Micro Combined Heat and Power - Advantages

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.