equipment would have to be replaced to meet the pollution requirements, 100's of thousands of dollars. Then there was the required air monitoring.


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## Djea3 (Mar 8, 2019)

SWDweller said:


> What you need to learn is the amount of exhaust that an emergency generator puts out per hour. Can be in the tons of pollution. I was tasked to turn a 900kw machine into a peak shaver. The county pollution people laughed me out of their office.


Was this diesel or ?? I doubt that natural gas would have such pollution ramifications but man would you need a lot of it! As I understand it, some cities have gas capture from landfills and are generating "free" power while making the area safe. Sunnyvale Ca comes to mind and possibly Santa Clara, CA as well. I know they can generate significant power 24/7 from it (for how many years??). I remember the giant candles in the oil country, 300 ft tall burn towers constantly burning off natural gas to be rid of it.


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## SWDweller (Dec 9, 2020)

Generator people make 2 kinds of machines. Emergency power and standby/prime movers.

Emergency requires no monitoring almost USA wide. Prime movers are a different animal. The local air pollution people can drive you crazy with their rules and regs. 
Natural gas is cleaner, but not by much when you consider you have to increase the size of the engine to cover the same load out. NG and propane both contain less BTU's than diesel or gasoline.
The one I sited was diesel. The county where it was located required monitoring for an engine that ran that much. The monitoring and permitting from the EPA is NO BLOODY JOKE, and is expensive 10's of thousands and the owner is on the hook for calabration. 
Methane is a source of fuel. HOWEVER, no diesel engine MFG will tell you it is OK to run their engine on 100% methane. Methane is very acidic and will tear the guts out of an engine in less than 1000 hours. Most people use a 50-50 mix with methane. Need to lube the upper end of the engine. 
The stuff they are burning off is so close to garbage it barely burns in a lot of cases.

I agree a lot of candles out there doing nothing. Other note methane is harder to compress than acetylene. Most people do not compress it so you need a HUGE tank for storage.

Check with your local tank supplier about filling acetylene tanks. You will be surprised.
Here in the desert 100F they only fill acetylene tanks after the sun goes down and with a water bath. The tanks get really hot during the fill cycle.


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## paulengr (Oct 8, 2017)

SWDweller said:


> Generator people make 2 kinds of machines. Emergency power and standby/prime movers.
> 
> Emergency requires no monitoring almost USA wide. Prime movers are a different animal. The local air pollution people can drive you crazy with their rules and regs.
> Natural gas is cleaner, but not by much when you consider you have to increase the size of the engine to cover the same load out. NG and propane both contain less BTU's than diesel or gasoline.
> ...


Methane is no problem. But it takes a very large engine and uses spark ignition so it’s “gas”. Use a blower to compress it. But yep corrosive and the landfill condensate does a number on the engine.


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