Lichtblick and Volkswagen To Build 'Swarm' Power Plants

Dr. Hok writes "As more and more renewable energy enters the grid, it gets increasingly difficult to match supply and demand 24/7. The answer of German power company Lichtblick and Volkswagen is a swarm of 100,000 flexible base-load generators. These fridge-sized CHP (Combined Heat and Power) generators that will be installed in people's basements in Hamburg starting early next year will feed electricity into the grid and the waste heat into their home's water/heating. The "ZuhauseKraftwerk" (HomePowerPlant) features a vanilla VW Golf natural-gas engine that generates 20kW electrical and 34 kW heat with an efficiency of 92%. The units are remotely controlled via a mobile network or DSL; they can ramp up in a minute if needed. A water tank ensures that heat is continuously available, while electricity is produced on demand. The swarm will replace two nuclear plants, they say. And your old oil heating needed replacement anyway."

Comments

Uh?

[0123456]

"The swarm will replace two nuclear plants, they say"

So when we're all supposed to be scared to death of EVIL GLOBAL WARMING, the 'green' Germans want to replace two nuclear plants that emit no CO2 with... car engines... running on natural gas which will probably have to be purchased from the Commies?

Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

Re:Uh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Germany and Spain allow nice allowances for those that produce the power at home. For example, the price paid for residences in grid-tie solar systems is $.60 per KWH in Germany ("Solar is only economic for installation on rooftops because of the feed-in tariffs for solar electricity of 60 cents per kWh". http://www.edn.com/article/CA6432171.html )

Note that Germany is doing this even though solar is much less efficient there. Germany is located at ~ 51' N latitude . For reference, Great Falls, MT is at ~ 47' N Latitude.

If the US tariffed-in rates were set at even $.38 per KWH, solar would be a no-brainer investment for majority of homes in the US and coal and natural gas generation would die a natural death with no power infrastructure upgrade needed.

As a side note, the price of natural gas sets the world price for Ammonium nitrate - a product which uses natural gas as a major catalyst to produce. Therefore the price of Natural Gas has a great impact on the cost of food for most of the world. ( http://www.ipm.iastate.edu/ipm/icm/2003/4-14-2003/natgasn.html ).

That is to say: the electricity we use that is generated by natural gas, increases the price we pay for food-stuffs here and in the rest of the world.

Re:Uh?

[gmthor]

The point is that nuclear plants can't be shut of in a few minutes (coal plants neither) and waters storing plants are not flexible enough. Because of that many windmills and water dams are shut of even thou they could produce green energy. So what it really means is that this technology will allow real green technology to run when ever it can.
Just a statistics i remember (i can not cite it anymore thou) is that about 40% of green energy is wasted because the electric grid couldn't handle it.

Re:Uh?

[orzetto]

Ammonium nitrate [is] a product which uses natural gas as a major catalyst to produce.

Here come the chemistry Nazis: natural gas is a reactant, not a catalyst, and not to produce ammonium nitrate. It is used to produce hydrogen, which is then combined with nitrogen to get ammonia, with which you actually get the ammonium nitrate when you combine it with nitric acid.

Though you're right that the price of NG has a large influence on that of ammonium nitrate.

Re:Uh?

[bickerdyke]

Alternatively, instead of having hundreds of thousands of CO2 producing generators with the ability to rapidly ramp up and down production, you could have a few nice green nuclear power plants and ramp up and down the load instead (e.g. by using the excess power to do useful stuff like cracking water).

I guess I should buy stocks of every major paint company, just in case if someone really wanted to start building 'green nuclear power plants'. Wouldn't know of any other way to turn them 'green'

Re:Uh?

[FireFury03]

I live close enough to Chernobyl to know that nuclear power is simply not acceptable. Unless you just love thyroid cancer.

Massively flawed reactor designs being run by complete idiots is simply not acceptable. Modern reactors are extremely safe and (in the West) well regulated. If you're going to ban the modern nuclear industry on public safety grounds, you'd better ban the whole chemical industry too since that deals with chemicals that are way more harmful and is far less well regulated. Replacing all the coal fired power plants with nuclear plants would massively cut pollution (coal plants put up a *lot* of particulate pollution into the atmosphere, much of which is radioactive and/or highly toxic, not to mention the environmental concerns of the toxic and radioactive fly ash which has to be disposed of - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill for why this is bad).

Re:Uh?

[hairyfeet]

Is that why we here in AR have wildcatters coming out our wazoos? In less than 2 years we have had more than a half dozen natural gas wildcatters popping up all over town, and we are just a little speck on the map so they must be all over the place. I figured the price of natural gas wasn't high enough to explain all the rigs popping up everywhere, but if it is as you say and the natural gas is required for food production that makes a lot more sense.

Because everyone here has known for decades there was natural gas all over the place, just nobody bothered because the price of gas was so cheap. hell in the days of family wells out local fire dept was getting called out all the time because somebodies pump kicked on and the natural gas blew the well house sky high. I was wondering why all of a sudden we have natural gas companies building like mad here, and can't hardly move for all the semis carrying gas production equipment. A tie in with food production makes a lot more sense as to why we have suddenly become a boom town. Thanks for the info.

