ReNew Economy reports that a ethanol and cogeneration plant is to be built in Queensland that will almost double biofuel production in Australia - Huge, $800m bio-energy project in Queensland gets boost from ARENA grant.

Global biofuel production is still increasing at a reasonable clip (in the the 5% to 10% per annum range - well under the growth rate for solar and wind power but respectable nevertheless).

IEEE Spectrum has an article on cogeneration and other forms of distributed energy generation - Natural Gas Sets Off a Distributed-Energy Boom.

Rooftop solar has long been the poster child of distributed energy, but experts say the boom in the natural gas supply and memories of large-scale outages are also playing a big role in moving electricity generation out of the hands of big utilities.

Different gas-fueled technologies—fuel cells, microturbines, reciprocating engines, and turbines—are now competing for a spot in the basements of businesses. “People are genuinely waking up to their options,” says Kerry-Ann Adamson, research director at Navigant Research. “Distributed-generation technology can be better than the current option of centralized power on the grid.”

Depending on local electricity prices and government incentives, natural gas–powered distributed energy can be less expensive than grid power over the lifetime of the equipment. This is most often true if it’s a combined heat and power unit—also called a cogeneration unit—in which the heat from electricity generation is captured as hot water or steam. There can be environmental benefits as well: Many of these technologies can run on gas from landfills or biomass digesters. When both heat and electricity are used, system efficiency can top 80 percent.

Greentech Media has an article on one of Dean Kamen's cleantech experiments (in this case a Stirling Engine cogeneration device) - NRG Energy Deploying Dean Kamen’s Solar-Smart In-Home Generator

Few executives are more outspoken about the threat that distributed energy poses to utilities than NRG Energy CEO David Crane, so it’s not surprising that NRG Energy plans to sell a product that is disruptive to the centralized power business model.

The company is working with Deka Research on an on-site “energy appliance,” according to NRG Energy’s corporate sustainability report. In an interview last week with The Atlantic, Crane said the device, called Beacon 10, can generate electricity from natural gas, work with a battery and rooftop solar, and provide backup in the case of a grid outage. “When there’s not enough solar, you turn on the Beacon 10. Then, ideally, the grid itself would just be the ultimate backup. It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said.

Deka Research is headed by Dean Kamen, a renowned inventor best known for creating the Segway transporter who has worked extensively with Stirling engines. Earlier this year at the Fortune Brainstorm Green conference, NRG Energy showed a portable Stirling engine, and Crane said that the company is working with Kamen to test 200 of the machines in homes. Kamen has already made a multi-fuel, Stirling-engine-based water purifier called the Slingshot, which Coca-Cola will distribute to rural Latin America and African villages.

A specification sheet seen by the website Energy Choice Matters indicated that the Stirling engine of Beacon 10 is capable of producing 15 kilowatts of power, can send excess energy to the grid, and is slightly larger than a washing machine. The NRGBeacon10.com website has apparently since been taken down, and an NRG representative declined to provide more details on Beacon 10.

Beacon 10 is one of a number of products NRG Energy has that are outside the typical offerings of conventional utilities. The company has developed a solar canopy and has installed EV charging stations at retail locations. It’s also one of the utilities working with Nest Labs to offer consumers a two-way thermostat.

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.

Greentech Media reports that Bloom Energy is expanding its production capacity - Bloom to Open Factory in Delaware in Geographic Expansion.

Fuel cell maker Bloom Energy will open a factory on the site of a mothballed auto plant in Delaware and begin to sell fuel cells in that state.

Delaware has a portfolio standard that seeks to get 25 percent of the state's capacity from renewable sources by 2025. Governor Jack Markell is pushing to get fuel cells added to the definition of "renewable." It's not impossible. President Obama in his State of the Union speech argued for a "clean" energy standard that includes nuclear, clean coal and gas, instead of a "renewable" standard. Bloom's fuel cells convert gas to electricity onsite and are more efficient in most cases than converting gas at a central power plant and delivering the power through the grid.

