Need more power? Try recycling what you’ve already used
Another significant funding deal for the energy conservation crowd was announced this morning, with ReGen Power Systems taking $5 million for an engine that converts waste industrial heat into power. That may sound a bit boring, but the investment and technology are a harbinger of big changes to come.
Everyone has experienced waste heat from electricity-driven machines — take your common electrical oven for example. The oven exists to cook things, whether atop its burners or inside. Either way, the majority of the heat bypasses the food and escapes into the air and environment around the oven. Unless you need a warm kitchen, most of the electricity you just used was wasted.
Scale that up a few hundred times, and you’ve got a typical industrial process, along with its massive heat losses. Cooling towers exist just to get rid of all the excess. Of course, engineers have been aware for decades that they could turn that heat back into electricity if they liked, but the process never seemed to be worth it, at least in the United States. In Europe, with higher energy prices and a longer conservation tradition, some big plants have installed waste heat recyclers.
But with prices set to rise, and heightened worries over global warming, most industries are changing their minds — providing openings for startups. Recycled Energy Development (RED), one of the more mature companies, has worked on over $2 billion worth of projects according to its webpage, while just two days ago newcomer ElectraTherm reportedly raised $2.6 million in a first round of funding.
ReGen is also a newcomer; this funding is its first, and the company is still working on its designs. It has a prototype 10-kilowatt engine that it will use to test out the concept, with a larger 500kW engine yet to come. That’s about 10 times the size of ElectraTherm’s first production unit. But that’s one of the encouraging things about the influx of new ventures; the heat recyclers they’re building aren’t just for the largest, hottest smokestacks, but will instead address nearly all industries. Ultimately, that could save gigawatts of energy, and generate billions of dollars in revenue yearly.
The $5 million funding was led by 21Ventures and the Quercus Trust. ReGen is based in New Salem, Mass.
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About the Author, Chris Morrison
Chris Morrison writes about cleantech and environmental issues for VentureBeat, with occasional forays into gaming and semantic technology. He got his start writing about tech for Business 2.0 magazine, but quickly realized new media was the ticket when that institution closed its doors in 2007. Chris has also covered public equities and regulatory issues. He originally hails from southern Virginia, graduated from Evergreen State College in Washington, and now lives in San Francisco.