There are hundreds of coal-electric plants here in the US that spew TONS of steam daily. It be awesome if they could harness that the same way.

Synik103

@tex1ntux: Its not particularly different. The point is that someone is using energy that up until now has been wasted.

LastAndLeast

@tex1ntux: There was a discussion on this yesterday on the bbc with some MIT folks, the basic idea is to hopefully employ the tech from power plants and large industry all the way down to biofuel cook stoves in developing countries allowing cheaper electricity et-al.

We'll see.

ruggels

The other big issue which can be highlighted by pointing out a project in Hamilton Ontario is that the company in question that is polluting might not have a foreseeable future.

Hamilton wanted to convert the waste heat from Stelco to heat buildings throughout the city during the winters. The problem with putting all the money into the project is that Stelco is always close to bankruptcy that any investment into improving the infrastructure would go to waste if they finally went belly up. Most large polluters are manufacturing companies which as anyone in North America knows right now aren't exactly doing the best.

DarkNight_DS

Aside from using waste heat, how is this any different from a geothermal, nuclear, coal, etc. power plant?

tex1ntux

Add that with some retrofitted wind turbines that are moved by the gases escaping and you have a pretty effecient smoke stack there.

Hand_O_Death

@DarkNight_DS... exactly, which is one of the biggest issues I have with the whole cap & trade carbon credits approach; it still is far too easy to scam the system to have the funds from purchased offsets go to pay for "green" upgrades like this, on plants that shouldn't have it in the first place.

There needs to be more stringency in the system as to who can qualify to sell offsets (found a nearby sod farm of all things, that was certified to sell the "carbon sequestration" of the sod it grows).

Ridgerunner

@Hand_O_Death: And remember, most of these gasses you see coming out of the smokestacks have already turned a much more efficient turbine than any wind-style turbine you could put on the stack. There's not much kinetic energy there to harness as it is. But there is some heat to grab.

AndyDuncan

@Hand_O_Death: If you successfully take the heat out there won't be much energy to move the air fast enough to spin a turbine.

AndyDuncan

It is a simple and great idea to get 'free' (from a perspective) energy. The problem is that it ultimately is going to add only the smallest percentage of additional energy, which is why it has been ignored. Now that energy costs are rising, it makes sense to try to capture every last ounce of energy, and that is great - and needs to be done. However, we need to focus on the elephant in the room, which is a dramatic swap in energy sources to ones that are much more environmentally friendly.

Monty

This is just a cogeneration plant, except they seem to be pulling the waste heat from multiple sources. There's nothing new to this. The University of Colorado at Boulder put in a cogen plant a decade ago. Typical cogen is burning natural gas in a gas turbine to make power, then taking the hot gas exhaust to boil water for steam to turn a steam turbine to make more power. In general it bumps the overall efficiency from around 25% to around 40%. Scavenging additional waste heat from smaller secondary sources is good but has diminishing returns if you try to get it all. The sale of Heat Recovery Steam Generators has been a multi-billion dollar industry for several decades. Some of the work I do is retrofitting older power plants to cogen or combined cycle (coal/steam). Also, if you're "boiling water up to 200°F" you're not boiling it, and you're especially not superheating it as is preferred in steam turbines (saturated steam is bad for corrosion).

twalker920

They've discussed doing this for years in a small neighbouring town where I live here in Sweden which has a big ass steel producing factory. Of course the people in charge can only plan ahead about as far as the next time they go to take a shit, so they are still refusing to fund it due to the high cost of implementing it. Fucking retards.

BoinK

@LastAndLeast: Which is awesome. This will probably be the more immediate future of our energy reform. There is so much wasted energy that we could stretch out our use of traditional fuels by using energy that, until now, was more of a nuisance than anything else.

archercc

@itsgadgetplayyyy: Actually, adding salt is that last thing you want to do. Water for steam turbines actually goes through a purification process before being used, the steam turbine has very strict requirements for water to prevent damage to the blades. Also, you really need superheated steam in the neighborhood of 400-600°F to get the most energy efficiency. Steam turbines cost upwards of a million bucks, if you're going to install one you should make sure it's protected right.

twalker920

@twalker920: "if you're 'boiling water up to 200°F' you're not boiling it..."

I had that same thought, but if you add simple sodium chloride to the water, it might boil at that low a temperature, or it may require a slightly more exotic compound. Obviously, the lower the boiling point the better, for this purpose.

itsgadgetplayyyy

this may be a little off topic, but what about another form of waste heat, namely the black roads that we all drive on? i mean, tube of water under the road, 93% of roads are asphalt(black)=boiling water/electricity.

rimshot515

@twalker920: QTF. I can't imagine that there are many power plants around without HRSGs attached to them. And if you run saturated steam through a turbine the water droplets will chew the blades to shit.

