Energy Schemes
In 1957, it was the first company to fit a main Royal Navy ship (HMS Cumberland) with a (experimental) gas turbine.
In 1959, it opened a new type of power plant using waste sewage gas that powered eight turbines at Britain's biggest sewage works at the Northern Outfall Sewer at Beckton in east London. This was a 18,000 horsepower combined heat and power plant.
The company pioneered combined heat and power schemes. The company began this technology in Cortemaggiore, Emilia-Romagna in 1956 at the Agip (Azienda Generale Italiana Petroli) oil refinery. By the late 1960s, Ruston & Hornsby CHP units were installed in Australia, Germany, the USA, South America, and the Middle East.
In the 1970s, these CHP schemes were not as well developed as today because electricity companies were not interested in developing a market that would provide direct competition to themselves. CHP schemes were then known as total energy schemes, which comprised exhaust heat recovery. The company won the Queen's Award for Enterprise: International Trade (Export) in 1977, 1978 and 1982.
The large Singer factory in Clydebank, which employed 11,000 people, was notably powered by Rustons turbines. The King Faisal Specialist Hospital was installed with a CHP unit in 1975. Whitehall in London is heated and has its electricity from a CHP unit built in the late 1990s.
Read more about this topic: Ruston (engine Builder)
Famous quotes containing the words energy and/or schemes:
“Perhaps catastrophe is the natural human environment, and even though we spend a good deal of energy trying to get away from it, we are programmed for survival amid catastrophe.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“Science is a dynamic undertaking directed to lowering the degree of the empiricism involved in solving problems; or, if you prefer, science is a process of fabricating a web of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiments and observations and fruitful of further experiments and observations.”
—James Conant (1893–1978)