Local utility Delmarva Power has signed a contract to buy 30 megawatts worth of Bloom boxes. Thirty megawatts will mean 100 Bloom Energy Servers. Bloom has been selling the servers for around $700,000 to $800,000 each. …

The 200,000-square-foot plant is an old Chrysler plant. Delaware has two old auto plants. Fisker Automotive took over the other. Hence the nickname "The Old Factory State" you see on those new license plates. It's also probably not a coincidence that both Bloom and Fisker come out of the portfolio of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers. Once a VC firm links one deal with a state, others follow. Three Khosla Ventures portfolio companies have inked manufacturing deals laced with incentives with Mississippi.

The Climate Spectator has an article on interest in trigeneration in large Sydney office buildings- Sydney's trigen power play.

The path towards distributed generation in Australia made another important step forward today with the switching on of the country’s first trigeneration precinct.

Distributed generation has become an important part of energy systems in Europe and elsewhere in recent years, but it has barely taken a toehold in Australia. However, the deal struck between the Origin Energy subsidiary Cogent and Investa Property Group, for the supply of energy to two buildings owned by Investa, may signal a change in the way energy use and network demand is managed in our CBDs.

The system switched on today is a trigeneration facility installed by Cogent in the Coca Cola Place building in North Sydney. Trigen uses gas to generate electricity on site, but then captures the excess heat for use as heating, and for cooling via an absorption chiller. Its promoters say it increases energy efficiency to around 80 per cent, compared to just 30-40 per cent in coal-fired power stations, where excess heat is usually vented.

It is not the first trigen system to be installed in Australia, but the groundbreaking nature of this facility is the “precinct” concept, meaning that Investa will be able to use the excess energy generated in one building to supply power to its Deutsche Bank building located on the other side of the harbour.

It’s a development that considerably enhances the economics of tri-gen, as some tri-gen facilities have been installed and then left idle because the buildings in which they were located could not generate the demand needed to make them efficient and to properly balance the demand on electricity and thermal energy. The precinct concept solves this by providing another electricity outlet, and could also allow the installation of larger and more efficient facilities. It is expected to be the fore-runner of numerous other such precincts in coming years.

“It is a great example of how we are paving the way for more intelligent energy systems of the future,” said Frank Calabria, the head of energy markets at Origin Energy.

The City of Sydney has bold plans to make its CBD virtually self sufficient in energy within two decades by having 360MW of such generation installed in its city building, helping avoid the costs of new generation capacity and transmission upgrades. It is negotiating on a contract with Cogent to begin installing trigen systems at various council buildings that it hopes will be able to supply energy to other council buildings, and also neighbouring offices.

Craig Roussac, the general manager of sustainability, safety and environment at Investa, said the precinct concept meant that trigen systems were now an attractive proposition, and that the company, Australia’s biggest office building owner, would be looking to retro-fit them in other buildings with the aim to create more energy precincts.

Roussac says he was not in favour of trigen systems before the precinct concept, because buildings were either forced to create artificial energy demand, switch the trigen systems off, or run them inefficiently. For him, many of these plants were only there for show.

“Responsible building operators strive to use as little energy as possible,” he said. “This agreement proves we can have our cake and eat it too. We can power a super-efficient building with lower emissions electricity, while at the same time heating and cooling it with the waste heat that would normally go up a coal-fired power station’s smoke stack. In addition, further benefits flow from the ability to export excess electricity to the grid.”

Roussac said such systems would be essential for any building aiming for a 6-star green rating. The installation costs were around “a couple of million per megawatt”, but in the case of the Coca Cola building, the return on investment was enhanced because it was leasing the plant back to Origin/Cogent and gaining a fixed income from that. “It’s like having an extra tenant. when you capitalise that income, the return on investment is quite good – it increases the value of the asset by considerably more than the cost of the plant.”

Origin's Calabria says the tri-gen plan provides 774 kWe of power to the base building and 650kWe of cooling to the air conditioning system when running at full capacity. About 50 per cent of the energy will be consumed by the base building and about half will be to the grid, for the benefit of the other building.

The Climate Spectator reports that Ceramic Fuel Cells have been chosen to power a showcase green building in Holland - Hard cell.

