Making your own electricity
I live in the south east of England, part of the UK. I live in a village close to but far enough away from one of the main towns in Suffolk. So I need to have a car but I also ride a motorbike and use a push bike depending on the journey. I hate to say this, but cycling to work is not an option. By car the journey is an average of 30 minutes, by motorbike, I can almost guarantee a 25 minute journey. By push bike, at a fair lick, I would be really lucky to do the journey in an hour and twenty minutes.
My house is reasonably energy efficient, built in 2000 it came with cavity wall insulation as well as an insulated roof and good quality double glazing – in the winter we need to keep some of the curtains closed to keep the heat down in the lounge and dinning room. But we are consumers of generated power and as such limited to the whims of the markets.
Given the house exists on a modern estate, facing east/west, solar power isn’t easily or predictably harvested: our south face has few windows and is the gable end and between October and March the amount of direct light dramatically drops.
It seems impractical, given our plot, that a Geothermal heat pump would be at all feasible either.
So what options are there?
Well, 55% of the homes in Denmark use combined heat and power (CHP) boilers, one of these products available in the UK is the Ecogen
CHP boilers are a little larger than a normal boiler but while they generates heat for your house and hot water, they also generate electricity, typically 1kW per hour (an old unit). Micro-generation is the key here, it can reliably supply 46% of your household needs and feed in back to the grid, but it’s not a big supplier of your electrical needs, though it may be able to supply electricity during power cuts (aside from the green credentials, this really appeals to me).
Obviously, more electricity is produced during the winter but that’s when we need more electricity to power lights 🙂
Posted: September 14th, 2011 under 42.