Peter Thiel put $300K into this company, which seeks to capture waste heat from power generation facilities (and other forms of low-grade heat) by artificially creating very tall vortices. The system works something like a very tall chimney, but without the expense of constructing such a chimney. Simple explanation here.
(When I wonder “will this work?”, I don’t mean at a technical level..sounds like experimentation has demonstrated that it will, at least at a small scale…I mean “work” in a commercial sense)
They cite 35% as a typical efficiency for a thermal power plant (which sounds about right) and estimate that their system could recover 20% of the now-wasted heat, resulting in an overall plant output increase of about 40% with no increase in fuel consumption. However, I’d make the point that new combined-cycle power plants are considerably more efficient–GE is claiming 60% for some of their “H” series machines…which is obviously a good thing but leaves less wasted heat to be recovered. Still, there is a lot of rejected heat even from combined-cycle turbines…and not all power plants are going to be combined-cycle..for one thing, I don’t think CC plants can use coal unless it is first gasified.
Lots of issues between development and large-scale deployment, of course..costs of large-scale systems are hard to estimate until you actually build one and operate it for a while, and I also wonder about public acceptance (and aviation safety/traffic implications, were these plants to be built out densely.) It’s a very creative concept, and I’m glad to see Thiel putting some money behind it…lots more will be needed to reach a commercial level.
I’ll be watching this with interest.