cheap natural gas + solar distributed

At Sxsw eco.

Strange talk by nrg.
They have a box they are hoping will work in the future to hook up to natural gas, solar, and the grid, and water and building heat. It seemed great if it works. Need heat or hot water, it runs a sterling engine to burn natural gas and heat the water or building. Extra electricity goes to the grid. Solar same. If the grid needs more power, it tells the box and you are a generator.

There has been big talks about regulation and getting these things and solar built, along with internet tecthnology, and distributed networks democratizing generation.

Speaker also through out that she was talking to the philadelphia eagles office, 5 of the players have bought teslas and fight for bragging rights on how efficient their homes and cars are.

 

Its a Dean Kamen box that NRG is helping develop. The exciting part of this is the small scale, where an individual can do solar and combined heat and power for a distributed system - the way to get away from big utilities doing coal and nuclear and controlling everything. There were questions about the sterling choice, and it seems to make sense instead of an ice. In a larger, say company a turbine would work, but for homes they are too expensive for chp.

It will take grid improvements and changes in government regulations (these are state and local), but could greatly speed the demise of baseload power to more renewables. Also talked about is easier information and regulation to get the solar installed. You still need those big utilities filling in the grid power, but more and more can go to individuals and groups doing combined heat and power natural gas, wind farms, and solar.

 

According to the woman giving the talk 50% of homes are hooked up to natural gas. These are not new connections.

The box we are talking about is not appropriate if you don't have solar and natural natural gas. It allows you to use the excess heat from the natural gas electrical generator. As a home owner you need to keep your furnace and hot water heater maintained, this is just anouther box, but the utility (NRG if they have their way) will maintain it, or maybe you maintain it yourself if you prefer. My programmable thermostat, that the utility can use to turn down my airconditioner, broke and my utility came right out. Which makes you ask why is NRG working to empower households to create distributed power, and the answer is quite simple. They want to expand at the expense of old line utilities, but it isn't simple.

Your other questions were fracking pollution. Still we are at an eco confererence, and NRG does coal, nuclear, natural gas, solar, and wind. I'll see a nuclear presentation tomorrow from the pandora people, but if you are a big corporate utility trying to get the attention of enviro groups, big coal, to small natural gas seems like a good strategy. If you empower individuals, solar and natural gas can grow much faster and get rid of coal.

The other point, why sterling? Its Dean Kamen's invention to build this box with inverters to tie everything to the grid. Its quieter than a ice, and cheaper than a turbine. IMHO for bigger chp buildings a turbine is appropriate. Who knows if they can get this working well enough, and inexpensive enough to get mass adoption, but IMHO it would be cool to democracize the grid. I'm sure they can do a trial in ERCOT, but regulations in other parts of the country might not allow it. The combined heat power would be more economical in colder places, but I don't know where it is cold that they also have smart grid technology and a grid operator willing to make it work. This would be great for a place like Connecticut, since it has a congested grid, cold weather, and expensive electricity. If the power goes off from the utility, having a small generator in home is definitely a plus.

This new box is still in development, and the speaker will send me a link when available, but here is dean talking about why he would use a sterling engine to heat water and make electricity.
OnInnovation: Stirling Engine Demo (part 5) with Dean Kamen

 

Question then?

If you are going to remove methane from the 50% of homes that use it for heating and hot water (80% of heat for these purposes), what are you going to replace it with?

Will you build more coal plants and install electrical heat? What about that smokestack pollution and mining pollution? That seems to pollute the air and water more, as well as increase ghg. We can do geothermal heat pumps, but that is expensive construction, and will not be rapidly adopted.

We can do a better job regulating and reducing gas pipeline leaks, other states could adopt texas's law against flaring natural gas at well heads. We can also do a better job regulating fracking pollution. These seem much easier solutions than to remove abundant and clean burning natural gas from home heating, cooking, and hot water. Lets take the economic steps forward, and have more money to build renewables, instead of taking steps back.
EDF defends its controversial study of methane leaks from fracking wells | Grist

Once you have that connection why not make it more efficient by also generating electricity in some of those homes? Today the reason is simply cost and infrastructure. Say you can get 30% of the homes that use natural gas to also go solar, and use one of these boxes. You now take 15% of the natural gas wasted to generate electricity, but you also build an infrastructure that is more resistant to downed power lines. You may only be 20% efficient as a peaking plant versus 35% of a commercial one (ocgt), but the new capacity is much cheaper, and may help utilities deal better with power fluctuations of wind and solar.

 

I agree there. It is legal to release in other countries, I don't think its ever legal to release it here. It is legal to flare in many states, but not mine. When they initially passed the no flaring law in texas it slowed down exploration, and cost a little money, but now its in place there are only positive side effects, other than the tceq allows too many emergency flares, that really are just companies moving too fast.

And this is simply a matter of really poor regulation. They need to change it, or gulp, have the epa adopt a modified version of the texas law and have it work on the entire country. Remember the oil companies are flaring because they are not paying the environmental costs. The answer is not to charge these costs, but to make the practice illegal. If you simply tax the flares they become much harder to regulate. There are two technologies that are there, the existing one which is to pipe it out, is fairly expensive in the short term in the bakkan shale, but the price is low compared to the value of the oil. The other technology being developed, that may help harvest the arctic remote methane fields that may go up as the ice melts, is to converte the methane to methanol on site and truck it out.

Well I then agree with you on better regulation, which is the edf's POV, to work with industry to reduce the pollution. The fields you are complaining about in bakkan are oil fields, and the flares do reduce methane and other gassing to carbon dioxide and water, but the methane could be used productively. There are many environmental groups that simply want to use less natural gas and fight with the gas companies, which IMHO is counter productive.

 

I don't think there is anything magic about the sterling, but it is quite impressive as a quite combined heat and power machine. Here is a write up of a earlier version of just the sterling running of biogas for the developing world.
Empire Off The Grid - IEEE Spectrum
The idea is low price, low maintenance, in the above app biogas from manure.

Why did NRG tie this to solar? Its fairly straightforward, in order for solar to work right you need to pay for and manage the grid interconnection. This adds hot water, electric generation, and a small battery. Your hot water become more efficient. Your home becomes a stabilizer of the grid, and you can monitor household energy use over the web. IIRC with today's natural gas prices, your home made gas electricity would cost less than 6 cents per kwh. You pay more for the capacity, but the utility may pay back those extra fixed costs to have the capacity.

 

Sterling will be much much less expensive, and be able to start up much faster. The fuel cell will likely be twice as efficient producing electricity, but if you are using the waste heat then the lower efficiency of electric generation is made up for by using the heat for your water (or in bigger systems your house). The idea for the "system" is to be efficient with the solar on your roof.

Large companies are putting in fuel cells in places like california where the utilities won't build ccgt plants (more efficient and cost effective) and pass the costs savings to them, or the utilities will sell them coal power, and they don't want to be part of the problem. These are problems of regulation. For a large building a fuel cell or ocgt would be better in a chp application. For a home owner, or a remote village this system of solar + sterling + small battery seems really nice especially if you have natural gas hook up, or can set up a biogas plant and pipe the methane from it to the machine. Add in plug-in vehicles with v2g technology and it becomes even a better system. Army is working with solar and diesel generators for remote applications, but sterling may be better if it can burn any fuel.