While at the IEEE T&D Expo last November, I had the opportunity to meet folks from the National Electric Energy Testing, Research and Applications Center, a not-for-profit at Georgia Tech which focuses exclusively on power delivery technology, including (the integration of) storage and distributed generation.

06 Dec 2001 UFTO Note - JTEC New SolidState Heat to Electricity…

Nickel Hydrogen Batteries have been used in space for decades, and are known for extreme reliability. Ergenics Inc. has basic patents for a "segmented Ni H battery" concept that should make it practical for terrestial uses. They're building a prototype for ARPA for a military hybrid vehicle, and can make them as small as a laptop computer battery.

ENECO, a small company in Salt Lake City that we've known for over 5 years, has kept a very low profile until this week, when it burst into the news with an announcement, jointly with MIT, of a solid state device that converts heat directly to electricity at higher efficiency than thermoelectric devices.

In providing additional details about its proposed fuel cell hydrogen membrane program, H2fuel confirmed that the membrane is being tailored to work at temperatures up to 350C, levels that are normally associated with the water gas shift reaction.

As you know, I attended this annual conference held in conjunction with two power electronics conferences, all under the name of PowerSystems World 2001. Overall, the event was poorly organized and confusing to begin with, however, I've learned that a new company is taking over conference operations, so things may improve.

The Johnson Thermo-Electric Conversion (JTEC) system is a solid state, thermodynamic, energy conversion device that operates on the Ericsson cycle, which is equivalent to the Carnot cycle. It can be configured to operate as either a heat engine (for power production) or a heat pump (for cooling).

As the new-economy/dotcom bubble was hitting it's last high in March 2000, Energy Technology was 3 months into a bubble of its own. Plug Power's IPO the previous Fall did nothing until the fateful day in early January 2000, when an online commentator listed it as one of the 10 stocks to own in the new millenium.

EPRI solutions' Second Annual Business Forum was designed to bring together leading Distributed Resource (DR) technology companies, the energy utility industry, and energy industry investors for the exchange of information related to business and investment opportunities.

Beginning in 1999, Community Power Corp (CPC) joined with NREL and Shell Renewables to develop a new generation of small modular biopower systems (SMB), designed to replace conventional diesel generators and to free communities from dependence on diesel fuel, with its high cost and environmental damage.

A novel approach to solar PV has been quietly hatching in Tucson for a number of years. I've been on their trail since early '98, but until very recently they were in strict stealth-mode, and it was impossible to get a handle on what they were doing.

Serveron Corp. launched itself in February as the industry's first provider of full time monitoring services for T&D equipment. Starting with the gas-in-oil sensors developed by a predecessor company, Micromonitors, Serveron offers a complete solution, from instrumentation, to on-line monitoring, to (condition-based) maintenance scheduling and asset management, to risk management.

One of the more remarkable "new" technologies mentioned is the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PMBR), actually an old idea. In the heyday of reactor development, helium gas cooled designs were pursued by the U.S. (using a fuel block concept) and by the Germans, who used a "pebble" fuel configuration.

Progress is good. The first machine is hooked to a 10 MW generator, and it's doing better and better all the time. They're also working hard on a 800 KW version, which will enable them to advance the technology faster, and which is size they believe the DG market wants. The disk on the new machine will be 32 inches, operating at 28,000 rpm. Efficiency is 40%, and they expect single-digit NOx.