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Converting Waste Heat Into Power -- Updated
ReGen Power Systems LLC is pioneering development of a Stirling-type external combustion power system to convert excess process heat and steam energy at industrial plants into electricity. The system will be powered by a novel design to operate at the moderate and lower temperatures found in process heating at paper mills, steel mills, chemicals and petroleum refining facilities, glass ovens, cement plants and similar locations.
In addition to high efficiency, the ReGen systems will produce additional power with no new fuel combustion. Not only will they save money, but will produce no new emissions, enabling companies to contribute in a positive way to the environment.
The Stirling cycle was invented by Robert Stirling in 1816, and it is still known to be the highest potential efficiency of any heat engine technology. It is an external combustion engine that operates by using temperature differntials to expand and compress a pressurized gas, driving a piston that results in energy for electrical and other power operations. Because the system is closed, a portion of the heat not converted to work can be retained for reuse on the subsequent cycle. Internal combustion engines do not have this capability for efficiency and lower pollution emissions.
Self-generation of power by onsite generation is increasingly the solution for many energy-related problems, and can help the bottom line of costs for industries in a way the benefits the preservation of our environment. Distributed, rather than centralized power plants, are the most economic way to utilize locally produced waste gas or biomass. Perhaps the greatest value of the Stirling engine is its flexibility of fuel use. It can operate irrespective of the heat source, and serve many nations with the energy independence while lowering pollution emissions..
ReGen Power Systems LLC receives a $5 million investment
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
ReGen Power Systems Receives $5 Million Equity Commitment from 21Ventures.
NEW SALEM, MA – November 17, 2008.
ReGen Power Systems LLC today closed a significant equity financing that will enable the company to continue development of its low temperature differential engine to convert waste industrial heat to power. The $5 million investment by
21Ventures, LLC, and the Quercus Trust will fund the design and fabrication of two prototype engines. The first will be a 10kW engine for purposes of evaluation and testing. The second will be a 500kW engine to be installed at a corporate user site for field testing.
“As an external combustion engine, our design will be capable of using a wide range of heat sources to produce power,” notes ReGen President, Ricardo Conde. “We plan to offer engines that operate at 250º Centigrade for furnace exhaust, and others at 100º Centigrade to condense low pressure steam. We are excited to enter these very large markets.”
“Not only will the engine use ‘free’ fuel,” Conde explained, “but its use will produce power without producing a single molecule of greenhouse gas.” The engine will make power that would otherwise have been produced by a polluting central power plant. As a result, it will be environmentally positive as well as economic.
The new technology will be useful in many major industries, including paper, chemicals, refining, steel, aluminum, glass and cement. “In the U.S. alone, industry wastes the heat equivalent of more than 20 gigawatts of power each year,” according to David Anthony, Managing Director, of 21ventures.. “If this energy were converted to power using ReGen’s technology, it would eliminate the need to build twenty nuclear power plants.” The company expects demand for its power systems from around the world
The $5 million funding will also enable ReGen to fabricate several follow-up beta units for broader field tests, and to design a production prototype.
SOURCE: ReGen Power Systems, LLC
CONTACT: Richard Meloy, Chairman,
ReGen Power Systems at 203-328-3045
or visit the company’s website at
www.rgpsystems.com
Please note that Jonathan Mark, publisher of Flyby News,
is also associated with ReGen Power Systems LLC
Background and Resources --ReGen Power Systems LLCMarch 7, 2008 article published by Mass High Tech: The Journal of New England Technology
ReGen's Stirling idea: Power from waste heatalso posted in FN's archive issue March 16, 2008 - Item 3
ReGens Stirling idea: Power from waste heatMarch 7, 2008 STIRLING Engine R&D Gets Mass Financial Boost
"State loan kicks engine research into high gear"July 8, 2003 Item 2 - Stirling Engine for Waste Heat Power Systems
Stirling Advantage Announces Patent for Waste Heat Power SystemApril 22nd, Earth Day - 2002 -- Hampshire Gazette -- newspaper article:
"New technology from venerable Stirling", originally posted
http://www.gazettenet.com/04222002/business/13695.htm
Stirling Advantage -- June 21, 2002 -- Press Release:
New Power Source To Help Cut Global WarmingGeneral information on Stirling EnginesThe Bloom Box
21 February 2010 - 60 Minutes - CBS News
Large corporations have been testing a new device that can generate
power on the spot, without being connected to the electric grid.
