One person’s trash is another’s treasure – including waste heat. The Green Machine is ElectraTherm’s solution to creating inexpensive electricity from just such a source. It pulls waste heat to heat liquid, which turns to vapor, which rotates a turbine, which creates emissions-free electricity. The cost is about $0.04 per kWh during the three-year “payback” period, and less than $0.01 per kWh thereafter. Cheeeeep.
The Green Machine was just tested at Southern Methodist University where demonstrated cost-effective electricity generation can be done on a smaller scale. During the test, the Green Machine beat its projected 50 kilowatt output, producing more than enough electricity to provide power to forty 2,000 sf homes, all with waste heat – in other words, a hell of a lot of green electricity for a tiny bit of money.
This handy machine is inexpensive to create as well, costing about 30% less than any turbine-based system. Running without gearboxes, expensive electronics, oil pumps, filters, and a whole mess of other parts associated with similar products, maintenance costs are kept down. It pulls electricity from sources such as stationary engines, industrial manufacturing and process plants, geothermal sources, and the like. Therefore, any place with a significant source of waste heat could use the Green Machine to create extremely low cost electricity.
I think thermoelectric gadgets are relatively underutilized. When we hear solar this and solar that, seeing something like the Green Machine makes me optimistic for seeing a bigger variety of practical, economical solutions for turning what we waste into something we want.
