To the best of my knowledge, there’s not much with Stirling engines. (A source of great frustration, if only because I built one in the machine shop in grad school and have always had a personal attachment to them as a result!) There are certainly technical challenges, but it’s always struck me that the Stirling engine mfrs are focused on the wrong product – all of them start with the presumption that what the market really wants is a standard kW-rated product. But with such a great technology for waste heat recovery, what we really need is a company that will say “you tell me what temperature and chemical composition of waste heat you have and I’ll design a power plant around it.” (e.g., a 1 MW standard unit that anticipates 1000 degree hot air doesn’t do much for me if I’m in a glass plant with 1200 degree exhaust with various condensibles that can foul heat exchangers if not carefully designed.)

Someday, I’m hoping that someone in the industry will fix this – until then, it seems like the industry is always limited by delusions of the “better mousetrap” business plan.

Re: Edison, I’d disagree. He was certainly a good engineer and scientist, but modern utilities are full of those as well. The difference was that he was subject to competitive pressure, and as such could increase his profits by lowering his operating costs. Not so under our current electric regulatory model, and we get what we reward. Edison was financially rewarded for efficiency. The modern electric utility is not.

The reason Edisons power plant was efficient (for the time) is that he was an engineer an scientist, interested in making things work properly.

It’s a shame a lot of Tesla’s work was just buried.

By the way, great work!

Yes, Edison’s first plant was a cogen plant. So was the majority of the industry for it’s first 30 years. The demise of energy efficiency came in the early part of the 20th century when we set electricity markets up as a monopoly in which profits were earned based on returns on capital investment and operating costs were pass-throughs. The (in hindsight) predictable result was that the utility industry preferentially shifted their focus towards capitally-intensive projects and – while they didn’t have a disincentive to lower their operating costs – they essentially became agnostic with respect to cost-control.

Note that this doesn’t make utility employees bad people – it simply means that like the rest of us, they pursue profits. But unlike the rest of us, their route to profits is – per our regulatory framework – to increase, rather than decrease their cost of power.

The silver lining is that we have massive opportunities to lower both GHG emissions and energy costs, but only provided that we first overhaul our 100 year old regulatory paradigm.

Sean