Will we have one in every home someday?
Program Transcript
March 2010 - Business Insider - Chris Nelder
Sorry, The Much-Hyped "Bloom Box"
Is Not The Holy Grail Of Alternative Energy
For Flyby News archived resource guide, see:
Energy Emissions' Impact On Our Environment
This page was originally posted on 17 April 2002, and updated
above on the development of an external combustion engine
for clean affordable electrical power generation.
2) The Arctic Meltdown
3) Where art thou, Dems?
4) The moment of truth for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
Editor's Notes (17 April 2002):
Item 2 is more on evidence of the effects of Global Warming. Time is growing short. Item 3 is about the depressing known-revelations about the Democrats spineless stand in the wake of unprecedented destruction, except for those like Dennis Kucinich, Cynthia McKinney, Pete Stark, Barbara Lee, and others. The last Item is on the moment of truth for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. When originally posted and sent to Flyby News subscribers, it was in the first position.
2) The Arctic MeltdownPublished on Monday, April 15, 2002 in the Seattle Times
The Arctic Meltdown
Quick Thaw Alarms Natives
and Scientists by Usha Lee McFarling
YANRAKYNNOT, Russia — The native elders have no explanation. Scientists are perplexed as well. The icy realm of the Eskimo — the tundra and ice of Russia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland — has started to thaw.
Strange portents are everywhere.
Thunder and lightning, once rare, have become commonplace. An eerie warm wind now blows in from the south. Hunters who prided themselves on their ability to read the sky say they no longer can predict the sudden blizzards.
"The Earth," one hunter concluded, "is turning faster."
In recent years, seabirds have washed up dead by the thousands and deformed seal pups have become a common sight. Whales appear sick and undernourished. The walrus, a mainstay of the local diet, is becoming scarce, as are tundra rabbits.
The elders, who keep thousands of years of history and legend without ever writing it down, have long told children this story: If the ice that freezes thick over the sea each winter breaks up before summer, the entire village could perish.
The children always laugh. Here in the Russian Arctic, the ground is frozen nearly year-round. The ice blanketing the winter seas around the Bering Strait is thick enough to support men dragging sleds loaded with whale carcasses.
Even Zoya Telpina, the schoolteacher in this outpost of 350 Chukchi reindeer herders and marine mammal hunters, said a winter sea without ice seemed like "a fairy tale."
But last winter, when Telpina looked from her kitchen window toward the Bering Sea, she saw something she'd never seen in her 38 years: the dark swell of the open ocean, water where there had always been ice.
Telpina's husband, Mikhail, a 38-year-old dog-sled musher, has seen mushrooms on the tundra shrivel and whole herds of reindeer starve. He has cut open the bellies of salmon to find strange insects inside. He has seen willows rise where he has never seen trees before.
The changes are so widespread that they have spawned changes in the Eskimo languages that so precisely describe ice and snow. In Chukotka, where the natives speak Siberian Yupik, they use new words such as misullijuq — rainy snow — and are less likely to use words like umughagek — ice that is safe to walk on. In Nunavut, Canada, the Inuit people say the weather is uggianaqtuq — like a familiar friend acting strangely.
What the residents of the Arctic are reporting fits convincingly with powerful computer models, satellite images and recently declassified ice measurements taken by Russian submarines.
In the last century, parts of the Arctic have warmed by 10 degrees Fahrenheit — 10 times the global average. Sea ice covers 15 percent less of the Arctic Ocean than it did 20 years ago, and that ice has thinned from an average of 10 feet to less than 6.
A group of scientists who spent a year aboard an icebreaker concluded that the year-round sea ice that sustains marine mammals and those who hunt them could vanish altogether in 50 years.
The U.S. Navy, already planning for an ice-free Arctic, is exploring ways to defend the previously ice-clogged Northwest Passage from attack by sea.
