While everybody is dreaming (or shuddering at the thought) of masses of electric vehicles hanging off the grid at night, while that last ICE is donated to the Smithsonian, Volkswagen is taking a completely different tack. Forget the grid. Get your very own power plant. And guess what: It’s ICE powered.
Instead of being sent out to pasture, the ICE will invade our homes: German energy supplier LichtBlick has installed its first home power plants for residential and commercial customers in Hamburg. The energy is created by an EcoBlue natural-gas-powered engine, produced by Volkswagen exclusively for LichtBlick. The engines are tried and true 2.0 liter gasoline engines, as used and proven in millions of Touran and Caddy models.
Despite the 2.0 liter engine, we are not talking emergency generator.
These are 40,000 kilowatt hour units, suitable for very large single-family homes, buildings with two or three apartments, small businesses and public and social facilities such as schools and churches.
A lot of German homes are on the (Russian supplied) natural gas grid, which produces heat. Heat is also an unloved byproduct of energy production. So the idea is to deliver both. Driven by a marketing system that is astoundingly simple, considering that we are in a German setting.
The plant remains the property of LichtBlick, which rents the customer’s boiler-room. The customer pays a contribution starting at 5,000 euros for the installation. LichtBlick will dispose of the old gas heating system (in an environmentally responsible fashion, no doubt). Then they will install the ICE powered generating plant in your basement. They will take care of servicing, maintenance and repairs.
The result? Energy consumption will be reduced by up to 40 percent compared with conventional heat and electric power – or so Volkswagen’s press release claims.
LichtBlick plans to invest Germany with 100,000 of these home power plants. It would be Germany’s largest virtual gas-fired power plant with the capacity of two nuclear power plants. It would heat your home and water as well. A test set-up with 25 decentralized plants has already been in operation at Volkswagen’s Salzgitter plant since the beginning of the year.
Vladimir Putin, are you reading this? If you turn off the gas, not only will the Germans freeze. It also will be lights out in Deutschland. CO2? What CO2? And let’s not even think of charging an EV from these home grown power plants. The bind goggles.
(In case you ask: LichtBlick is German for anything from “bright spot” to “gleam of hope.”)
Actually this is a pretty good idea. It’s called co-generation, and should be more common but it isn’t. I’ve heard that the electrical grid (in France) has 5% losses in distribution. Gas lines are a more efficient way of delivering energy to the home. Here for example, gas heating is significantly cheaper than heating using electricity. However, electricity is more efficient for transport than ICEs, and leaving your motor at home instead of lugging it to work and back everyday, (I’m looking at you Volt) increases that efficiency.
Anyway, is Russia Germany’s only source for Natural Gas? Where are the Norwegians?
And as an aside, this is a good idea for my region of France, Brittany, where we have no nuke plants and import more than 80% of our electrical energy. Every winter we risk an electrical grid failure due to everybody heating their homes. If we topped that with charging our cars, we would certainly be headed for disaster. Home generator/heaters would do the trick.
Exactly right, it is called cogeneration.
In the US, there is this household size unit that hasn’t really gained traction: http://www.freewatt.com/products.asp , the ICE is a Honda (as stated on the website). I know there are some installations in the New England region where electric prices are high.
The efficiencies are tremendous if the “waste” heat can actually be used for space heating or heating potable/domestic water. A typical power plant dumps that heat into a nearby body of water.
Quite genius. I’m far from understanding all the engineering, but if this were a feasible idea, wouldn’t it have been done sooner than now? In other words, I thought there was a rational reason most of us are hooked up to a power grid and not simply running Generac units in our backyards (never mind all the noise).
I wonder/doubt how this will work in hotter climates, though, where A/C usage is greater. Creating heat is simple. Creating cool (and reducing humidity) is always a lot trickier and more complicated. But either way, maybe it’ll pave the way for a more diversified power grid.
The unit is hooked up to an electrical generator, right? I assume that it would generate electricity to run an air conditioning condenser pump or heat pump. Even in summer you’ll still use the heat from the engine to make hot water.
I’m not very knowledgeable about these systems so I might be missing something, but running an air conditioner doesn’t seem like it would be hard at all – just hook it up to the building’s electrical system.
Point of use generation rarely makes sense in all but a couple of specialized situations, and usually those situations are for backup use.
Decoupling power generation from point of use has lots of benefits. It allows for faster and easier upgrades to generation plant as the technology progresses and it also allows us to switch out generation types (nuclear, nat gas, solar…etc) as the technology progresses.