Ceramic Fuel Cells announced Tuesday that its BlueGen combined heat and power unit has been chosen to provide the energy requirements of De Groene Bocht, a canal-side townhouse in the heart of Amsterdam that showcases world-leading sustainable products, from furniture design and building materials to transport and electricity generation. BlueGen units operate around the clock, generating 1.5 kilowatts of electricity that can be used in the home, with surplus power fed back into the grid or used for such applications as EV charging. Each BlueGen unit can produce about 13,000kWh of electricity a year – more than twice the power needed for an average home. The heat by-product is enough to produce 200 litres of hot water a day.

Paddy Thompson, general manager business development at Ceramic Fuel Cells, said: “The integration of BlueGen into De Groene Bocht proves that the technology needed to create electricity and heat in a low-emission, highly efficient way exists today, and its use is a significant step towards achieving far-reaching cost and environmental benefits at home and in the workplace. This is an important first step into the heritage market for BlueGen which can help older buildings – which have notoriously poor carbon emission credentials due to their age – substantially improve their carbon footprint.” Matthijs Guichelaar from Cool Endeavour, said CFC's BlueGen technology was "likely to develop into a mass-market product and should make an important contribution to the transition to a more sustainable economy.

The SMH has an article on plans to expand the use of cogeneration in the City of Sydney - Sydney to go it alone as power producer.

SYDNEY will become the first Australian city to start weaning itself off coal-fired electricity, with the business district and much of the inner city preparing to switch to small, gas-driven power plants in the next 20 years.

The City of Sydney master plan, to be published today by the lord mayor, Clover Moore, will identify 15 ''low carbon zones'' based on trigeneration plants that create electricity and also generate heat and cold for airconditioning.

The switch could save up to $1.5 billion in state government spending on new infrastructure for bringing power from coal-fired plants, a report commissioned by the council said.

A ''decentralised'' power network for Sydney would be driven by gas, but the Herald understands plants would be capable of being driven by forms of biogas created from plant matter and sewage, as part of the council's ultimate goal of making the city centre carbon neutral by 2050.

With work on the new network expected to start within two years, the plan will increase demand for gas extraction, and possibly require new pipelines. ''NSW has sufficient known reserves of gas to meet anticipated needs,'' a spokesman said.

The plan will call for 360 megawatts of electricity from trigeneration by 2030, which would cut the city's greenhouse gas emissions by up to 26 per cent. ...

Most of the power plants would be just a few metres wide and power a city block or a cluster of buildings.

The council commissioned the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney to look at the potential benefits of the trigeneration plan.

Its report found there was potential to save $200 million in extra costs to upgrade the current electricity network before 2020, rising to savings of $1 billion by 2030. In addition, the power generated in the city would offset $500 million worth of energy the state government proposed to generate at two new coal-fired power plants.

The San Jose Mercury has a report on Adobe's installation of a number of cogeneration devices from Bloom Energy - 'Bloom Boxes' help power Adobe headquarters in San Jose.

Sunnyvale startup Bloom Energy has maintained a low profile since it first raised the curtain on its fuel cell technology at a highly orchestrated news conference earlier this year. But Adobe Systems was set to announce late Monday that it has chosen Bloom Energy's technology to help power its corporate headquarters in downtown San Jose, making it Bloom's largest single-site installation to date.

Adobe installed 20 vertically shaped wind turbines, made by Windspire Energy of Reno, at its headquarters in January. But with 2,500 employees and about a million square feet of office space, Adobe is eager to do even more to reduce its energy footprint. ...

Twelve of the Bloom devices -- commonly known as "Bloom Boxes" -- were installed in late August and are now generating electricity from Adobe's roof. Each Bloom Box provides 100 kilowatts, enough power for about 100 U.S. homes. The 12 together generate about 1.2 megawatts, enough for about 30 percent of the Adobe Towers' electricity needs.

The fuel cell technology is not cheap: The commercial-scale boxes cost $700,000 to $800,000 each and come with a 10-year warranty on performance that includes any maintenance and replacement parts.

Adobe declined to discuss how much they paid Bloom, but Knox said Adobe expects the boxes to generate enough electricity for it to recoup its investment in four to six years.

