Ongoing operational improvements within TRUenergy’s diverse business operations take place almost every day. These initiatives deliver better, more efficient use of resources, reduce our impact on the environment and help to improve the level of service we provide our customers.
TRUenergy has launched a Sustainable Procurement Policy to strengthen the quality and cost effectiveness of the products and services it procures. New procurement procedures underpin this Policy, including tendering and ongoing contract management measures to ensure safety, health, environment, quality and financial competencies consistently meet TRUenergy standards.
TRUenergy Yallourn is collaborating with other Latrobe Valley generators and major research groups to investigate more efficient means of generating electricity using brown coal. A participant in six research projects overall, TRUenergy has made a $700,000 contribution to projects investigating gasification of brown coal and coal drying techniques.
Typically, brown coal is an inefficient fuel for energy generation as it has high moisture content, increasing the volume of carbon dioxide emissions produced when it is burnt as fuel. Together, TRUenergy and its research partners are exploring different means of reducing this water content to significantly improve the performance of coal as a fuel source. Early tests show techniques like coal drying and gasification have the potential to reduce water in brown coal by 70 percent, substantially reducing greenhouse gas pollution in the process.
The push to reduce the environmental impact of coal-fired power generation is also behind a collaborative project between the CSIRO, TRUenergy Yallourn and other Latrobe Valley generators to determine how dried brown coal could be used to fire Victoria’s existing coal-fired power stations.
For TRUenergy, understanding the changes that may be required to its facilities for using dried coal, is not only important for optimising operations it will also ensure safe and reliable future power plant operation.