With energy-consuming equipment, such as water heaters and refrigerators, we have good data on energy consumption and can set clear standards accordingly. In some product categories—clothes washers, for example—Energy Star standards were adopted because those standards provide a high enough threshold to represent just the very top segment of the product market (less than 10%). In other product categories—e.g., refrigerators and dishwashers—we set a higher threshold than ENERGY STAR: for example, exceeding those standards by 10% or 20%. With lighting and lighting control equipment, certain generic products qualify, such as compact fluorescent lamps and occupancy/daylighting controls, while in other categories only a subset of products qualify. In some cases, products that meet the energy efficiency requirements are excluded, because of evidence of poor performance or durability. Microturbines are included here because of the potential for cogeneration (combined heat and power) that they offer.
PureComfort 240
The PureComfort™ system is the first packaged, building-scale cooling-heating-power (trigen) system to reach the market. Four 60-kW microturbines manufactured by Capstone are coupled with a double-effect absorption chiller from Carrier Corporation and sophisticated controls. The system can provide 240 kW of electricity and either 110 tons of cooling (hot summer day) or 900,000 Btu per hour of hot water (cold winter day). The chiller is 100% ozone-safe and has a coefficient of chiller performance of 1.3, well above the performance of single-effect chillers. The overall efficiency of energy utilization is in the range of 70-80%.
Combined heat and power (CHP) or cogeneration units, microturbines and reciprocating engine generators without heat recovery, and fuel cells all support distributed electricity generation.
Microturbines and reciprocating engine generators use natural gas, propane, or other fuels to generate electricity onsite. The same principle is used for microturbines as for large gas turbines at power plants, but the units are much smaller and thus are suited for distributed power production—producing power where it is needed).
When combined with cogeneration equipment—heat exchangers that make use of thermal energy that is usually wasted—the overall efficiency of these units can be increased to over 60%. These units have a number of applications, including off-grid generation, utility peak-shaving, emergency back-up power, and combined heat and power (CHP) at restaurants, commercial laundries, hospitals, manufacturing plants, office buildings with dehumidification or absorption cooling systems, and even homes.
Fuel cells offer exciting opportunities for clean, efficient, distributed generation of electricity. Very simply, fuel cells generate power by reversing the common high school chemistry experiment in which electric current is used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Fuel cells have been used for decades in space. In buildings, fuel cells can be especially useful for back-up power needs. For lack of a readily available supply of hydrogen, most fuel cells in common use today run on natural gas or some other fossil fuel, which is converted to separate the hydrogen from the other elements, so they are not actually a renewable energy source, but they do support alternatively fueled power production.
LEED Credits
EAc1: Optimize Energy Performance
EAc4: Enhanced Refrigerant Management
EAc5: Enhanced Refrigerant Management
EAp2: Minimum Energy Performance
EAp2: Minimum Energy Efficiency Performance
EAp3: Fundamental Refrigerant Management
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