If you have to go with point of use generation, these guys seem to have an interesting approach:
http://www.bloomenergy.com/products/solid-oxide-fuel-cell/
I don’t know a whole lot about Bloom Energy, but it does look interesting.
-ted
This is what I’ve heard as well, but I’d like to know if it’s better (in efficiency terms) spool up and down individual generators rather than load a few large ones. My gut feel tells me it isn’t.
I can’t also help but feel that things like this are band-aids to the real problem of energy consumption. I’d rather see a fully intelligent grid, integrated to the appliance level, than something like this.
If they can make it a replica of that grand Packard engine(or similar classic) with a plexiglas viewing panel, every car nut will want want one to gaze as upon like a fireplace.
It is brilliant because the Lichtblick feeds the power needs of your neighbors who don’t have one.
And Boris Yeltsin can go hump a cow, now that Poland is getting into the fractured-rock gas thing, and that the Russia-avoiding pipelines into Europe are being built.
Boris Nikolaevic Jelzin, if he were alive, would probably only care that it doesn’t run on vodka.
Changed to Putin … but who’s idea was that pipeline deal anyway? Too long ago, in the dark ages ….
Brotherhood and Soyuz pipelines going through Ukraine were built in the Soviet times.
They are building Nord Stream under the Baltic sea, from Russia directly to Germany.
Isn’t the efficiency of this thing tied up in how well the load can be managed? The whole problem with residential energy use is widely-varying demand and the cost of building standby capacity to handle peak demand. It’s hard to imagine that having this thing spinning away at 3:00 a.m. simply to keep a few electric clocks, LED nightlights and wall-wart power supplies going is very efficient. Now maybe if it’s recharging an EV overnight, that might be different. Likewise, at noon on a sunny day, what is it going to be powering with electricity?
As far as using these in warmer climates, solving the a/c problem is pretty simple: just drive the compressor off the engine. That’s bound to be more efficient than having an electrically-driven compressor using electricity that the engine produces.
Somewhere, I’ve seen attempts in the US to use natural gas-powered fuel cells for co-generation. I believe their conversion efficiency is higher than is a gas-powered engine. I also recall that there were significant reliability problems.
Good point re:A/C…I know gas-powered A/C units exist, but what you’re describing would probably increase the complexity even further as people have to retrofit their existing units. However, since they’re probably looking at Europe first, the A/C load will be pretty minimal in the north, and in the south, it’s mostly smaller mini-split units that don’t require too much power to begin with.
Something tells me this system will be most efficient with a supplemental array of batteries/capacitors to give the unit a break during slow periods (middle of the night)…unless you’re charging your EV :D
Why does it have to be “all or nothing?” For the few electric clocks, LED nightlights and wall-wart power supplies scenario, use the grid (That’s during the off-peak period anyway) and when your demand crosses a set threshold, switch to the LichtBlick system. For all intents and purposes you can invert the usual generator/grid equation and use the grid only in (your) emergencies or when it it is more economical to do so.
The point being missed is the heat is what they are after. Co-gen uses the heat that would be generated in a boiler/heater, claims that while making mechanical energy tuning a generator or a A/C compressor. If there is not enough need for the heat the efficiency is not there. In the late 70’s they were using big block chevy’s on N/G to generate power and heat water for demands like small processing plants and large swimming pools. If the unit is shut down it is not making/saving money/energy.
“As far as using these in warmer climates, solving the a/c problem is pretty simple: just drive the compressor off the engine. That’s bound to be more efficient than having an electrically-driven compressor using electricity that the engine produces.”
Why do you believe that? Is it just your opinion or is that statement based on published research? Can you point us to a source?
Is direct or shaft driven air conditioning compressor technology mature and well established? How long has it been in use in residential and light commercial applications? Who makes the units? I’ve never even heard of it (but I’m in the U.S.).
Folks, the common household in Germany doesn’t have A/C, period. They open the windows. I had an apartment in Duesseldorf on to top floor with the sun slamming on the flat roof above my head. With 100 degree weather (they have that on occasion) I baked till crispy brown, but no A/C.
Even in cars, A/C is a recent phenomenon, added option at extra charge (although often thrown in as an inducement, in lieu of Euros on the hood.) With the popularity of black cars in Germany, the in-car A/C is making inroads. But at home? Never heard of it.
