How Much Dissel Does It Take To Run A Large Generator?

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Recently Detroit Water & Waste Management announced the installation of about eight large generators run by disel. Does anyone know how much disel fuel is needed to keep a generator running for a 24 hour period. Does anyone know anymore about Detroit utilities? If you read the second Navy Report, Detroit was not supposed to be ready in water, waste and electricity.

-- Ruth Edwards (REath29646@aol.com), December 05, 1999

Answers

If a small 3kw generator burns one gallon an hour (bit less for diesel) and the size of "eight large generators" (either tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or mega - watts each) could draw 100 times (2,400 gallons of fuel/ per 24 hour period to 10,000 times the use (thousands of gallons per hour).

If fuel is hard to get - you can guess where it will be diverted to first (to feed the gennies!).

-- dw (y2k@outhere.com), December 05, 1999.


I don't know about generators but I do run huge Cat engines in my business (Model 3512..1300 horsepower). They go through about 25-30 gallons per hour.

-- Ace (Ace@nospam.com), December 05, 1999.

Fuel consumption is a function of the size of the engine and the demand from the generator. The same engine can consume .5 gal per hour with little demand and then 1.5 gallons with a higher demand. A 15KW diesel generator will average about 1 gallon per hour.

Those gensets may be 100, 250, 500 KW or larger.

-- cai2k@flash.net (cai2k@flash.net), December 05, 1999.


Hint: If you don't see a big tank (think truck/tractor trailer size) nearby that many diesels that large, they would have enough for only two-three days. If no tank nearby, then only a few hours in the "on-board" tank on the engine itself.

-- Robert A. Cook, PE (Marietta, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), December 06, 1999.

The above numbers seem to be more consistent with a gasoline engine. Diesel fuel has an energy capacity of about 135,000BTU/gallon. Through the magic of unit conversion, this equals 30kWHr/gallon. In other words, one gallon of diesel will run a 10kW generator at full output for three hours. Scale this number as needed.

-- Chris Tisone (c_tisone@hotmail.com), December 06, 1999.


Since the largest diesel generators are based on railroad locomotive engines and generator sets, look at locomotive fuel consumption figures.

As I recall, full-power operation for a twenty-cylinder, EMD 645E3 is in the area of 360 gallons per hour with an electrical output in the one megawatt range with crankshaft outputs of 3600 hp to 4200 hp. The newer EMD 710G-series engines do get beter "mileage" with their electronic engine controls. And most railroad freight locomotives you see carry at least a 3,000 gallon fuel tank with some as large as 5,000 gallons.

WW

-- Wildweasel (vtmldm@epix.net), December 06, 1999.


I concure with the above posts. One possibility is that they may be spark ignited gen sets that run on natural gas. If natural gas is available in the area via pipline. Otherwise they will need transports full of fuel quite frequently. But, alas, my buds over at the Gas co said it would take three weeks to manually get the natural gas flowing again if the Y2K bug bites their ....

-- dozerdoctor (dozerdoc@yahoo.com), December 06, 1999.

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