Giles Parkinson at The Australian has a column on englishman Allan Jones' quest to make greater use of cogeneration / trigeneration in Sydney - City of Sydney embraces tri-generation power

THE City of Sydney this month begins the process of taking energy generation back to its origins as it sends out final tender documents for a network of tri-generation plants that will reduce the need for council buildings to rely on coal-fired power generation and could, ultimately, take the entire CBD off grid.

Tri-generation plants generate electricity usually through a gas-fired turbine (although it can be biomass or other sources) and uses the excess heat for heating and airconditioning.

Their use has grown as more companies seek six-star green ratings on their buildings. But Allan Jones, who is overseeing the project for the City of Sydney, wants to move beyond the "boiler in the basement" mentality and create a more substantial network of cheap, efficient and less polluting energy.

The city project will establish tri-generation plants in seven locations around the CBD at Town Hall, Customs House and its five aquatic centres. The plan is to create a network of such plants providing up to 325MW over a 15-year period, which could connect to neighbouring buildings and the entire CBD.

Jones, who took the English city of Woking off the grid and implemented similar plans for London, is now the council's chief development officer for energy and climate change. He says there are numerous advantages to the plan. It will cut emissions by about 70 per cent, reduce and possibly eliminate the need for new coal-fired baseload generators and eliminate losses from transmission.

The City of Sydney is the first in Australia to undertake such an ambitious project, but the concept is not new. The very first power station built in Manhattan in 1882 by Thomas Edison was a co-generation plant and the island has been largely powered by a network of co-generation and tri-generation plants ever since. Jones says Edison was a great believer in decentralised energy and hated the idea of wasting excess heat. Sadly, the systems that came to dominate most national grids focused on a centralised business model, ignoring the waste heat.

But now it's back to the future -- just like the car industry, which seems destined to return to the electric vehicle, which was only supplanted by the internal combustion engine because it was easier to create a network of fuel pumps than charging stations at the time. For the City of Sydney to achieve its ambitions, however, it will require modifications to regulations that would allow it to generate energy and trade within its own network of council buildings and to third-party buildings.

There have already been numerous delays to the grand vision of the geothermal industry to provide up to 2000MW of capacity by 2020, caused by well blowouts, flooding in the Cooper basin, the slow release of government funds for drilling programs, and the difficulty in obtaining matching equity -- a situation made worse by a slump in the value of most listed geothermal groups.

Indeed, the industry seems to be in the midst of a crisis of faith, heightened by the shock decision last week of energy major AGL Energy to decline an option to help fund the development of the Parachilna hot-rock geothermal play in South Australia.

Parachilna, owned by Torrens Energy, had been considered one of the more prospective hot-rock plays because it was next to the grid. But AGL has decided the sums don't add up for hot rocks yet. It seems more interested in the shallower hot sedimentary aquifers and in large-scale solar photovoltaic technology, with chief executive Michael Fraser convinced that solar PV costs are on a rapid decline.

Australian bank NAB has implemented a variant on a cogeneration system (apparently using traditional technology rather than a "Bloom Box" style fuel cell) within their main data centre in order to cut power bills and Tri-generation plant to cut bank's energy bill.

NATIONAL Australia Bank expects to save nearly $1 million in annual power costs by installing a tri-generation plant at its main data centre in Melbourne. Tri-gen plants produce electricity and use waste energy to produce heat and cooling. The resulting energy consumption is much lower than using a traditional electricity grid.

NAB embarked on the tri-gen path two years ago for sustainability purposes, as it was facing power consumption growth of 10 per cent annually.

Trigen technology introduces cooling processes into co-generation technology, which reuses heat from energy manufacture. Co-generation is the technology behind the famous New York stream system which transports heat for homes and office buildings.

The gas-powered data centre channels excess gas — heated to more than 300ºC — into the 2 megawatt trigen plant where it is sent into an absorption chiller that boils refrigerant liquid to produce cold water for cooling.

NAB data centre platform specialist, Glenn Allan, said the trigen plant was quietly switched on early this month. “We are farming a single energy expense for multiple re-use,” Allan said. “We are the first [to use trigen] in data centres, but you will be able to count the months until the next deployment.”

