It’s promising. A super efficient all-in-one system which will provide electricity, heat and refrigerated cooling to your home is in the works. A research team at Newcastle University is working on a generator which will run on vegetable oil.
The vegetable oil will be the de facto source for the generation of electricity. The ensuing heat will be trapped and used to warm the home and alternatively can also be converted to cool a refrigerator. At each step of the process, the effort is to maximise the use of the waste heat.
The promise gets more promising with the fact that the plant used to produce the vegetable oil obviously absorbs carbon whilst growing. One of the potential oils under review is the seed of the Croton Megalocarpus plant which grows in East Africa. It won’t head the ethanol way as the plant is grows on land that is not cultivable for traditional farming or food production thus providing a fuel without sacrificing land for food crops. So the whole process is designed to have a zero carbon footprint. An added benefit is that the excess energy can be stored for later use.
The program is headed by Professor Tony Roskilly at the Sir Joseph Swan Institute for Energy Research at Newcastle University. He says,
” The supply of electricity, heating and cooling can be optimized by this one, efficient and sustainable system.”
The process is known technically as micro-trigeneration and probably it is the first notable and practical one of its kind. Dr Yaodong Wang from the Newcastle University said,
“In the past, a significant barrier to the take-up of domestic scale micro-trigeneration systems has been the availability of the right energy at the right time. By integrating new energy storage technology with the micro-trigeneration system we have the potential to overcome this barrier and make an impact on future domestic energy supply.”
Though Newcastle University is steering the ship, inputs have come in from experts around the world. Ulster University is using its modelling expertise to build a full scale prototype. Leeds University is pitching in with the development of the energy storage system which will ensure that maximum heat is reutilised. And from far flung China comes the handshake of joint development of the £1.1m project.
Image; Wikimedia Commons