Shai

Thermoelectricity is not the correct term as it implies electricity generated from thermoelectric cells. The industry standard term for this type of electricity production is called co-generation.

GiltProto

@twalker920: I didn't think this was a turbine, but rereading the post I see it is. So how does it work at 200 degrees F ? Or is it a typo, and it should be Celsius? Or 300 F?

itsgadgetplayyyy

it'll b gr8 if day can use heat emitted by air conditioners for other uses (ex lighting). anybody thought of that yet?

niel718

It's more of an "Ah ha" idea than a genius idea but that doesn't make it any less important. There's a landfill I used to drive by that had a flame burning 24/7 as the gases from the trash was released. Aside from smelling bad, why couldn't that flame be used for something...anything? Pump the gas to a nearby building to use for the water heater?

I'm just spitting ideas but there are smarter people than me and these situations are all over the place. As another poster said, with the prices going up nearly daily for energy these last bits utilized will become even more important.

CubFan81

I've always tried to advocate (without much actual active research on my part on its worth or feasibility) at least redirecting the heat wasted towards places that burn energy to create heat, like using this during the winter to warm up the plant's offices, or that place in europe that took the heat from a building of computers and transferred it to heat a local swimming pool.

But I still say the most immediate and logical thing that I haven't yet seen fully implemented is having a gym's exercise machines work as generators that power the gym, since most of their energy goes towards having to blast AC to keep the people inside cool. Ridiculous!

Arvin Bautista

If it only uses boiling water, the carnot efficiency is craptacular. Why bother?

Nyarlathotep

@itsgadgetplayyyy:

200 degrees F is correct. And it isn't a turbine, its a patented technology called a twin screw expander.

The full release has more info.

anydayn0w

200 degrees F is the right temp - that is what makes this unique. They don't use a turbine - its patented technology they call a twin screw expander.

The full release explains a bit better:

[www.prweb.com]

anydayn0w

200 degrees F is correct, that is what makes this announcement so huge - they have a patented twin screw expander that does the work. It's not a turbine. The full press release explains it better, see [www.prweb.com]

anydayn0w

It's actually not a turbine - it's a patented technology called a twin screw expander.

BenitaCallisto

@Synik103: Not exactly. Steam given off by power plants already serves it's purpose of cooling the plant. The amount of energy you can get from a power plant depends on a high temperature (furnace) and a cool sink (the huge towers that give off the steam). The higher the difference of these two, the higher the amount of useful energy given.
What I understood from this article, is that they would use the fumes that are given off by burning the fuel. Those fumes are at great temperatures and at the moment they do nothing more than pollute, both thermally and toxically.
I guess an every-day example of this would be placing a teapot right outside your car exhaust with the engine running. You'd heat the water, without spending any additional energy ;)

zeusalmighty

These projects are going on all over the country this isn't the first.

Nemesisesq

@LastAndLeast: But how much energy is going to be expended setting this thing up? And keeping the program going? What kind of "liquids" are going to be boiled? Water? Where do we get the water from? How do we get it there? On diesel trucks.

paqman

Where exactly is this useful? What type of equipment is this specifically used on? There is very little technical information on their webpage about this installation or other possible uses, just a lot of technobabble about possible savings.

Waste heat recovery is nothing new, and new solutions are always welcome, but I personally wouldn't be investing in that particular company.

Fierock

In principle this is just another small-scale co-gen plant. The fact that they can generate MW with only 200F liquids is what's relatively new about it. CCGT (combined cycle gas) plants actually use lwer temperature low pressure steam too. I guess the novelty here is that its a a smaller scale.

Of course, depending on the efficiency levels, they may just be better of using the waste heat for heating or cooling (through absorption chillers) than using it for electricity.
If you look at the spec sheet [ [www.electratherm.com]] for the liquid heat-to-power units, they only get about 10% efficiency for the 30KW unit...and for some reason efficiency actually *falls* for the large 500KW unit (its more like 7%)...

Christopher

This is a great story. I'm associated with a company that does something similar -- Recycled Energy Development (recycled-energy.com). And I actually think ElectraTherm is understating the potential of energy recycling. EPA and Department of Energy estimates suggest energy recycling technology -- which includes things like "cogeneration" plants that create electricity and heat from the same fuel source -- could provide 40% of our nation's electricity, slashing greenhouse pollution by 20% while cutting energy costs. In other words, we can mitigate climate change profitably. We need to hear more about this!

VarneyRegillus