It happens. Whilst plenty of people got to read the original post, it was still obscured by the massive volume of day trader posts and numerous thread titles that it appeared amongst.
Whilst you've dished up the link again, we'd might as well reproduce the content (often links aren't followed) ...
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June 15, 2009 – Vol.14 No.13
GREEN POWER FOR THE REST OF US. by Bruce Mulliken, Green Energy News
I live in brick townhouse (or row house) in the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland, USA. It’s about 60 years old and going strong. It has a slate roof that is original and at the moment watertight. There are about 500 nearly identical houses in my neighborhood. None will ever have a solar panel or small wind turbine on its roof.
Why? There are a number of reasons. The neighborhood has a strong association with a strict set of restrictions that basically says we’re supposed to keep our houses looking as near original as possible. There were no solar electric panels in 1950 when the neighborhood was built, and then small wind turbines were found only on farms pumping water. Home power generation wasn’t considered six decades ago. So both of those technologies are out for anyone who wants to generate his own power.
Change the restrictions you might be thinking? Think not. The restrictions have worked well for 60 years in keeping the neighborhood looking good and thus keeping property values higher than equivalent neighborhoods nearby – about 20 percent higher, at least.
There are other reasons as well. The slate roofs, which we’re allowed replace only with natural slate, wouldn’t take kindly to solar panels attached to them. And, being townhouses with a relatively small footprint they also have roof surface areas too small for any meaningful solar capacity, even if they did have good sun-facing exposures. (Mine does for some of the day.)
For one reason or another, the inability to install either of the two most common small renewable generation systems is echoed in millions of homes in the U.S. and likely hundreds of millions of homes worldwide.
However, for those millions, there’s an alternative. Use the natural gas that supplies our homes for heat and hot water to generate electricity too. Do it as efficiently as possible. And wait for renewable methane to be blended with that natural gas for an additional touch of greenness.
Piped-in natural gas, though certainly not everywhere, is fairly common in urban areas as well as the near suburbs. Newer exurbs, those further out suburbs, now often have gas supplies buried in the street and connected to homes as a sales feature. People like cooking with gas and heating with it is usually less expensive than heating with electricity. Usually.
Slowly, very slowly, natural gas is being considered, at least in part, to be a renewable fuel. Natural gas is mostly methane, and methane from sources such as landfill gas operations and sewage treatment facilities can be blended in with natural gas pumped from fossil sources underground.
The most recent example of the ability to blend methane with fossil natural gas comes from England. There, United Utilities has partnered with National Grid to inject methane derived from a wastewater treatment plant into the local gas pipeline network to fuel a fleet of sludge tankers, as well as about 500 homes, in a pilot project. The methane comes from biogas, an emission of the wastewater treatment process. They call it biomethane, but chemically, methane is methane no matter what the source. The company thinks there’s enough biomethane from the one treatment plant to supply a small town of 5000 homes.
(Methane, of course, is a more-potent-than-carbon-dioxide greenhouse gas so we’re better off using it as fuel than letting it go into the atmosphere.)
Of course we’d want to use that renewable natural gas most efficiently and for that we’ll skip over to Australia. There Ceramic Fuel Cells Limited (CFCL) has launched its BlueGEN micro-Combined Heat & Power (micro-CHP) system. BlueGEN, with its solid oxide fuel cell technology, will generate electricity at 60 percent efficiency that reaches 85 percent when heat is utilized for space heating or domestic hot water in combined heat and power mode.
The unit is about the size of a dishwasher and operates at 2 kilowatts power output constantly (24/7/365 days a year) with unused electricity sent back to the grid. Each BlueGEN unit can produce up to 17,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year. The unit makes about 200 liters (52 gallons) of hot water each day as well. The price? About $8000 Australian ($5600 US). Pay back period is forecast by the company to be about seven years, at least in Australia. The pay back calculation includes the unit itself, buying natural gas, selling electricity back to the grid while buying some electricity to cover demand higher than 2 kilowatts.
CFCL is ramping up to begin selling the units in Australia in 2010.
So there’s hope for those of us who might want to generate our own renewable power but live in houses where wind and solar are not possible. But we still have to wait until savvy entrepreneurs bring products like BlueGEN into town and municipal waste operators start pumping renewable methane into the pipelines.
Links:
Ceramic Fuel Cells Limited http://www.cfcl.com.au
United Utilities http://www.unitedutilities.com
National Grid (UK) http://www.nationalgrid.com/uk
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Cheers.
CFU Price at posting:
20.8¢ Sentiment: LT Buy Disclosure: Held
