North Sydney Council has installed a cogeneration plant at my local pool - Cogeneration Plant at North Sydney Olympic Pool.

A 100kW cogeneration plant has been installed (July 2013) at the North Sydney Olympic Pool by the contractor Urban Energy. The plant, which will be powered by natural gas, will reduce CO2 emissions by 367 tonnes per annum and contribute to achieving Council’s sustainability targets.

The plant will produce more than 450,000kWh of electricity per annum, saving $58,000 on the Pool’s power bill. The Olympic Pool facility accounts for 35% of Council’s total electricity use, with an annual consumption of more than 1,450,000kWh.

Cogeneration technology, or cogen as it is usually called, is the process of using a heat engine to simultaneously generate electricity and heat - both essential for the operation of the Olympic Pool. The new system will heat the outdoor pool at a pleasant 25 degrees all year round and maintain the indoor pool at a steamy 29 degrees.

Forbes has an article on a new combined heat and power fuel cell that apparently costs far less than competing devices - Redox Power Plans To Roll Out Dishwasher-Sized Fuel Cells That Cost 90% Less Than Currently Available Fuel Cells.

Redox says that it plans to bring to market a fuel cell that is about one-tenth the size and one-tenth the cost of currently commercial fuel cells by 2014. The breakthrough solid oxide fuel cell technology is the brainchild of Eric Wachsman, the director of the University of Maryland’s Energy Research Center. Redox says that it will provide safe, efficient, reliable, uninterrupted power, on–site and optionally off the grid, at a price competitive with current energy sources. ...

The first generation has a nameplate capacity of 25 kilowatts, which can power a gas station or small grocery store, and is roughly the size of a dishwasher. The system can run at an 80% efficiency when used to provide both heat and power.

With interest in fuel cells being given a big boost by the Bloom Box, the BBC has an article on Japanese efforts to sell cells to Europe - Japan aims its home fuel cells at Europe.

Following the success of a half-price subsidy for CO2-busting fuel-cell heat and energy generators for homes, Japan is now poised to ship its attention to supplying the UK and Germany with this hi-tech next-generation energy source.

With over 5,000 fuel cells providing heat and energy for conventional homes up and down Japan, the BBC has learnt that companies such as electronics giant Panasonic are in talks with EU governments about the possibility of bringing these proven energy and carbon-saving devices to market in Europe and elsewhere.

Panasonic has described the interest in its commercial fuel-cell project from the German, Korean and UK governments as "intense", and is confident that Japan, as the first to start commercial sales for homes last year, will be the forerunner in bringing the technology into common use.

Fuel cells - a technology that has been around for more than 100 years - convert fuels such as hydrogen and natural gas into electricity through an electrochemical reaction. The resultant heat generated also warms buildings in gas-boiler-sized boxes known as cogeneration fuel cells.

The idea is to generate all of the heating and hot water and the majority of the electricity needed by a typical UK home, without the need to be connected to the energy wasteful national grid.

Such efficient use of gas supplies can save the consumer around 25% of total energy costs, and reduce each home's CO2 emissions by up to 2.5 tonnes per annum, according to their makers.

They also claim customers can earn back the system's relatively high cost, running at present into thousands of pounds, within a few years through utility bill savings.

earth2tech has a post on CHP / cogeneration company Bloom Energy, following a recent interview with CEO KR Sridhar - Bloom Energy CEO: We Can Be the Gas Station for Transportation. I liked Sridhar's take on the company's mission - "We fundamentally want to change the world. This is a mission about changing the world because energy is a passport to a better living. For the rest of the world that does not have access to power, access to electricity, to give them that is empowering them to a better life."

A year ago, venture capitalists at the firm Kleiner Perkins let slip a few juicy details about their first cleantech investment: quiet fuel cell maker Bloom Energy. Now in an interesting and rare interview with Alison van Diggelen, who produces Fresh Dialogues, Bloom Energy chief executive KR Sridhar has shared a few more tidbits, including the fact that Bloom is targeting the transportation industry in the company’s grand vision.

No the fuel cell won’t be making its way into the vehicles themselves but Sridhar tells van Diggelen that “the ultimate vision” is to have refrigerator-sized Bloom devices powering transportation within a decade. As Sridhar explains: “Our device can either produce the electricity that will charge the car or provide you hydrogen if the transportation becomes a hydrogen based. So we’ve sort of become the gas station for the transportation industry.” That sounds like the devices could provide an off-the-grid form of electric vehicle charging.

