I took a tour today of NYU’s new trigeneration plant: It’s “tri” because it produces electricity, heat and hot water, and chilled water for air conditioning. It’s a great facility, well thought out and executed. It’s state of the art. It provides 13.4 MW of electricity and that which isn’t used by the school is fed to the grid. Refer to this from NYU for the whole story.
This is so the paradigm for the future. Central power plants using coal and nuclear power lose about two thirds of their energy to heat! I wrote about this here a while back and how we just squander energy in the old way of generating electricity. See, in particular, this revealing flow diagram from the Energy Information Administration. This sort of waste is criminal.
Trigeneration, or cogeneration as it’s usually configured and known – or combined heat and power (CHP) in Europe and beyond – radically enhances the efficiency of the energy used for these purposes.
Now the next step is to bring renewable energy, generated on-site, into the picture: gas from biomass, ground-source heat or true geothermal, solar PV or concentrated solar thermal, microwind, or marine energy, among a slew of possibilities. That’s distributed generation (DG) at its optimum.
Now that’s what I’m talking about: my generation.