Allan said trigen power will gradually replace the data centres’ remaining energy grid dependence and will be considered for incorporation into all new NAB data centres. “These aren’t emergency stand-by technologies — they are running the baseload power every day of the week,” Allan said. ...

NAB’s primary Melbourne data centre has been a favourite of the banks’ carbon razor gang, as part of the carbon neutral initiative through which the bank has conducted efficiency assessments, bought a fleet of hybrid vehicles, switched to 10 per cent green power and slashed energy use in its 790 branches. ...

Power and cooling costs can also be significantly reduced by replacing ordinary servers with blades and using virtualisation, Allan said. Blade servers are the staple in NAB’s data centres and, while virtualisation has been deployed extensively, he warned that the enterprise consolidation ratios may not reach some of the more optimistic predictions. Allan said the most productive uses of virtualisation are only coming out now after the “toy factor” mentality has passed.

“There is a litany of inventions in history where the usefulness is only discovered later… virtualisation could be made more useful if I could create backup application on a server, inflate it for 90 minutes then remove it so it doesn’t take up resources,” he said.

“[Virtualisation] will lower the server-to-power ratio — NAB has 16 blades to six power supplies — and if you virtualise, the ratio becomes incredible,” he said. “The case for virtualisation is off the table; everyone should do it, if not for the power savings than for the improved change management capabilities.”

The data centre uses cold and hot isle systems and Allan, who is eagerly watching research in jet impingement chip cooling, said every data centre should operate advanced cooling management models.

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.

The Age has an article on cogeneration / fuel cell company Ceramic Fuel Cells (an area attracting much attention in the wake of the unveiling of the Bloom Box) - Fuel cells a tough sell in a coal-fired economy .

IF YOU are flicking on a light switch in Melbourne today, there is a 96 per cent chance you are buying electricity generated more than 100 kilometres away, beneath a Latrobe Valley smokestack.

It is a cheap way to set up an electricity system, but hugely inefficient.

An estimated 75 per cent of the energy generated at Hazelwood and Yallourn is lost as heat or used onsite. Another 5 per cent is lost during transmission and distribution. It means only about 20 per cent of the energy ends up making the distance.

The electrons firing your bulb are also environmentally unfriendly, coming from decades-old technology that burns brown coal, the most greenhouse gas intensive major power source.

The replacement for this ''dirty'' power in coming years may not be what most expect - initially large-scale gas plants supplemented by wind farms, with solar thermal and geothermal hopefully to follow. It could also come from a box about the size of a small washing machine that sits down the side of your house.

This, at least, is the line of Ceramic Fuel Cells, the company behind the solid oxide fuel cell technology known as BlueGen. Based in Noble Park, it is said to produce enough power in a year to run a standard home more than twice over.

BlueGen creates electricity and heat by passing natural gas over ceramic fuel cells. According to Ceramic Fuel Cells managing director Brendan Dow it is 85 per cent efficient and cuts the average home's annual carbon dioxide emissions by 18 tonnes.

''At the moment they are about $25,000 to $30,000 installed but I predict within the next three to four years they should be $10,000,'' Dow says.

''But this is misleading, really. They will be like a mobile phone, where you don't pay for the handset, you just pay for the contract. Here, you won't pay for the BlueGen unit, just for the gas.''

It is a big call. Just 30 BlueGen units have been sold to date - and just four in Australia. The majority of sales have been in Germany, which is better prepared for decentralised electricity generation after years of the government generously promoting rooftop solar photovoltaic panels.

But Ceramic Fuel Cells is now approaching an important turning point. It expects safety approval by a Netherlands rating agency in the next three weeks, making large-scale installation much easier. It has signed deals with a handful of European companies, opened a manufacturing plant near Dusseldorf and employs 80 people in Melbourne. Premier John Brumby opened the Noble Park plant last May, and has been vocally supportive. Dow spruiks a bright future: "We will be cash-flow positive by next year. We're only planning on selling a couple of hundred this year, but the plan is to sell up to a couple of thousand next year."

The question Ceramic Fuel Cells poses for policy makers is: does an innovative low-emissions technology that emits less carbon dioxide than brown coal deserve public help to become cost-effective?