It’s yet another massive industry that the 7-year-old company, which is really just getting started on its commercial shipments according to documents associated with its $150 million Series F financing round, is hoping to tackle. The 5-kilowatt Bloom box, which has been in testing for the last few years, involves a fuel cell system that can generate electricity using a range of liquid fuels, such as natural gas or ethanol.

Other interesting points of van Diggelen’s interview include Sridhar’s reality check on how long large scale energy tech projects really take:

This is not a microchip. These are huge devices, they need to be build in very large quantities, and if you take automotive, if you take anything else, its penetration and how long it takes to build the factories, the machines for factories. These things don’t happen over night…It’s going to be slower than what the bits and bites people in Silicon Valley think because it’s not like software that you’re just going to write and then copy 800 times, or a million times over instantly, and distribute.

Solve Climate has an interesting post on cogeneration in the US and the - Co-Generation: Clean as Wind, Reliable as Coal. The title isn't strictly true - while it can improve the efficiency of many forms of power generation, CHP still relies on the burning of fossil fuels (except when hydrogen is used) and is just increasing the efficiency with which we harness the energy generated - it isn't carbon free and thus shouldn't really be compared with solar, wind and other true clean energy sources.

We think we could make about 19 to 20 percent of U.S. electricity with heat that is currently thrown away by industry.

Tom Casten, chairman, Recycled Energy Development

There are different types of co-generation, but the concept is simply this: take energy that is being wasted on an industrial scale and find a way to put it to use. Do that, and co-generation could provide up to 20% of the nation's electrical generation, replacing a large number of our coal plants at a lower cost and with roughly the same reliability.

Another name for co-generation is combined heat and power (CHP). We have enough potential CHP to replace 40% of coal-fired generation. Producing 20% of our electricity from CHP would put it on par with our fleet of nuclear reactors, which also produce about 20%. CHP is also as clean as wind power, reliable enough to use as base-load power and has the lowest construction cost of any power source.

The DOE and EPA in 2001 put together a road map to double the amount of CHP. It said,

CHP is a win-win-win solution for energy users, energy and equipment suppliers, and society-at-large and produces measurable national benefits for energy efficiency, environmental protection, and economic growth.

A typical coal plant has an efficiency in the low 30% range, meaning 65% or more of the energy is wasted. CHP can improve the plant efficiency to the 60%-80% range. Waste heat is commonplace in heavy industry too: for example a West Virginia Alloys silicon plant uses high heat to refine the metal. For now, when they're done refining metal, they just let the heat dissipate. Recycled Energy Development (RED) is developing the CHP needed to capture that heat and drive a steam turbine that will produce 40 to 44 Megawatts of electricity. No additional fuel is used - all the power that is generated comes from capturing the heat that would've been wasted. Since there's no extra fuel, there's no extra fuel expense and no extra CO2 generated, making this as clean as wind or solar power.

...

The heat from a power plant, instead of being lost in a cooling tower or surrendered to the atmosphere, can be used for local heating via underground hot water or steam pipes to nearby businesses, homes or industry. There's a limit on how far the heat can travel, hence the name, district heating. Once more common, today in the US this is mostly limited to college campuses and a few old downtown neighborhoods.

Anytime there is a pressure drop in a pipe, a backpressure turbine generator can capture the lost energy. For example, long distance natural gas pipelines operate at high pressure and when the pressure is reduced for local distribution, some of the significant energy originally used to pressurize the pipe can be recovered. This is sort of like regenerative braking for gas lines. An investment of $8 to $10 billion could capture 6.5 GW, another bargain at $1,250 to $1,500/kW. Steam pipelines are more numerous and have even more potential. The college campuses with district heating mentioned above could also be producing some fuel-free power where ever the steam pressure is reduced from transmission pressures to the pressure used in buildings.

Many industrial processes have leftover gas or create some low quality gas that can be burned. Quite often, this is simply flared ( that is, burned ) at the top of a smokestack. I watched flaring gas coming off steel mill blast furnaces for years as a kid in Gary, Indiana without knowing what it was. In any event, I was awed by 15 foot high tongues of flame dancing on top of a 300 foot high stack. Other sources are oil refineries, auto painting plants, carbon black plants and ethanol refiners.

