Clean company alert: Climate Energy
CNET’s News.com has a piece about a U.S.-based company called Climate Energy that manufactures and sells a “micro combined heat and power” unit for residential basements. “Climate Energy’s system is designed around a Honda internal combustion engine that burns natural gas to generate electricity. A heat exchanger feeds any captured heat to a furnace, which then distributes the hot air,” according to the article.
What’s interesting is that this product, while it might sound new and unique within a North American context, isn’t such a big deal in Europe. The U.K., for example, has four micro-CHP products on the market that on average can reduce a household’s greenhouse gas emissions by 25 per cent. In Japan, it’s estimated that 30,000 of such units have been sold and installed over the past few years. While twice the price of a traditional high-end furnace, the company figures it has a 7 to 10 year payback. Not the greatest payback, mind you, but with volume production you can imagine that these machines could fall dramatically in price. For now, government incentives might make this a worthwhile purchase for some.
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca
February 2nd, 2007 at 8:02 am
Two years ago I loved the idea of a 25% reduction in greenhouse emmissions. Today it’s increasingly clear that this improvement is too little, too late. Does it really make sense to be investing in good but inadequate infrastructure that will be with us for a long time?
For residences, it’s much better to focus your investment on the building envelope. In Germany, they’ve manage to find a 90% solution that’s perfectly affordable, using intelligent passive solar design with a well-tailored supplemental heating unit. I’m not sure that a CHP unit could be made to efficiently be integrated with that. In view of this, my thinking is that a CHP which proposes only a 25% reduction is a bit of a dead end.
February 2nd, 2007 at 8:12 am
Good point, particularly with the release of the UN climate report today. We do need to aim higher.
February 2nd, 2007 at 10:02 am
The bottom line is that each year in the US 4 million home heating appliances are replaced. What are the current options for homeowners who are doing the replacing? In most cases they call their local HVAC contractor and get whatever the lowest bid appliance is.
With this combined heat and power alternative, at the very worst case they will be utilizing the natural gas, which they are going to burn anyway, at the highest efficiency currently possible in home heating.
It would be great if we could wake up tomorrow morning with solar panels and windmills on every roof, but that’s not the reality we are facing.
It was Voltaire who said, “The best is the enemy of the good.” We need to start by finding ways that average people can make a difference, and 25% IS a big difference. It’s equivalent to trading your SUV for a hybrid. Do you think that’s a bad idea also?