In the US, fuel cells are the flavour of the month thanks to some heavyweight support for a silicon fuel cell known as the "Bloom Box". Launched last month by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, it boasts Google as its first customer and has been backed by eBay, Wal-Mart and Coc-Cola. The rhetoric at the US launch was expansive. Schwarzenegger said the fuel cell technology was "shaping the future of energy".

For the moment, Bloom and BlueGen are operating on a different scale - one fridge-sized Bloom Box unit generates enough power to run a street block and costs up to $US800,000 ($A874,300).

Ceramic Fuel Cells sees a bright future in Europe, but is less certain about a cautious Australian market still hooked on coal. It is lobbying hard to get the Victorian government to add it to a list of technologies that utilities are obligated to buy electricity from. "Not having that is why we've backed off in Australia," Dow says. "That's the single biggest hurdle to commercialisation in Australia."

CBS's "Sixty Minutes" program has a look at cogeneration / fuel cell company Bloom Energy this weekend - The Bloom Box: An Energy Breakthrough?.

For the past year and a half, several large California corporations have been secretly using the “Bloom Box,” a potentially revolutionary fuel-cell system. Confirming this for the first time, several of the companies report this system is a more efficient, clean, and cost effective way to get electricity than off the power grid. Lesley Stahl and 60 MINUTES cameras get the first look inside the secretive California company, just days before the Bloom Energy official launch, scheduled for this Wednesday (24). Stahl’s report will be broadcast on 60 MINUTES, Sunday Feb. 21 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.

John Donahoe, CEO of E-bay, confirms Bloom Boxes were installed at his corporate campus nine months ago. The company says the boxes already saved them over $100,000 in electricity bills. “It’s been very successful thus far. [The Bloom Boxes] have done what they said they would do,” says Donahoe. The five boxes are able to produce five times as much electricity as the 3,248 solar panels that E-bay installed on its campus roofs, says the CEO. “The footprint for Bloom is much more efficient,” he tells Stahl. Google, FedEx, Staples and Wal-Mart are among the first 20clients Bloom is confirming.

Stahl is the first journalist to be allowed into the Bloom Energy lab and factory where they currently make one box a day. The boxes create electricity by a chemical process that utilizes oxygen and fuel, but involves no combustion. Bloom’s founder and CEO, K.R. Sridhar, insists all the materials in the box are cheap and available in abundance. Bloom says each large Box – which can power about 100 homes – currently sells for $700-800,000. They hope within five to 10 years to roll out a smaller home version for about $3,000 a unit.

Bloom Energy was the first clean energy start-up Kleiner-Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, invested in. They currently invest in about 50 clean tech companies. Sridhar confirms the company has received over $400 million, making it one of the most expensive startups in history. The majority of that comes from Kleiner Perkins. John Doerr, the Kleiner Perkins partner who invested in Bloom, has high hopes. “The Bloom Box is intended to replace the [electric power] grid for its customer,” says Doerr. He thinks existing utility companies should not be threatened or have a problem with Bloom Energy. “The utility companies will see this as a solution. All they need to do is buy Bloom Boxes, put them in the substation for the neighborhood and sell that electricity,” he says.

But there is another hurdle says Michael Kanellos, editor in chief of the Web site GreenTech Media. Even if Sridhar can mass produce his boxes and sell them cheaply enough, “The problem is then G.E. and Siemens and other conglomerates that can probably do the same thing. They have fuel cell patents,” he tells Stahl.

Tonic reports that cogeneration / fuel cell company Bloom Energy is installing a 500KW configuration at eBay - eBay First To Demonstrate Bloom Fuel cells.

Following hard on Tonic's story on EEStor and a the wave of clean energy technologies about to break on the shores of global warming comes word that eBay is to get the largest installation to date of Bloom Energy's new fuel cell.

And we're not talking about a tiny demonstration project, of the sort we often read about; this is a gang of five commercial-grade cells turning out an impressive 500KW. That's a lot of output. It's no power station, but it's enough to run a neighborhood worth of homes.