Without the stabilizing effect of great land masses, the Earth's watery north is exquisitely sensitive to warming. A few degrees of warmth can mean the difference between ice and water, permafrost or mud, hunger or even starvation for the inhabitants of these remote lands.
Yet, explaining the quick thaw and determining its cause — whether human or natural — has so far eluded the experts.
There are few long-term climate observations from the ArcticWeather stations in the Far North are just 50 years old. And there is almost no data from places like Russia's Chukotka Peninsula, only 55 miles from Alaska.
In their search for information, Western scientists are turning to sources they once disparaged. In a rare convergence of science and folklore, a group of scientists is mining the memories of native elders, counting animal pelts collected by hunters and documenting the collective knowledge of entire villages.
These threads, which stretch back generations, may be the only way to trace the outlines of the half-century of change that has resculpted the Arctic and to figure out its cause.
"We have all these people paying very close attention to the animals they hunt and the sea ice they travel on," said Henry Huntington, a scientific consultant in Alaska. "It's often extremely accurate and far better than anything science has come up with."
Native observations that at first don't seem consistent with the warming — such as snowier winters and colder summers — also fit the scientists' models. Warmer air is expected to usher more storms and precipitation into the Arctic. Melting sea ice in summer can lower the water temperature and lead to cooler temperatures on adjacent land.
Despite parallel observations, Western researchers and Arctic dwellers still look at each other suspiciously across a cultural divide. Many scientists remain uncomfortable with any information not backed by numbers and measurements. Many native elders resent scientists who come ashore with their strange machines thinking they know more about the place than those who live there.
Others mistrust Western scientists who come to gather data and never send back word of their findings. They recall a group of toxicologists who came to remote villages here several years ago to collect women's breast milk to measure pollution levels. The scientists detected organic pollutants such as dioxin and PCBs in the breast milk. But the women say they were never contacted about the results.
For scientists, the facts are mostly a matter of academic, and sometimes political, interest. But for the natives, they may be a matter of life and death.
The subsistence hunters of Chukotka live in small villages without pickup trucks or snowmobiles, without supply ships or supermarkets. They have 19th-century harpoons, small boats and limited fuel for their hunts.
These villagers, who depend almost entirely on the icy sea for their food, may be witnessing the demise of their ancient way of life.
Caleb Pungowiyi, an Eskimo who works with scientists to record the observations of his elders and peers, put it this way"When this Earth starts to be destroyed, we feel it."
Ice is a second home for Gennady Inankeuyas, a 42-year-old hunter considered the best harpooner on the Chukotka Peninsula. For years, Inankeuyas has prowled the ice for seals and walrus, dragging heavy sleds and animal carcasses over the frozen ocean.
This year, Inankeuyas returned to the uncertain ice. He had to. "Of course it's dangerous," he said. "But the village needs the food."
That food is not as easy to come by now that the weather has changed. "The south wind is a bad wind. It moves the walrus to another place," said Igor Macotrik, a 42-year-old Eskimo hunter. "The walrus is hard to find."
Scientists understand such observations. Their data show that the walrus are declining, possibly because they also have to work harder to find food. Walrus mothers nurse their babies on sea-ice floes. As melting ice recedes, the walrus do, too. Far from the coast, the mothers must dive longer and deeper from the ice to the sea floor to find clams.
In recent years, the Eskimo hunters have also noticed that gray whales have become very skinny. The meat of some freshly killed whales smells rancid, "like medicine," said Maxim Agnagisyak, a 28-year-old hunter. The sled dogs won't eat it.
Scientists are beginning to analyze samples of whale blubber from the region to seek an explanation. For several years, record numbers of gray whales have washed up dead and emaciated as they migrate to their winter calving grounds in Baja California.
Land animals are also under stress. Reindeer herds plummeted after the Soviet Union collapsed and the government subsidies that helped sustain the herds were cut off. The animals began starving, and their numbers continue to decline.