One more advantage of CHP is that the electricity usually doesn't have to travel far and rarely requires new transmission lines. Unlike many large utility plants sited far away from population centers, most CHP installations are already where there are people and power demand.

Barriers

If this is such a great idea, and it is, why haven't we used more of this fuel-free, cheap-to-build and reliable power? The biggest barriers are legal. In part because many of our state and federal laws are out-of-date and in part because monopoly power companies have tilted regulations in their favor, it can be the hardest part of implementation. In the DOE/ EPA road map, the main issue wasn't financing, technology or finding good projects, it was legal barriers. This is what the report said about eliminating regulatory and institutional barriers:

This set of actions is the centerpiece of this Roadmap. There are CHP systems that are commercially viable today but that developers have trouble getting installed because of roadblocks in siting, permitting, and interconnecting.

In most of the country, it is illegal for anyone but the power company to sell you power, reducing the market of CHP electricity to what you can use in your own plant. In the entire country, it's illegal for anyone but the electric company to run a power line across a street, making it even harder. When a company does consider a co-generation project, the local electric company can discourage it with high fees for interconnections, backup power and other services that make it uneconomical. This is far thornier than it appears at first. Check out RED's excellent blog for a real power industry insider's view of this and other issues.

If you've been worrying about meeting the Gore Challenge and you didn't know about CHP, you should feel like you just found a $1,000 bill laying on the sidewalk. Or, even better, 100 GW of high availability generation nearly ideal to provide 20% of our electrical generation and replace 40% of our coal plants.

The ABC's Catalyst show this week had a segment on green cement from a company called Zoobond - trying to reduce the huge carbon emissions that cement making currently entails.

An Australian company has started to make concrete which promises to dramatically cut the carbon dioxide ordinarily emitted during production. Concrete is the second most widely used material on earth, after water. Figures vary, but it’s estimated that the manufacture of cement, the reactive ingredient in concrete, is responsible for over 5% of the world’s CO2 emissions.

Using a technique to make geo-polymers similar to those found in some natural volcanic rocks, a concrete alternative called E-Crete is now being manufactured in Melbourne, which claims to have reduced the amount of CO2 ordinarily emitted in the manufacture process by an estimated 80-90%.

Narration: What’s the fast growing source of greenhouse gas?

You might be surprised but it’s cement. Cement’s already the 3rd largest man-made source of carbon dioxide - more than two billion tonnes of it a year. That’s after fossil fuels and defrorestation. And because of all the construction going on around the world, cement’s carbon footprint is growing rapidly.

In May 2007, the Mayor of London laid down a gauntlet: 60% cuts in carbon emissions by 2025 – that’s 25 years ahead of the UK’s national target – 25 years ahead of anywhere else in the world. So can a city do what a nation can’t?

London has faced many challenges in its long and colourful history, but this could be its biggest. Like all great cities, it has an insatiable hunger for power. 75% of the worlds’ carbon emissions come from cities. And yet cities are some of the places most at risk from climate change.

Stopping the City drowning is an unenviable responsibility, but it has fallen on the shoulders of Allan Jones MBE because of the extraordinary thing he did in the English town of Woking. Once there, he set the town on the path to independence of the national electricity grid, by generating all its own power.

Now, Allan has been asked to repeat what he did for Woking in Greater London - a city 75 times the size. London has a proud history of transformation under duress, but like the barriers on the Thames itself, the barriers that Allan and his compatriots face are immense. ...

Combined heat and power is not new – Manhattan was set up with it in the 1880’s. But when modern, centralised power stations were invented, CHP was quietly abandoned – Manhattan’s surrounds are on the grid.

In energy terms, though, centralised power stations are far less efficient. 2/3 of the energy produced is thrown away into the atmosphere as heat – with further losses over the grid.

Greenpeace UK is promoting a "virtual town" called EfficienCity which demonstrates how towns can achieve "lower greenhouse gas emissions, a more secure energy supply, cheaper electricity and heating bills and a whole new attitude towards energy" by decentralising power generation.

While our government promotes the fallacy that we need coal and nuclear to keep the lights on, innovative councils, businesses and individuals are taking the leap into a cleaner, greener future with decentralised energy.

