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At the beginning of the industrial revolution, right when Watt was getting his steam engine going, there were no centralized power plants. It was hard to move steam, so you put the coal-fired engines right where you needed the power.

Electricity changed all that because it was easier to move electrons. But the old model of making your own power held strong. In the early days of electricity, say, around 1905, it wasn’t clear whether centralized power systems would gain the technological momentum necessary to rearrange the long-standing method for factory functioning.

There were some obvious advantages to making your own power — it was under your control, you could make or less as needed, it might be a competitive advantage, etc. But eventually the hassle of it all and the efficiencies gained by spreading the capital cost of building a plant over more customers won out. By 1915, it was clear that Edison’s model of one power station serving all the customers in a geographical area via an electric grid had won.

Now, we read in the Times’ Green Inc blog that Ausra, a once-hot solar thermal startup, is planning to bring the old model back. They want to sell the hot steam they produce with their concentrating solar systems directly to industrial plants, bypassing the grid altogether. It’s an interesting move by their CEO, Bob Fishman, who is an old Calpine natural gas utility executive.

“Ausra says it will now focus less on solar power generation (which put it in competition with other power generators),” we read, “and more on providing solar-thermal technology and equipment for industrial customers — including fossil fuel power plants — in need of steam.

Who needs steam? Well, for one, traditional fossil fuel plants could use that steam to reduce the amount of coal or natural gas they have to burn. You’d end up with a hybrid system, which sounds like it could be complex. But some regular old industrial customers might want steam as steam. Ausra’s release notes advanced oil recovery and food processing.

For a fossil fuel plant, they could offset a considerable amount of their emissions with one of Ausra’s 50 megawatt equivalent plants. Remember that they lose about two-thirds of the heat content of the coal they burn in turning that heat into electricity. So, you’d really be offsetting something like 500 million BTUs per hour of coal. Different coals generate more or less CO2, but the US average is around 215 pounds per million BTUs. Doing the math for a coal plant that’s running about 90 percent of the time, you’d get a decrease in CO2 emissions of about 423 thousand tons. That seems like a lot, but even if every coal plant in America installed one — an unlikely scenario — that would only reduce the coal industry’s emissions by about 15 percent.

Still, it’s an interesting business model to work with the fossil fuel plants and not against them. It shows how flexible green tech companies are willing to be to succeed and how often they revive earleir models of power production.

Image: The “derelict steam boiler” from an old steam-driven sawmill in Alaska.