SBIR/STTR Award attributes
Residential and Commercial buildings account for 40% of the nation’s total energy demand. Adoption of building energy saving technologies are needed to reduce energy use, energy cost and greenhouse gas emissions. These energy efficiency strategies must also be resilient to power disruptions in order to cover critical building functions in limited power states. A technology that provides both high resiliency to power disruptions, due to scheduled (maintenance problems or fire control in California) or unscheduled (system breakdown or cyberattack) outages, as well as provides cost effective continuous production of power, heating and cooling, would be highly desirable. An efficient natural gas driven combined heating, cooling and power approach for commercial buildings (office, hospitals, hotels, schools, universities, municipal office, shopping centers, data centers and like buildings), called the Boiler Burner Integrated Trigeneration System, can address the heating and cooling needs of these buildings, while simultaneously generating 33% to 100% of the power needs for these buildings on a continuous basis. The technology can also increase overall efficiency from 37% to over 80%, reduce fuel use, fuel cost and greenhouse gas emissions by over 27% and reduce criteria pollutants by over 20% at a total cost that provides a simple payback of 5 years. These system benefits are achieved along with complete resiliency of building power, heating and cooling needs. To create this system,a proven combined heating and power system will be combined with absorption cooling to create a system that has power, heating and cooling resiliency. Under the proposed project the system process parameters for building applications of interest will be optimized using commercial process simulation software. In support of performance and cost analysis, northern cooler and southern warmer climates will be considered in the analyses. The available power and heating portion of the technology will then be brought to operation and tested to define, in combination with absorption system cooling modeling, the efficiency, fuel use, fuel cost and greenhouse gas benefits of the system. In the larger Phase II effort, an absorption cooling system will be acquired and integrated with the available system and tested. There are approximately 130,000 building boilers that could benefit from implementing the resilient, more efficient and lower-cost proposed technology. Assuming a 20% market share this represents a $10.8 billion retrofit market and a $1.1 billion new market. Implementing this technology will reduce fuel costs by $440 million/year and reduce greenhouse gases by 5.6 million tons/year.
