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Volkswagen and LichtBlick Partner on Home Combined Heat and Power Systems; LichtBlick Plans a “SchwarmStrom” for 2,000 MW of Decentralized Power
September 09, 2009
| An EcoBlue CHP unit. Click to enlarge. |
Volkswagen and German energy supplier LichtBlick have formed an exclusive world-wide energy partnership. Volkswagen will produce the high-efficiency EcoBlue CHP (combined heat and power) plant, which is to be driven by natural gas engines from Volkswagen. LichtBlick will market the plants as “ZuhauseKraftwerke” (home power plants) and will use them in a new, decentralized intelligent power supply scheme: “SchwarmStrom” (current swarm).
LichtBlick plans eventually to network some 100,000 of the distributed home power plants to form a 2,000 MW virtual decentralized power plant to handle fluctuations in future electricity generation as renewables grow to represent a larger component of the power mix, according to Dr. Christian Friege, CEO of LicbtBlick.
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Consortium Launches Britain’s First Dual Fuel Biomethane Bus; Emissions Cut in Half
| Biomethane bus. Click to enlarge. |
A consortium brought together by low carbon experts at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the UK launched the first bus in the UK to run on biomethane gas. The dual-fuel diesel-biomethane powered bus is expected to reduce pollutant emissions and greenhouse gas emissions by around a half. It is hoped the technology will be rolled out to bus fleets across the country and further afield.
The dual-fuel vehicle is a standard Optare Solo single-deck diesel midibus from the Anglian Bus fleet. Originally powered entirely by diesel, the Mercedes-Benz engine has been adapted by the Hardstaff Group (earlier post) to run for 60-80% of the time on low-carbon biomethane. Biomethane is chemically identical to the methane in natural gas but it is made by bacterial action on biowastes. Biomethane is extracted from landfill sites or from biogas produced in purpose-built anaerobic digestion facilities.
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Researchers Show Direct Bacterial Production of Methane from Electricity and CO2
March 30, 2009
Researchers at Penn State University, led by Dr. Bruce Logan, have found that methane can be directly produced using a biocathode containing methanogens in electrochemical systems (abiotic anode) or microbial electrolysis cells (MECs; biotic anode) by a process called electromethanogenesis.
The results show that electromethanogenesis can be used to convert electrical current produced from renewable energy sources (such as wind, solar, or biomass) into a biofuel (methane) as well as serving as a method for the capture of carbon dioxide. A paper on the work was published online 26 March in the ACS journal Environmental Science and Technology.
