Making distributed Combined Heat and Power (CHP) generation with zero pollution convenient

ended

NEED: To reduce the impact of Particulate Matter (PM) pollution caused by fuel combustion for residential space and water heating in cities, an emerging solution is the use of micro-Combined Heat and Power (m-CHP) based on Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC), which use natural gas already available from the gas network to produce electricity and heat, but without any combustion. However, currently the installation of SOFC is difficult to design and run in an economically convenient way, due to the difficulty in predicting and optimizing the capacity utilization factor, i.e. the number of hours the m-CHP is operating, which depends on the fluctuating and seasonal heating demand of the application. SOLUTION: EGG1 is a patented configuration which combines SOFC with electric driven Heat Pump (HP) and an innovative control system able to optimize and make profitable the application of SOFC for residential and small commercial applications, by decoupling the heat and electricity production from the user demands, so making it able to respond to the electricity price signals or demand/response in smart grid configurations. EGG1 supplies power and heating demands using natural gas without any combustion, thus without any harmful smog and PM emission into the atmosphere, maximizing the capacity utilization factor and making SOFC and HP become economically profitable even in very cold climates, thanks to reduction of the energy bill of >50%. Egg integrates and sells the EGG1 micro-CHP as a black box for up to 10 apartments block, integrating BlueGEN 1.5 kW SOFC under partnership agreement with SOLIDpower, the world’s most advanced producer of SOFC m-CHP. The system will integrate commercial components with a proprietary integration and control system programmed with the advanced self-learning algorithms. The EGG1 will be installed by a network of certified installers and sold to private users (B2C) or to ESCOs (B2B).