Volkswagen to Make Electricity in Your Basement
We are used to the idea of powering our homes from our roofs, by now. But what if we could get our electricity from the basement? From what’s already down there… heating our homes.
Everyone who uses natural gas to supply heat and to heat water, could be tapping into that heat to make their own electricity as well with a CHP unit. Unlike solar or wind power, this energy source could be supplying electric power both day and night, and whether it’s windy or not.
And who better to make such a unit but an auto company that has already put in some design time making natural gas engines work more efficiently. Volkswagen wants to make electricity in your basement.
If you live in Germany. For now.
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Volkswagen has formed a partnership with German energy supplier LichtBlick to build combined heat and power plants which are to be driven by high efficiency Volkswagen natural gas engines.
Obviously for the homeowner this means that as well as the option of making your own power on the roof, now there is the option of getting a supply from your basement as well. But it is not primarily individual homeowners who would be the beneficiaries of Volkswagen’s decentralized electricity swarm in their own basement. Not directly, at least.
These units would send bursts of power, as needed, to the grid. Each unit will connect to a grid operations center, and will be able to provide power on demand to the grid. So LichtBlick will market the EcoBlue CHP home power plants to municipalities as a new, decentralized intelligent power supply scheme aptly named the SchwarmStrom or “swarm of electricity”.
What the electrical current “swarm” refers to is that 100,000 of these units in a town would effectively constitute a 2,000 megawatt natural gas power plant. Just a decentralized one.
“The home power plants together form a huge, invisible power station that doesn’t make the countryside ugly or require additional infrastructure.” says LichtBlick.
Lichtblick said the plan was that tens of thousands of generators could be mobilized to meet a surge in demand or if drought made it hard to cool nuclear plants or a calm spell idled wind turbines.
Conventional base-load power plants cannot be started up or shut down fast enough to compensate for fluctuations in power supply from solar or wind energy units as a result of changing weather conditions.
“Gas plants have an advantage over nuclear power stations in that the heat produced by the latter is wasted”, Claudia Kemfert; the DIW research institute energy expert said, in evaluating the EcoBlue.
This would be great to have during a power outage too.
that $7300 price tag is steep though. How much do you think you would make back in personal savings and selling to the grid (minus the cost of the gas to create that electricity)?
Is there a business model where the $7300 device could be installed for free and then you just pay monthly? Like a cell phone plan where you get the phone for free if you commit to a long contract?
Honda already makes something similar: http://www.hondanews.com/categories/1048/releases/4880
Makes sense for VW to follow suit.
If you have any generator that uses some form of IC engine, and that engine is cooled via a fluid in contained with a water jacket, you can run the coolant to an indoor storage tank in any building and run heaters off of it or run it through a heat exchanger for domestic hot water…
You end up with electricity, heat and warm water…
Ben; the money you could make would depend on
a. if you have a Feed in Tarfiff available where you live and
b. if it would cover CHP.
CHP is not a classic “renewable” like solar etc, though worthy.
One city I know is considering a FIT that will pay for CHP in California, Sacramento’s SMUD:
http://cleantechnica.com/2009/08/17/smud-offers-unusual-feed-in-tariff-but-not-as-good-as-gainesvilles/
Germany, where this is being pioneered, has the best FIT in the world for solar, but this arrangement with Volkswagen and LightBlick only lowers their energy costs for energy customers hosting this.
But wouldn’t a Feed in Tariff be perfect for this.
MD - thanks - great info
I wish they had an English website, but 94% total efficiency is very impressive, probably necessitating both block cooling and exhaust heat capture. Susan, can you do another article comparing cost, power and heat output of the Capstone, Freewatt and EcoBlue CHP systems? Given the large amount of waste heat in these systems, it might be advantageous to add an Organic Rankine Cycle generator to improve the power to heat ratio. The design of the stratified heat storage tank is also critical for efficient heat capture and storage.
Tom, you write it comparing cost, power and heat output of the Capstone, Freewatt and EcoBlue CHP
But where are we getting this gas from? I don’t know about in Germany, but over here in the US, thousands of acres of arable land and billions of gallons of drinkable water are being poisoned in an effort to extract this so-called clean energy.
You can’t forget to look at the extraction side of things!
http://www.energyjustice.net/naturalgas/
I’d have to say 94% is a misleading exaggeration! A regular gasoline fueled ICE is at best 30% energy efficient at the flywheel. They’re talking about running an ICE on natural gas, a fuel with even lower energy density than petroleum.
Based on the Gasoline figure simple math says they are claiming a whopping 64% of their energy generation from waste heat which might fly if they’re talking about Germany in the middle of winter, but is a gross exaggeration for the rest of the year. That much heat energy can simply not be used in a domestic house year round.
I’d also like to point out the noise and emissions from such an ICE are not mentioned. Ever tried to get some sleep within earshot of a diesel genset? LOL
@Richard
”I’d also like to point out the noise and emissions from such an ICE are not mentioned. Ever tried to get some sleep within earshot of a diesel genset?”
noise= energy
emissions = energy
( my comment = totally uninformed layman’s quick impression after skim reading )
@Richard (Dick Smith?)
–A commentor who has no actual comment on the story!– Bring it on mate!!
Have you read about truck stop plug-in sites being installed across the US? So resting truck drivers can turn off their engines instead of running them for hours just to power their AC systems. At idle the Diesel runs at all of 3% energy efficiency (emissions = energy LOL) and now local residents can get some piece and quite (noise = energy LOL)
A nuclear bomb = energy…. what is your point??
This VW system is meant to be based in residential areas. I don’t see any mention of it being intended for areas only zoned for industrial levels of noise. Having just returned from an event where diesel gen sets ran 24 hours a day to provide lighting… I am well aware of the noise and vibration they make, even when insulated from the ground by tires.
Even a small 2 hp air compressor can generate significant disturbance in a quiet residential neighborhood, and they only make noise, they don’t pump out noxious fumes!
The ‘green’ movement is meant to be getting away from ICEs not finding new ways for auto manufacturers to sell more of them!