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.