Scientists have not studied the reindeer herds of Chukotka, but they have seen similar starvation in Canadian caribou. The grazing animals normally survive the winter by nosing through soft, dry snow to feed on the tundra vegetation insulated below. In recent warm years, winter rains have alternated with snow, leaving an icy crust that is difficult to penetrate and cuts the animals' legs.
Scientists are only beginning to catch up with native observations on many other aspects of the Arctic environment, such as tundra vegetation. They are monitoring a tree line that is advancing north as the Arctic warms. And scientists from Russia, Delaware and Ohio have just started a large-scale project to study the permafrost as it thaws.
It is unclear if the changing climate will let them finish their work. With scientists still debating the trajectory of change in the Arctic, the fate of the Siberian Eskimo remains as uncertain as the Arctic ice in late spring.
Hunters with tiny boats and little fuel must now go much farther out to sea for food. Sometimes they return empty-handed. Sometimes they return with prey unusual for the season, or fish native to warmer waters. Sometimes, when the seas are rough, they do not return at all.
The hunters willingly talk about the many changes they see around them. But they don't spend much time worrying about climate change.
For the moment, they have more pressing concerns gathering enough ammunition for the spring hunt and stretching their supply of stored whale meat.
Copyright © 2002 The Seattle Times Company
For Flyby News resources on this topic, see.
Mounting Evidence of Global Warming
3) Where art thou, Dems?Where art thou, Dems?
So this is what it's like to live in a one-party country
By Molly Ivins
April 12, 2002; Creators Syndicate
AUSTIN, Texas -- Across the length and breadth of this great land of ours, from the mountain to the prairie, from every hill and dale comes the question, "Where are the Democrats?" They're among the missing, along with Judge Crater and Osama bin Laden. The venerable political organization, the party of Jackson and Jefferson, is not to be found in action. OTAM -- out to all meals. So this is what it's like to live in a one-party country.
Is it possible, remotely possible, that Democrats are frightened by the John Ashcroft-Trent Lott school of "patriotism," which holds that questioning our elected (or even not-so-elected) leaders is tantamount to disloyalty if not treason? That expressing concern about our fundamental liberties helps terrorists? For that line of attack to be treated with anything but the contempt it deserves is itself un-American, not a word I use lightly.
As if the argument is not contemptible enough, one has only to look at the performance of these same definers of "patriotism" as blind obedience when Bill Clinton was struggling to fight a war. When the Clinton administration was trying to track and kill Osama bin Laden, Republicans gratuitously dismissed the entire effort as an attempt to change the subject from the all-important Monica Lewinsky.
And there we do come to one real reason the Democrats are so quiet. Political opposition in the Clinton years was so shatteringly nasty, no one wants to be seen anywhere near it now. To be accused of being "partisan" now stands for a level of conduct so degraded and degrading, we have forgotten what principled opposition means.
However, President Bush's sex life has nothing to do with the fact that his foreign policy is so inept that all the Arab countries, including our friends and allies the Saudis and the Egyptians, are now siding with Saddam Hussein rather than the United States. You really have to work at it to produce a result that bad.
We still haven't caught Bin Laden or any of the other leaders of Al-Qaeda, who are presumably regrouping and plotting some fresh horror. We haven't even finished the job in Afghanistan, as we are reminded daily, but the administration seems to have dropped that like a hot rock and gone off to plan invading Iraq -- which has no known connection with Sept. 11 -- instead. Already we are abandoning Hamid Karzai by refusing to cooperate with the Brits to maintain order there.
Someone suggested the other day if the Republicans were in the opposition, they'd have an "Osama calendar" updated daily. It's now 254 days since Sept. 11 and still Bin Laden eludes our clueless leaders." But that is precisely the sort of opposition we don't need.
Suggestions for how to fix things are a lot more useful than sitting around complaining about how fouled up things are. How do we get Sharon to accept the idea that the settlers on the West Bank have to go? How about talking the Arab countries into co-funding a Marshall Plan for the West Bank? Why not call in Bruce Urquhart, the U.N. diplomat who settled several wars, as a sort of senior consultant?