What is decentralised energy? Well, it's pretty much the opposite of our present, outrageously inefficient energy system, which was designed to meet the needs of a society that hadn't even heard of climate change. This centralised system is a shambles - in fact, it would be impossible to invent a less efficient way of generating energy.

The typical power plant in the UK is only 38 per cent efficient. By the time we use electricity in our homes and offices, we've lost nearly 80 per cent of the usable energy inside the fossil fuels we burn. This is mostly because we have two separate energy systems: one for electricity, and another to heat water and buildings. It's news to some, but heat is a far bigger culprit than electricity when it comes to global warming.

For electricity, we burn fossil fuels in a few large power plants, miles away from the homes and offices they supply. Two thirds of the energy available in fossil fuels is lost in the power plant as waste heat (a by-product of electricity generation) and during transmission. Another 13 per cent is lost through inefficient use in our buildings.

For heat, we burn more fossil fuels (mostly natural gas) in boilers in our homes, offices and factories. It's a little bit like putting radiators on the outside of your house instead of inside it; we're burning one lot of fossil fuels for electricity, and another lot for heat, but waste heat is a by-product of electricity generation. Can't we just burn one lot of fuel to generate electricity, and capture the 'waste' heat at the same time?

We can. Combined heat and power or CHP does exactly that.

Combined heat and power

CHP is the heart of an efficient, decentralised energy system like EfficienCity's. It's the most efficient way possible to burn fuel because so little energy is lost as waste heat. That's how CHP plants in Denmark can reach up to 95 per cent efficiency. Because the heat needs to be captured and piped around the local district, CHP plants are usually sited in the towns and cities where the electricity and heat will be used. This makes it more efficient for electricity generation as well as heat; very little energy is lost in transmission.

If we combined the efficiencies of CHP with improved efficiencies in the home (proper insulation say, and minimum efficiency standards for appliances), we'd practically eliminate the profligate wastage of our current system. CHP is also brilliant in the transition from a fossil-fuelled energy system to one based on cleaner, greener fuels like biogas and biomass. CHP plants can run on a variety of fuels, which means that the fuel mix can include fossil fuels like natural gas but, as more cleaner fuels like biogas become more available, they can switch to those.

Pretty much any organic matter can be used to produce biogas; farm waste is the most famous example (thanks to The Archers) but we could be reaping energy from all of our food that ends up as landfill - food makes up about half of our total landfill, where it produces large amounts of methane, another greenhouse gas.

Local renewable energy sources

But decentralised energy isn't all about CHP. There's an abundance of energy out there in our natural world, ready to be harnessed. We could be harvesting energy from the wind, the sun's rays, the ocean, underground springs and even the earth itself. According to the government, just the wind, wave and tidal resources of our windswept island could meet 40 per cent of our energy needs by 2020. In the longer term, the sky's the limit.
A flexible, scalable energy system

Unlike our conventional power plants, decentralised energy is completely scalable and flexible. You can have a tiny CHP plant in a supermarket or an enormous industrial plant like Immingham, which will soon provide as much electricity as Sizewell B. You can have a single wind turbine like the one at Manchester City's stadium or a massive wind farm like the forthcoming London Array. This also means that decentralised energy systems can be installed much faster than huge power plants, and can be tailored to fit local needs.

Energy security

Whereas decentralised systems like EfficienCity's rely on local, diverse energy sources, our current system will soon rely mostly on imported fossil fuels. On top of that, using hundreds of small energy generators instead of a few major ones means there's a far lower risk of system failure; it's far less likely that several small plants will fail at the same time than that one big plant will. If a local decentralised network did fail though, only one small area would be affected, and that area could import from neighbouring areas.

No more energy price hikes

Decentralised energy can also save consumers an enormous amount. Efficiency measures alone can save consumers a whopping £12 billion a year (the government's own figures) and they save more money than they cost to implement. But there are other savings to be made. Although energy from decentralised systems may be more expensive per kilowatt hour than energy from coal, it can actually work out cheaper for the consumer. Why? Because only 37 per cent of the average British electricity bill is for the electricity. The rest goes to propping up the grossly inefficient infrastructure.

And of course, if the UK decoupled itself from the fossil fuel market, we'd be protecting ourselves from the massive price increases of gas, coal and oil, which will inevitably keep coming.