Advantages
The advantage of having some "ownership" of one's electrical power was discussed above. Actual utility bill savings are probably minimal when looking at life-cycle cost of this approach as compared to a simple natural gas furnace.
There are definite pollution-reduction advantages if the unit is replacing an electric heating system powered by a coal power plant.
Also, like other distributed power systems, the end user can configure the unit as an emergency power source in the event of a power outage.
A big picture advantage of this approach is the ability to distribute power generation, locally, at the end-user rather than a remote power plant. If deployed on a large scale, this can reduce the need for new power plant installations and free-up transmission line capacity for other uses (e.g. solar energy or wind turbine farms). There is also the reduced long-range transmission losses. Avoiding transmission line losses and power plant construction reduces costs, energy consumption and pollution for everyone. In a fully realized distributed power generation scenario, micro-CHP may be used to supplement the less predictable generation provided by solar, wind and other energy sources, and therefore increase grid reliability.
Read more about this topic: Micro Combined Heat And Power
Famous quotes containing the word advantages:
“If we live in the Nineteenth Century, why should we not enjoy the advantages which the Nineteenth Century offers? Why should our life be in any respect provincial?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Can you conceive what it is to native-born American women citizens, accustomed to the advantages of our schools, our churches and the mingling of our social life, to ask over and over again for so simple a thing as that “we, the people,” should mean women as well as men; that our Constitution should mean exactly what it says?”
—Mary F. Eastman, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4 ch. 5, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“In 1845 he built himself a small framed house on the shores of Walden Pond, and lived there two years alone, a life of labor and study. This action was quite native and fit for him. No one who knew him would tax him with affectation. He was more unlike his neighbors in his thought than in his action. As soon as he had exhausted himself that advantages of his solitude, he abandoned it.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)