And why NOT remind people that Bush was warned over and over that letting the Middle East crisis get worse was folly? Why not point out that suggestions and solutions offered before Sept. 11 were ignored by Bush? Why not explain that the consequences of arrogant unilateralism are simply unacceptable? The old American isolationist tendency is always too ready to conclude, "You just can't deal with Those People." Of course you can. Disaster is not inevitable, but it can sure be encouraged by inaction. And that includes inaction by Democrats.
From Sept. 12 on, this administration ignored repeated calls for energy conservation. At a time when all Americans were ready to do anything to help, we could have started a "get out of the SUVs, cut the mileage, carpool, take a bus" campaign. To help one's country in a concrete way like saving fuel, and in turn reducing our dependence on unstable allies and freeing up our foreign policy options, was such an obvious step. And the Bush administration should take all the lumps it's got coming for having failed to do so.
So what did the Democrats do? Nineteen Democratic senators recently voted with the Republicans against requiring automakers to increase gas mileage. The Middle East is now so volatile an oil embargo is not that unlikely. We could have bought ourselves quite a bit of insurance by now, had we acted promptly.
Many elected Democrats apparently think this administration is so set in its unilateralist ways, there's no point in trying to move on the Kyoto Treaty, or the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, or the International Criminal Court (which would have been such a useful option for dealing with Bin Laden.) Sen. William Proxmire of Wisconsin delivered, over the years, 3,211 speeches on why we should sign the U.N. Convention Against Genocide. It took 19 years. Let's get started. Why not point out that suggestions and solutions offered before Sept. 11 were ignored by Bush?
© 2002 Creators Syndicate
www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemId=13137
4) The moment of truth for the Arctic National Wildlife RefugeThe moment of truth has arrived for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The U.S. Senate is likely to vote as early as Thursday on an amendment to open America's greatest sanctuary for Arctic animals to oil development and sprawling industrialization. Even if you have sent a message to your senators about this issue before, new developments make it critical that you do so again right now by going to:
http://www.savebiogems.org/arctic/takeaction.asp?step=2&item=1190
Our defense of the Arctic Refuge is hanging by a slender thread -- a mere handful of senators who are likely but not certain to vote with us. As the critical vote nears, the pro-oil lobby is resorting to increasingly cynical schemes to lure these "swing" senators to their side. Drilling proponents have offered to guarantee healthcare benefits for unemployed steelworkers in return for opening the refuge to oil development. They have offered to guarantee a supply of oil to Israel. More eleventh-hour ploys are sure to follow today and tomorrow. It is an insult to the American people to tie such issues to the fate of the Arctic Refuge. Providing for steelworkers and promoting peace in the Middle East should not depend on destroying our greatest remaining wilderness.
These attempts to cut backroom deals that will sell out the refuge are especially repugnant because the Senate has already voted AGAINST an amendment that would have improved fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks. That single measure alone would have saved far more oil than the Arctic Refuge could ever produce. But pro-oil senators would rather sacrifice America's premier wildlife refuge so that oil giants can sell even more oil that can then be wasted in the world's most inefficient gas-guzzling vehicles. This is special-interest politics at its absolute, public-be-damned worst. It can only be countered by millions of pro-environment messages from people like you and me.
Please do your part by contacting your two senators immediately. If you want to have the greatest possible impact, then **pick up the phone right now** and call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121. Speak to your senators' staff and ask them to tell your senators to oppose any amendment that would allow oil exploration or development in the Arctic Refuge. It will take you only about 3 minutes, but will make a big impression.
If you have less than 3 minutes or you're not within reach of a phone, then go to http://www.savebiogems.org/arctic/takeaction.asp?step=2&item=1190 and send an electronic fax or email (and please take a few seconds to personalize the sample message by adding your own thoughts about why preserving the Arctic Refuge is important to you).
However you choose to contact your senators, *please do it instantly.* This may be our last, best chance to stop the oil giants from plundering America's irreplaceable sanctuary for polar bears, white wolves, and 130,000 caribou.
And thank you, as always, for your continued support of NRDC.
Sincerely,
John H. Adams
President
Natural Resources Defense Council
==================================================
BioGems: Saving Endangered Wild Places
A project of the Natural Resources Defense Council
www.SaveBioGems.org
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