Waste heat found in the exhaust gas of various industrial processes and it is estimated that somewhere between 20 to 50% of industrial energy input is lost as waste heat in the form of hot exhaust gases, cooling water, and heat lost from hot equipment surfaces and heated products. As the industrial sector continues efforts to improve its energy efficiency, recovering waste heat losses provides an attractive opportunity for an emission free and less costly energy resource.
Numerous technologies and variations/combinations of technologies are commercially available for waste heat recovery. However these are limited in application due to limited efficiency benefits and high cost. IdeaLab is developing next generation systems and solutions that can convert waste heat into useful products like electricity at high efficiency and low system cost.
The variability of these sources has led to concerns regarding the reliability of an electric grid that derives a large fraction of its energy from these sources as well as the cost of reliably integrating large amounts of variable generation into the electric grid. Because the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine at any given location, there has been an increased call for the deployment of energy storage as an essential component of future energy systems that use large amounts of variable renewable resources. However, this often-characterized “need” for energy storage to enable renewable integration is actually an economic question. IdeaLab is developing economical energy storage solutions that can be deployed on a large scale to improve the penetration of renewable energy on the power grid.
In addition, CHP can bring power resilience to households and commercial entities to counter weather-related outages that cause billions of dollars of losses to the economy annually. IdeaLab is developing kW scale distributed power systems to serve this market using state-of-the-art technology for a compact solution that can serve this market at high efficiency and low cost to improve power generation reliability and economics.
IdeaLab is developing next generation systems and solutions that can convert waste heat into useful products like electricity at high efficiency and low system cost.
IdeaLab is developing economical energy storage solutions that can be deployed on a large scale to improve the penetration of renewable energy on the power grid.
IdeaLab is developing kW scale distributed power systems to serve this market using state-of-the-art technology for a compact solution.