Of sorts yes. I think its as much as 50-82% efficient in a boiler when also used to produce electricity as well as heat the water.
The company is already running trials of prototype domestic power systems in the UK, where it is used as an add-on to conventional gas boilers.
“I have one powering my home, it provides me with 80 per cent of my power, free hot water, and part of my heating,” said Caldwell. “I buy gas at 4p per kilowatt hour, and the fuel cell converts it at around 50 per cent [efficiency], so essentially my electricity is costing me 8p per kilowatt hour, instead of 17p per kilowatt hour if I was buying it from the grid,” he said. Residential fuel cells could cut energy bills and lower CO2 emissions
I dont think the Combined Heat and Power units have been fully commercialised yet. There are a couple of test homes in the UK. Similarly there are tests ongoing for using excess electricity to produce clean hydrogen. Their fuel cell technology appears to work both ways.
I don’t think CHPs will ever be a great addition for individual homes.
For large residential blocks with a common plant area, they’re a great idea. We’ve just put in a couple in some large developments we’ve been doing in Norwich.
I think it depends. If your power goes out but gas is still on, or you have a means to store spare electricity when the boiler is on, perhaps it could work. It means homes would have two sources of power.
It depends on what the future of heating is - electric perhaps?
A CHP doesn’t store power as such, it uses previously wasted product such as heat to generate electricity (as an example) by a local turbine moved by steam. They’re really good for factory’s etc as well though.
And also you have the physical space issues. They’re not small, even for a domestic unit (for 1 house, which I don’t think exists) would be huge.
Then you factor in the capital cost and recovery and it would become inefficient.
The way for houses to become more efficient energy wise, is at the source of the energy opposed to at the property.
Obviously with the exception of heat pumps instead of boilers, but that means the electrical demand is higher. So then we’re back at making the means of generating electricity more efficiently.
There is legs in storing the local energy generated by PV though.
Albeit, it is technically reused by the grid, but I guess it’s mainly wasted by them as the network is so big,
Or the grid is at capacity so it cannot handle more energy in the network. When they went private the spare capacity dropped hugely.
It does seems to be this way I’m finding, as above, generally heat pumps.
It’s causing other sets of problems as well, transformers etc need to be upgraded in some cases as well.
Been a big bull since the rally after Covid that set this thing on fire.
For now, I’m a bear until the market cools as it is so incredibly overinflated across each Index (especially in the US), so once that happens I’ll most likely buy double digit shares and hope for a push to $1,000 by 2023.