Re:Uh?

[Kavafy]

Nuclear power is inherently dangerous, we do not know how to deal with the waste, the nuclear fossil fuel will last only a couple of decades, and huge power plants are as inefficient as it gets because of the long distances electricity is transported. By contrast, distributed generation of electricity as proposed by the article is much more efficient, because it happens very close to the consumer.

There are already passively safe reactor designs available to be built, most of the waste that will ever be produced has already been produced as modern reactors produce far less, and where did you get the idea that there are only a couple of decades of fuel left? More like a hundred years with current technologies and billions of years if breeder reactors are used: http://www.nea.fr/html/general/press/2008/2008-02.html

Re:Uh?

[timmarhy]

i think until you learn even a little about how a power grid works, you'll continue to hear, and be frustrated by, the base load arguement against solar,wind and wave.

"Had we invested a fraction of the research funding that we have given to nuclear power industries into renewable energy research, we would probably already have most of our energy from renewalbe sources. "

the fact is we HAVEN'T invested in nuclear at all for about 20 years,beyond keeping existing reactors going. and how do you come to the conslusion we could make solar/wind/wave able to provide a constant load?!?! is any amount of research going to make the sun shine and the wind blow on queue?!

"Nuclear power is inherently dangerous, we do not know how to deal with the waste, the nuclear fossil fuel will last only a couple of decades" - bull-fucking-shit! the nuclear industry has a saftey record 2nd to none for a start. then consider modern reactors have passive saftey masures making a meltdown impossible.

and i've also heard this argument that uranium fuel will run out in 50 years. yes, present STOCKS will run out if we don't dig up anymore, or look for/develope new deposits. i know for a fact (i work in resources) australia has MASSIVE reserves of uranium, which could provide fuel to the world for easily 500 years at present rates. then there are breeder reactors, which can extend the life of fuel rods 50x, at which point you end up with either a low rad material which isn't dangerous or a highly active material which has a 1/2 life of 200 years - easily containable.

but i know you won't listen to reason, you've been spoon fed this nonsense for years. i'll just wait for your lights to go out.

Re:Uh?

[Hal_Porter]

EVERY DAY IS ANGRY GERMAN DAY, SCHWEINEHUND!

Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.

Re:Uh?

[jonadab]

You're looking at it from a purely ideological standpoint, and you're missing the pragmatic side of the issue.

The fact is, nuclear power plants, today, in practice, in the real world, *can* and *do* deliver the kind of energy required to run the power grid. They can completely replace the burning of fossil fuels if necessary, and the fuel they run on is in fact VERY plentiful, particularly modern reactors that can run on U-238. This is partly because it goes so far. A pound of uranium generates a WHOLE lot more power than a pound of coal or oil. But uranium is fairly abundant anyway. There's more uranium in the earth's crust than there is tin, for instance. Enough to meet the world's power needs for *centuries* (and by then hopefully we'll have more cost-effective solar -- but I'm getting ahead of myself).

It is likely that no amount of research or investment will ever make wind and wave deliver enough power to meet the world's needs at the current power consumption rate. Falling-water power plants are very cost-effective where you have a generous amount of water at significant potential, e.g., at a dam or large waterfall, but there are relatively few such sites. We do use them where they are available, but there's a limit to how many of them we can build. We can't replace all the coal and oil plants with hoover-dam-style plants, because quite simply there just plain aren't that many large rivers.

Solar power can, in the long term, deliver the power we need, but at present it still needs decades of development to get to a point where it will be economically viable. I'm very much in favor of continuing that research, but it's not going to happen overnight. Today, the most cost-effective method we have for harnessing solar power involves using acres and acres of green plants to turn it into carbohydrates, which we can then burn as fuel. If we want to replace fossil-fuel and nuclear power generation with solar, we're going to have to do better than that. Further research and development is required.

Re:Uh?

[Rogerborg]

So, you're saying that if we all live in log cabins and drink from the same hole in the ground that we're crapping in, then there's no problem with relying on solar?

Heck, why not just live in caves and burn our own dung, like the Goddamn Belgians.

Re:Uh?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

He made an error in wording(said catalyst, should have said feedstock); but his intended point stands. Ammonium nitrate is typically made from ammonia and nitric acid; and ammonia is, these days, typically made from natural gas or petroleum gases.

Re:Uh?

[TheRaven64]

There is no such thing as radioactive waste. If it is sufficiently radioactive to be dangerous, it is sufficiently radioactive to be used in betavoltaic, radiothermal, or pebble bed reactors. Complaining about radioactive waste is like using charcoal mounds as a fuel source and then complaining that you have to store all of that waste charcoal.

Re:Uh?

[Rei]

There are some serious problems with this home generation concept.

1) When is extra peaking most in demand? In the middle of the day in July, when everyone's AC comes on. How much home heating is generally needed in the middle of the day in July when everyone's AC comes on? Not bloody much. But you're going to have the full heat output of a car engine pumping into your house; there's no way water heating alone will justify that.

