Avoid Power Outages and Improve The Environment

The big story in the paper today reads, "Snows close down 105 miles of I-90, leaves 350,000 without power." In our part of the world we are spared from the torment of hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis and nearly every other form of natural disaster. The exception being Rochester's notorious winter storms that have been known to leave people without power for up to several weeks. Googling around for a few minutes led me to a fantastic technology called Combined Cooling, Heating, and Power (CCHP) that delivers distributed generation of energy, heating, and cooling. The basic premise of distributed generation is that nearly 50% of all the energy in the US is lost to production losses at the plant and transmission losses over our huge, antiquated, grid.

Home CCHP systems have the chance of freeing us from the notoriouisly abusive pricing of New York energy companies. In a nutshell CCHP systems are onsite gas fired turbine generators that use the waste heat to heat and - believe it or not - cool your home. Power generation is often over 90% efficient, has no transmission losses and you don't need to pay for it to be delivered to your home. The result is a clean efficient generator/furnace/air conditioner in a box located in your basement. When the power goes out in your neighborhood, you will only notice when your neighbors show up at your door to enjoy your heat and functional appliances!

This technology is also the kind of thing we should be integrating into the Renaissance Square LEED Platinum building design. The Transamerica Pyramid building in the financial district of San Francisco is in the process of installing a 1.1 MW CHP system. Some interesting savings they expect to see that we should demand of RenSquare are:

• Recovered waste heat from the engines will be used to heat the building, displacing 100% of the steam currently purchased for heating purposes.
• Waste heat will drive a 320-ton absorption chiller that will be installed to create chilled water for the building”.
• Double the overall fuel efficiency over utility-produced power.
• 40% reduction in greenhouse gasses.
• Zero downtime of electricity availability due to on-site generation

To that point, the CHP system installed at Saddleback Community College in San Diego, CA is estimated to produced a monetary savings of $11.2 million over the next 15 years. Are we demanding enough of our city?