 | Rachel Nolan - Peak Oil Speech in Qld Parliament | TOD: Australia/New Zealand | The Bullroarer - Monday 31 March 2008 |  |
54 comments on Cogeneration At Home: Ceramic Fuel Cells And Bloom Energy
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True.
Good to see you found a New Zealand company for the list - I should have done some more searching...
Is there an argument to be made that household CHP would reduce the baseload generation requirement (all those electric hot water systems)?
Of course at the expense or requirement of then distributing liquid or gas fuels.
A technology for the periphery perhaps... where it's more economical to move fuel rather than build the infrastructure to move electrons? Of course it might just be cheaper and simpler to have a diesel genset and solar hot water in those cases.
What hasn't been done yet is to use the reject heat for driving a cooling process... perhaps using the adsorption methods (eg activated charcoal:ethanol or water:silica)
I think CHP has its niches - for example, apartment blocks, where solar hot water isn't really an option, or buildings located in areas with poor solar availability.
Once again - its a stopgap - an efficiency measure to make our gas supplies last longer.
Not sure about reject heat - thats what I like about the Stirling engine ideas - presumably the engine captures and harnesses the excess heat.
Gav
Its more the other way round you initially use the heat to drive the stirling engine the excess heat is used to heat the water, EP dismissed whispergen as they have a 10%/75% (0verall 85% efficient), But this is as much driven by their target markets (replacement of domestic boilers). There are a number of regulatory etc issues with feeding power back into the grid which need to be dealt with, ie our whole system is setup based on individual households as consumers and this works against cooperative energy generation & useage. I'd like to see electrical regulation that commits distributors to designing the electric grid as a 2-way network otherwise all these CHP systems will fail to get a foothold until energy prices are excessively high (ie when it is far to late)
Neven MacEwan B.E. E&E
Ooops - thanks for the correction.
I agree with your comments about electricity pricing - net-metering should be mandatory at a minimum - but preferably some form of feed in tariff that lets distributed generation compete better with centralised generation schemes.