Combined Heat and Power: Executive Summary (1996)

Combined Heat and Power: Executive Summary

Michael Laughton, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London. Applied Energy, volume 53, numbers 1–2 (1996), pages 227–233. DOI 10.1016/0306-2619(95)00064-X. Summarised here with short quotations; the paper is the publisher’s and is not reproduced.

What it is

The closing summary of a meeting on combined heat and power (CHP), printed as most of a double issue of Applied Energy. The issue opens with a foreword by Pardoe and an editorial note, then carries the meeting’s papers (the history of CHP, the industry’s view, the energy framework, UK implementation, environmental implications, city-scale schemes, single-site schemes), a record of the questions and discussion, and, last, Laughton’s executive summary. He calls the meeting “the consultative conference”. Nothing in it concerns Meyer.

What it says

• Why CHP. With demand and environmental concern both growing, “there is a moral obligation to be efficient in the use of energy”, and supply efficiency is where CHP helps most: systems run at 80–90% efficiency when electricity and heat are balanced. About 2,000 MW of CHP was then running in the UK on some 600 sites, 2–3% of British supply, and the 1990 White Paper This Common Inheritance set a target of doubling it by 2000.
• Technology. Fifteen years of change from steam-turbine schemes to reciprocating engines, gas turbines and combined cycles, with packaged small plant, from small gas engines in offices, hotels and sewage works up to large industrial steam plant, community heating and the still “speculative” micro-CHP.
• Environment. One unit of electricity and two of heat take about 3.7 units of primary energy with CHP, against 5.4 from a coal station or 4.7 from a combined-cycle gas station with a gas boiler. The new 2 GW would avoid about 12 million tonnes of CO₂ a year, and “more speculatively” 20 million with fuel-cell CHP “powered by hydrogen obtained from the electrolysis of water by non-fossil-fuel generated electricity.”
• Institutions and money. The regional electricity companies are suppliers, not energy-service companies; regulation does more for efficiency than price; the carbon/energy tax, the EC’s SAVE programme and the Energy Saving Trust could help; and the Energy Efficiency Office’s list of barriers runs from pricing heat to three-to-five-year paybacks.
• Conclusions. A CHP tranche in the Non-Fossil-Fuel Obligation, fair prices for CHP power, old urban power-station sites kept for CHP, planning guidance and changed leasing rules, and a long-term trend that “can only work to the advantage of CHP”.

Why it is here

For the man, not the subject. Laughton was one of the three British visitors, with Admiral Sir Anthony Griffin and Keith Hindley, who watched Meyer’s cell at Grove City in October 1990, as Electronics World reported in January 1991. In the 1996 dealership case he was the expert due to inspect the car, as the Sunday Times told it (reprinted in Fusion Facts). This paper, from the same year, shows his field as it stood: the efficiency of energy supply and the policy around it, written for a conference of the British energy establishment, with hydrogen from electrolysis appearing only as a speculative carrier for fuel cells.

Still open

• Which body held the consultative conference, and when. The summary cites the Watt Committee on Energy’s earlier evidence to Parliament, and “consultative conference” is the Watt Committee’s own name for its meetings, so it was probably theirs; Pardoe’s foreword, which the archive has not seen, would say.