Another significant funding deal for the energy conservation crowd was announced this morning, with ReGen Power Systems taking $5 million for an engine that converts waste industrial heat into power. That may sound a bit boring, but the investment and technology are a harbinger of big changes to come.
Everyone has experienced waste heat from electricity-driven machines — take your common electrical oven for example. The oven exists to cook things, whether atop its burners or inside. Either way, the majority of the heat bypasses the food and escapes into the air and environment around the oven. Unless you need a warm kitchen, most of the electricity you just used was wasted.
Scale that up a few hundred times, and you’ve got a typical industrial process, along with its massive heat losses. Cooling towers exist just to get rid of all the excess. Of course, engineers have been aware for decades that they could turn that heat back into electricity if they liked, but the process never seemed to be worth it, at least in the United States. In Europe, with higher energy prices and a longer conservation tradition, some big plants have installed waste heat recyclers.
But with prices set to rise, and heightened worries over global warming, most industries are changing their minds — providing openings for startups. Recycled Energy Development (RED), one of the more mature companies, has worked on over $2 billion worth of projects according to its webpage, while just two days ago newcomer ElectraTherm reportedly raised $2.6 million in a first round of funding.
ReGen is also a newcomer; this funding is its first, and the company is still working on its designs. It has a prototype 10-kilowatt engine that it will use to test out the concept, with a larger 500kW engine yet to come. That’s about 10 times the size of ElectraTherm’s first production unit. But that’s one of the encouraging things about the influx of new ventures; the heat recyclers they’re building aren’t just for the largest, hottest smokestacks, but will instead address nearly all industries. Ultimately, that could save gigawatts of energy, and generate billions of dollars in revenue yearly.
The $5 million funding was led by 21Ventures and the Quercus Trust. ReGen is based in New Salem, Mass.
1 comment:
I'm associated with Recycled Energy Development, one of the companies you mention. And you're right: turning waste heat into clean power could do an awful lot to curb global warming while cutting energy costs. You said that in the past, engineers have decided that this process wasn't worth it. But one of the major reasons for that is regulatory barriers. Until 1978, it wasn't even LEGAL for anyone but the local utility to generate and sell power. Since then, the rules have opened up a bit, but utilities still have enormous advantages. Yet EPA and DOE estimates suggest that energy recycling could slash U.S. greenhouse pollution by 20%. That's as much as if we pulled every car off the road. Meanwhile, costs would go down. This is what we should be focusing on.
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