Have you ever seen clouds of steam billowing from the smokestacks of some sort of factory or industrial facility? That's nothing but wasted energy...but GE wants to turn it back in to power.
Last Friday General Electric announced that it had acquired Calnetix Power Solutions, a privately held company which makes systems for converting heat from industrial equipment into electricity.
CNET's Green Tech says,
Calnetix's system is designed specifically for small-scale power generation at places, such as factories which give off a lot of unused heat. It can also be used to make electricity from gas engines, such as landfills that capture and burn biogas or at a concentrating solar power plant.
To turn heat into electricity, Calnetix uses an Organic Rankine Cycle where heat and pressure turn a working fluid, which is a refrigerant, into a vapor. That vapor expands to turn a turbine, which drives a generator to make electricity. The vapor is cooled, turned back into a liquid, and circulated in pipes through the system again.
The company says that improvements in the basic cycle allow it to turn heat as low as 250 degrees Fahrenheit into 125 kilowatts of electricity which can be used on site or fed into the grid.
The acquisition gives GE a commercial product and intellectual property to go with it. The company seems determined to capitalize on growing small-scale waste-to-power technology market, which it projects to be $1 billion and grow rapidly.
Capturing waste heat to convert into power...now that's pulling clean energy out of thin air.
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