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18 year—closer to 10 percent in Asia.36 Running either on diesel fuel or natural gas, reciprocat- ing engines are relatively inexpensive to install, and when waste heat is reused for water or space heating or industrial processes, they can reach efficiencies of 85 percent and above. Several manufacturers have begun mass-producing these engines with installation costs as low as $600 per kilowatt. (See Appendix A for a sampling of reciprocating engine and other micropower companies.) (See Table 2.) Current uses include small commercial and remote applications. Caterpillar, for example, offers 25-kilowatt generators for fast-food restaurants and runs a 500-kilowatt system that provides heat and power to the South Pole Research Facility. Honda, SenerTec, and oth- ers are developing residential cogenerating systems of roughly 2 to 5 kilowatts—some with 90 percent efficiencies—which can run air conditioners, though some analysts believe they will be used mainly for standby purposes.37 TABLE 2 Combustion-based Micropower Options Reciprocating Engine Microturbine Stirling Engine Current size range (kilowatts) Electrical efficiency (percent) Current installed cost (U.S. $ per kilowatt) Expected installed cost with mass production (U.S. $ per kilowatt) 5–10,000 20–45 $600–$1,000 <$500 30–200 27–30 $600–$1,100 $200–$400 0.3–25 15–30 $1,500 $200–$300 Source: See endnote 37. FIGURE 1 World Gas Turbine Price and Cumulative Installed Capacity, 1956–81 MICROPOWER: THE NEXT ELECTRICAL ERA 1,600 U.S. Dollars Per Kilowatt (1998) 1,400 1,200 1,000 800 600 400 200 Megawatts 60,000 50,000 40,000 30,000 20,000 10,000 Price Capacity Source: See endnote 34. 00 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 hooked up to low-voltage local distribution systems or installed in commercial and residential buildings. In addi- tion to enabling economies of mass production, which drive down their installation costs, the modularity allows for fast construction: micropower units can be built in factories, transported to their site, and installed in a matter of hours. By contrast, large power plants must be built on site, and construction can take months, years, or even decades.35 Leading micropower’s move to market are the recipro- cating engines, used for decades in trucks, buses, and other off-grid applications. Reciprocating engines currently domi- nate the roughly 10,000 megawatts of generation units sized at 5 megawatts and below that are installed annually for con- tinuous use, as well as the 14,000 megawatts installed for standby power. According to Cambridge Energy Research Associates, this market is growing at roughly 5 percent per HOT LITTLE NUMBERS 19PDF Image | Micropower: The Next Electrical Era
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