Under a kitchen counter, powered by natural gas.
Yep, or on the weall, as there will be a wall mounted unit. One will
provide on0demand DHW too.
As I recall, this came from John Corey
and his friends at the Clever Fellows
Invention Consortium in Troy, NY, USA.
When will we see it in the US?
Interesting, I never knew that. The idea of distributed power is not
exactly new.
A press release from Gledhill, the intelligent thermal store manufacturer.
They make some excellent stuff. I have one of their thermal stores, which
is a class act.
http://www.gledhill.net/water-storage/news/article14-mchp.htm
The first 550 houses are under construction right now. Powergen have been
doing trials for a few years with the Whispergen Stirling and Gledhill
thermal store. Another company, Microgen are to introduce a Stirling
version, probably using the Gledhill store too. Their unit is made by Rennai
in Japan, although designed in the UK.
http://www.microgendirect.com/main2.swf The Microgen has a free wheeling
piston Stirling with the power generating coils in the piston and around the
cylinder. The Japanese are very keen on this technology. The UK government
is actively promoting mCHP, although it can only ever be a medium term fix.
The long term has to be not using masses amount of power to begin with.
The gas bills are no different to using a normal condensing boiler, but the
electricity bills drop by around 1/3, depending on household. As
electricity is 4 times the price of gas here, that is a considerable saving
to the home owner. As time moves on and more energy efficient appliances
are being introduced, so savings may be greater on the electricity side as
the Stirling unit would provide more local power than drawing in off the
grid.
Then there is the environmental impact of less emissions and less power
infrastructure, which may mean less electricity pylons ruining the views of
the countryside.
See my recent post on this. The Gledhill web site has a few slide show
presentations and a page on the central control system that the power
provider may use to operate the units remotely.
Well we are moving towards hybrid cars and now hybrid heating and power
systems.