A California-based company is transforming stored heat into electricity. Heat2Power (H2P) leverages thermophotovoltaic (TPV) technology through a modular panel.
A California-based company is transforming stored heat into electricity. Heat2Power (H2P) leverages thermophotovoltaic (TPV) technology through a modular panel.
Heat2Power, co-founded by Profs. Stephen Forrest and Andrej Lenert, uses high-efficiency, low-cost thermophotovoltaic technology to turn stored heat into energy.
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While I do love the concept, it is not very feasible at the scales this company is talking about. It's mostly used in huge recovery systems for things like geothermal systems, or small capture recovery from industrial sites, but if they manage to find new ways to concentrate this kind of heat capture, it could get interesting.
My initial thought goes to using datacenters as sources. Tons of heat production, but you'd need to concentrate that in order to capture it somehow. Like large scale radiators that connect to each other to pipe captured heat to a central location or something. Would serve a dual purpose of cooling and capture.
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I am no expert in any of this, but why do you think it couldn't work at scale? This company says their tech has advantages in cheapness and efficiency over existing solutions. What is it about what they are doing that will not scale?
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Just because of the amount of heat needed to produce a meaningful amount of energy. Just looking at recent news on TPV, and it looks like newer tech is only getting about 40% conversion efficiency, which is not super great.
The real problem with TPV is the type of heat it can use, which just from looking is a minimum of 1900 C/3450 F. This is because, like solar, it's capturing photons the heat source kicks out, then "traps" them and runs them down a wire to store someplace (I'm over simplifying this of course).
To use it as this company plans, need to radiate heat from many sources to one central location to get those kinds of temps, which is incredibly challenging . It's not like you could just slap a bunch of small capture points together from a large number of kinda hot things and batch them together.
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