I worked (or tried to work on one) in Santa Barbara about 10 years ago.It was several years old then. I cant remember the Manufacturer. The system had a single cylinder natural gas engine directly coupled to the compressor. the whole thing shook badly upon start up and shut down. when I tried to research it the company had recalled all of them and no support was available. The little info i got was they were considered very efficient but the standard ratings did not apply because the ratings for air conditioners are done in Watts to BTUs and because they used natural gas that ratio doesn’t apply. It might have been the cost of gas vs cost of electricity is what made them “efficient”.You also had the added benefit that it heated water.
As Far as infrastructure I believe they are replacing the boiler in the boiler room and using its gas.
I assume this is base load only, in combination with grid supply since you wouldn’t want it operating below efficient speed and wouldn’t want to size it for peak load. I thought co-gen was quite common in Germany, but perhaps I’m mistaken. if it is, then there’s sunk capital in the heating lines from the existing power plants (which are sure to be turbine NG and higher efficiency than a reciprocating piston engine) which won’t help. Is this really the first time someone has built an on-site genset with co-gen? I find that hard to believe. So I’m left wondering what’s the big deal?
The big deal is that this is a major commitment of 100.000 units and a different business model where the utility owns and maintains the units installed in the consumer’s building and pays the building owner a rental fee for the space used in the boiler room.
“then there’s sunk capital in the heating lines from the existing power plants”
I’m not sure what you mean by “heating lines”. Is it common in Germany to deliver steam or hot water from a central plant out to businesses or neighborhoods? My understanding is that electrical and natural gas delivery infrastructure already exist and will continue to be utilized. You can’t have co-gen without a fuel source and in this case, they’re going to continue to utilize the existing natural gas distribution network.
Building new industrial infrastructure is incredibly hard in the U.S. and I imagine that its insanely hard in the E.U. Companies and municipalities spend years and millions of dollars just going through public meetings, permit applications, environmental impact studies and bucket fulls of other hurdles just to get the permission to build. Once they’ve done that they need to have arranged hundreds of millions of dollars in capital and then have to manage a ridiculously huge industrial construction project with its inevitable cost and time overruns.
I’d much rather have smaller units in each building that can be easily replaced with newer technology when the time comes and not have to go through public hearings, environmental impact studies, etc. etc. to do so.
2.0L to produce 40KVa? I couldn’t open the press release and maybe it wouldn’t have helped, but doesn’t that sound low? My 8KVa backup generator uses a 18(?)hp B&S gasoline V twin.
Probably connected with continuous vs. intermittent duty. Can’t push an engine intended for a decade or so of daily, near continuous duty nearly as hard as a backup generator to be used for an occasional power outage.
Rated speed on the VW engine is 1500 rpm, which is pretty well loping along.
http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http://www.lichtblick.de/uf/100500_LichtBlick-Info_Technische%2520Daten_ZuhauseKraftwerk.pdf&prev=_t&rurl=translate.google.com&usg=ALkJrhjAtQ8W_QX08vV6x4d23Zp_iT3F9g
This is brilliant, despite the issue potential puppet-strings from Moscow.
The Europeans do a much better job of finding efficiencies, and more importantly, pulling the mask off of energy subsidization, than we do. This LichtBlick thing does both.
We’re going to be paying $6 per gallon, whether we do it at the pump or on April 15th. At least paying it at the pump would allow for honest and adult choices.
Likewise, it is easier to forget to turn out the lights when the power is being brought anonymously from over 30 miles away from a coal/nuclear plant (and the bill comes 3 weeks later.)
Those “efficiencies” you speak of are rendered marginal when you ad the various energy and pollution taxes to your utility bill. If the “LightBlick” system were adopted in a widespread manner, the government would slowly eliminate that 40% of savings; say put a 15% tax on it today, convince people they’re still getting a great deal (25% savings!) and then dump the tax revenue into social programs that have nothing to do w/energy. Then “rinse & repeat” until that 40% “savings” is completely eliminated. That is the way it’s done.
Now I can’t speak for the rest of Germany, but in parts of the Rheinland Pfalz…where a fair amount of power is purchased from French nuclear plants…there are monthly outages; again, though not a hardship, it’s not exactly “efficient” either My FIL has a modern oil furnace that also has an optional wood-fired boiler; he’s learned to not rely upon either the Russians or the French to keep the lights on. That said, wood isn’t cheap either. If only Germans weren’t so absurdly paranoid of nuclear power on their own soil…
FYI to Bertel-
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in new york city, co-gen has been available for ever. the power company delivers steam from the generating stations to apartment buildings. my building used to run on it but a couple of years ago my landlord switched to a boiler that can run on either gas or oil. i don’t understand why building this complex system for 3 x 40 story buildings was cheaper than buying steam.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_steam_system