Micro Combined Heat and Power - Overview

Overview

A micro-CHP system is a small heat engine (power plant) which provides all the power for an individual building; heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, mechanical energy and electric power. It is a smaller-scale version of cogeneration schemes which have been used with large scale electric power plants. The purpose is to utilize more of the energy in the fuel. The reason for using such systems is that heat engines, such as steam power plants which generate the electric power needed for modern life by burning fuel, are not very efficient. Due to Carnot's theorem, a heat engine cannot be 100% efficient; it cannot convert anywhere near all the heat in the fuel it burns into useful forms such as electricity. So heat engines always produce a surplus of low-temperature waste heat, called "secondary heat" or "low-grade heat". Modern plants are limited to efficiencies of about 33 - 60% at most, so 40 - 67% of the energy is exhausted as waste heat. In the past this energy was usually wasted to the environment. Cogeneration systems, built in recent years in cold-climate countries, utilize the waste heat produced by large power plants for heating, piping hot water from the plant into buildings in the surrounding community.

However, it is not practical to transport heat long distances, due to heat loss from the pipes. Since electricity can be transported practically, it is more efficient to generate the electricity near where the waste heat can be used. So in a "micro-combined heat and power system" (micro-CHP), small power plants are instead located where the secondary heat can be used, in individual buildings. Micro-CHP are defined by the EC as being of less than 50 kW electrical power output.

In a central power plant, the supply of "waste heat" may exceed the local heat demand. In such cases, if it is not desirable to reduce the power production, the excess waste heat must be disposed in e.g. cooling towers or sea cooling without being used. A way to avoid excess waste heat is to reduce the fuel input to the CHP plant, reducing both the heat and power output to balance the heat demand. In doing this, the power production is limited by the heat demand.

CHP systems are able to increase the total energy utilization of primary energy sources, such as fuel and concentrated solar thermal energy. Thus CHP has been steadily gaining popularity in all sectors of the energy economy, due to the increased costs of fuels, particularly oil-based fuels, and due to environmental concerns, particularly climate change.

In a traditional power plant delivering electricity to consumers, about 30% of the heat content of the primary heat energy source, such as biomass, coal, solar thermal, natural gas, petroleum or uranium, reaches the consumer, although the efficiency can be 20% for very old plants and 45% for newer gas plants. In contrast, a CHP system converts 15%–42% of the primary heat to electricity, and most of the remaining heat is captured for hot water or space heating. In total, as much as 90% of the heat from the primary energy source goes to useful purposes when heat production does not exceed the demand.

CHP systems have benefited the industrial sector since the beginning of the industrial revolution. For three decades, these larger CHP systems were more economically justifiable than micro-CHP, due to the economy of scale. After the year 2000, micro-CHP has become cost effective in many markets around the world, due to rising energy costs. The development of micro-CHP systems has also been facilitated by recent technological developments of small heat engines. This includes improved performance and/or cost-effectiveness of fuel cells, Stirling engines, steam engines, gas turbines, diesel engines and Otto engines.