Michael Kanellos, writing in greentechmedia, reports that the "City of San Jose has granted eBay permission to install five fuel cells from Bloom Energy that will generate up to 500 kilowatts of power." According to the San Jose Business Journal, eBay is "on a mission to reduce its overall carbon footprint by 15 percent by 2012 ... It’s using technology from the first green tech investment made by [venture capital firm] Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers to do it."

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.

The Age reports that cogeneration / fuel cell manufacturer Ceramic Fuel cells expects to start selling its "Bluegen" product in Australia next year - Ceramic fires up Bluegen.

THE ASX-listed alternative energy company Ceramic Fuel Cells is set to start making its ''Bluegen'' home solid oxide fuel cell units, which could see them being installed in Australian homes from early next year.

Manufactured in Germany, the units will be priced from $8000 to $10,000 each and produce up to 17,000 kwh of electricity a year - more than twice the amount needed to power an average home.

Ceramic's managing director, Brendan Dow, said the grid-connected units, which are about the size of a dishwasher, generate electricity from natural gas on-site at a higher efficiency and lower cost than coal-fired power.

Cleantech.com reports that India may have more natural gas than previously thought and is looking to expand the use of gas in power generation, transport and cogeneration - India readies for shift away from oil.

Officials are laying the framework for an economy based on natural gas and fuel cells.

Indian officials say they're laying pipelines that could lead to the emergence of an economy based on natural gas, instead of oil.

The shift could ease India's reliance on imported oil, as well as lessening the country's electricity shortages.

India imports 68 percent of its oil consumption, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. According to the World Bank, roughly 40 percent of residences in India
are without electricity, and blackouts are common in cities with access to the electric grid.

But Indian officials are enacting a plan that could use vast domestic reserves of natural gas to solve both problems. The EIA says that India had 38 trillion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves as of January 2009. In 2007, India produced just 1.1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and used 1.5 trillion cubic feet thanks to imports.

But the Business Standard reports that government officials now think the potential reserves are even larger: India has the potential to source at least 200 trillion cubic feet of gas from its East Coast alone.

The cross-country and intra-city pipelines could supply homes' gas turbines or fuel cell units, which would then produce hydrogen that could be used to fuel motorcycles.

Further deployment of pipelines could mean city fleets and public transit could be powered by compressed natural gas, while vapor absorption chillers could be used to cool buildings.

Robert Gottliebsen has an article at The Business Spectator on cogeneration / fuel cell company Ceramic Fuel Cells - Small but powerful.

Around the world enormous effort is being concentrated on generating energy more efficiently with lower carbon emissions. That work encompasses many generating techniques, but significant development expenditure is now being concentrated on decentralised power generation instead of the traditional centralised power generation facilities.

In Australia one of the leaders in power generation decentralisation is a fairly obscure company, Ceramic Fuel Cells.

I noticed about 18 months ago that Jeff Harding, who spearheaded the development of the global wind and hydro group, Pacific Hydro, ( before selling it to the industry superannuation funds), joined the board of Ceramic and became its chairman.

Ceramic has been developing CSIRO technology that produces small fuel cells that form the base of gas fired home generators.

Ceramic Fuel Cells’ technological breakthroughs have been obscured by the fact that the group lost tens of millions investing in global debt securities (Making up for lost capital, April 7). Those losses are now the subject of IMF funded court cases against the promoter. Ceramic Fuel Cells has developed a small $6,000 home generator that has an 85 per cent power/heat conversion rate. A normal large power station has a 40 per cent power conversion rate. Ceramic’s high conversion figures have fascinated a whole range of European and Japanese power utilities who can see that the units can slash greenhouse emissions and halve the amount of gas required to generate home/office electricity and heating. And as the energy is produced in the home or office there is no transmission waste, although surplus electricity can be sold back to the grid.

Ceramic is currently completing a European manufacturing facility. It can’t wait for the court case decision, so it has just raised $20 million with a placement at 5 cents a share. Original shareholders Woodside and Energex did not take up shares in the placement, so their percentage stake has been more than halved. But two major European funds, the Belgium based KBC Ecoclimate Change Fund and Deutsche bank’s New Energy Opportunity Fund each subscribed around $4.5 million and each now have about 12 per cent of Ceramic Fuel Cells.

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.