First stop was Ingenio La Cabaña, where Tino Zamora spent a good couple hours explaining the plant to us and showing us around. All of the seven sugar plants in El Salvador generate their own mechanical power, electricity, and process heat using bagasse (sugar cane waste), but La Cabaña is one of the only ones that produces surplus electric power to export to the grid and diverts some of the molasses to make ethanol. I was very impressed with all the automation, mostly using Siemens and Honeywell DAQ and controls. And the three labs (one for testing the incoming sugarcane, one for testing sugar and molasses products, and one for the ethanol distillery) look very professional.
Having said that, deep inside the plant is a kind of scary place, lots of fire, steam, rickety catwalks, and huge mechanical grinding equipment in motion. And we really walked through just about every nook and cranny. You don't quite get the sense that you get at the LaGeo geothermal plant, where the safety equipment and procedures seemed to be fully up to first world standards. Granted, sugar processing is inherently a messy business. I wouldn't want to be the one responsible for keeping the plant clean.
Piles of bagasse and woodchips at La Cabaña -- they're experimenting with the latter feedstock as a way of extending their generating season (the cane harvest is only 4-5 months each year)
After a lunch break, we drove over to Ingenio El Angel and met with Germán Molina. He spent a good while talking with us about the plant and, like Tino at Cabaña, says he's happy to have the students come for a plant tour. My sense is that the two plants have enough differences and are close together enough that we should visit both plants with the students.
Ethanol distillery at La Cabaña
Something I really like about visiting all these power plants is that the senior engineers who really know the plants make themselves very accessible and seem to enjoy showing interested visitors their plants in some depth.
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