CHP and its Future With CF/LENR (Guest Post)

Many thanks to ECW Reader Alain Samoun who has provided the following article about combined heat and power systems.

Some statistics that I have gathered about CHP (Mainly from Cogeneration & On-Site Power Production (COSPP) http://www.cospp.com )

CHP: Combined Heat and Power (electricity)  also called Cogeneration and DG distributed generation.

The local production of energy is more efficient, using usually natural gas with smaller electrical output (1KW -100MW) compared to large centralized energy plants using fossil fuels or nuclear fission (up to 1,600MW). The use of CHP in commercial building can reduce the demand of energy by 40% in comparison of separate production of heat and power.

Europe is the leader in CHP use (11% of total electricity used – mainly with fossil fuel – before the US, but the Obama administration has set a higher goal. Germany plans to have 25% of its electricity from cogeneration by 2020, up from 15% today. There are 25,000 micro CHP units in Germany in the range of 1-50KW with grants from the gov ranging from 1,500 to 2,000 euros per unit.

In the US nationwide, 82.4 GW of CHP systems had been installed at commercial and industrial sites as of July 2013. Chemical companies made up the largest set of users, accounting for 29% of installations, followed by fuel refining companies at 18%. CHP capacity is set to rise from its present base of 93.5 GW to a total of 115.9 GW by 2020.

France has 800 CHP installations @5MW average. They have problems with subsidies ending soon to support them. But insulation of buildings may increase the use of microCHP.

Advantages of local power/heat generation: As an example, in New York City, electricity costs more for delivery than for generation. (Forbes) mainly because the grids maintenance.

It is 5 to 25 per cent cheaper to transport energy in the form of gas in pipelines than to transport electricity over power lines. The use of CHP in commercial buildings can reduce the demand of energy by 40 per cent in comparison to the separate production of heat and power.
Despite its dominance, the US gas turbine market value is expected to increase at a slower pace than steam turbines, from $486 million in 2013 to $1.21 billion by 2020, at a CAGR, Compound Annual Growth Rate, of 13.5%, says GlobalData. Meanwhile, the steam turbine market value will grow from $314 million in 2013 to $827 million by 2020, at a CAGR of 15.3%

The E-Cat (or equivalent) will be more compatible to the current booming industry of CHP than retrofitting large power plants.  CHP should be easily adapted to CF/LENR reactors and when technically ready, will certainly be accepted by this industry. CHP also makes use of smart gridssmall infrastructures computer controlled to distribute electricity to small communitiessmall townsoffice and residential buildingssmall scale manufacturing etcParallelly, the heat produced by the reactors can be used  for heating/cooling of buildings and agriculture (Greenhouses).

CHP with CF/LENR could be used in industrial processes, especially to make drinkable water. CHP can even be adapted  to smaller scale (MicroCHP) like this company: Nirvana Energy — http://www.nirvana-es.com/system.html — which is planning to produce heat, hot water and electricity for individual housing, with a small unit not much bigger than a gas range.

Alain Samoun