2) Instead of spending the capital costs to build a couple really big peakers, they're going be building millions of tiny individual peakers, each with their own pollution controls? I can't imagine that would be even *remotely* cost-competitive. Or as clean.

I just don't buy it.

Re:92% efficiency??

[Anonymous Coward]

Well,

you could use math...

If 20kW+34kW is 92%, then the total input energy is 58.7kW, therefore the electric efficiency is approximately 34%.

However, natural gas boilers for heating and warm water are very common in Germany, so replacing some (and 100000 is "some") of them with units that can also generate electricity is not such a bad idea.

Cheers,
Sirius

Re:92% efficiency??

[gmthor]

Yes it can be that efficient.
You are right about the electric efficiency which is of cause bad. But what happens to the waste energy? All the rest is heat is stored in a big water tank for your home warm water. Only 8% of the energy escapes that system and will leave your chimney.

Re:92% efficiency??

[tancque]

I live nextdoor to Germany, in the Netherlands, and here airconditioning in homes is not very common. I assume it's the same in Germany.
It can be hot, of course, but never for very long. "Airco" is considered to be a luxery. And hot water is still needed in the summer.

Just be sure not to install such a system near your carefully stored wines in the cellar.

Re:Russia and natural gas

[Mr. Roadkill]

Uranium is a finite resource too, much more finite than fossil fuels in fact. If the world suddenly switched massively to nuclear power, there would be about a decade worth of uranium to extract. See this page

Not quite. That's assuming a "once-through" fuel cycle, and ignoring things like the newer generations of breeder reactors that burn waste from other reactors. Depending on a number of factors, estimates range between 80 and five BILLION year.

I quite like Bernard Cohen's take on things, cited in that same article, that effectively suggests that we can keep getting uranium from seawater at least as long as the time we have until the sun burns out. I don't quite know how realistic it is, but it's certainly interesting and worthy of further examination.

Re:92% efficiency??

[Halo1]

Very few homes in (North-)Western Europe have air conditioning, and the warm water tank would obviously not be placed in your living room. Average summer temperatures are between 20 and 30 degrees Celcius. And while the system would probably be overall less efficient in summer than in winter, you will still need some warm water anyway to do the dishes, to clean, to take showers, etc. There are also washing machines and dish washers nowadays that can take warm water as "input" rather than cold water that is subsequently heated using electricity.

Re:Russia and natural gas

[Libertarian001]

With all due respect, nothing on the wikipedia page you cite actually supports the argument that we're going to run out of uranium any time in the near future. Did you just put up a link and assume that no one would read it? "Uranium depletion is the result of extracting and consuming uranium, a finite resource. However, uranium resources may never be fully depleted as the economically-recoverable reserves (including those in seawater) may be effectively inexhaustible." (opening statement) And remember that the sky-is-falling crowd have, for the last 40 years, been claiming that we only have 40 years left of oil. IOW, knock it off with the FUD.

Nuclear power is safe

[Firethorn]

Nuclear power IS safe, at least by any reasonable use of the term. Thing is, if you scale up Nuclear power to the same electricity production as coal, even if you include a Chernobyl every year, it'd still kill fewer people than Coal does. The statistics DON'T point to a Chernobyl level event every year - at this point you're looking more at a greater than 50 year interval between them, and every year of safe operation without another disaster extends that.

Even though I am thousands of kilometers away, it is still recommended to not eat mushrooms more than a couple of times a year, and I want a better future for my own children.

Are you sure that recommendation is based on good science? Or is it like the Vaccine scare here in the USA about Thermisol? That has parents not vaccinating their kids even with thermisol free vaccines.

showing that US research spendings on solar energy are still only half of those on nuclear energy despite the fact that you claim that there is essentially no research on nuclear energy! ; figures are from National Council for Science and the Environment.

Given that Nuclear power provides ~20% of our power, sure, there's R&D with it, but most of that's gone to increasing power production capabilities at existing nuke plants, not for building new ones. I'd also note that wind isn't listed - which might put wind/solar over nuclear in research investments(might be why they don't list it), but still under the R&D investments for COAL.

While on this topic, I'll point out that I'm for a rough power production plan of 35% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, 20% hydro, 5% other.

Given that I've considered installed a combined cycle generator in my basement*, I'm not hostile to Lichtblick's plan. I'd power it with propane though, as that's what I have access to. It can be very efficient as well - an electrical power only plant is lucky to reach 50%, most are closer to 30%. The rest is waste heat. If you're using the combined cycle to also utilize the heat that would otherwise be waste, bonus.

*Normally you don't want the generator in the house, but it is perfectly safe if you take the right steps and properly duct the exhaust to OUTSIDE the building, and in my case I'd be ducting the air in as well.

Germans don't have home AC

[Doctor O]

Being German, I can tell you that I have yet to meet someone who has AC in his home. Public buildings *sometimes* have it, but AC isn't common here at all.