Yesterday I carried on a bit about an ammonia fueled distributed heating utility. Certain over clever Kossacks noted that ammonia had been one of the first refrigerants and wondered out loud about cooling with it, too, thusly tipping my hand and rushing me into this diary on the second half of the idea.
Ammonia is best served cold, and that might make for a very interesting situation in the hotter parts of the country.
Go over the fold for a peek at a brave new world ...
Yesterday’s diary in a nutshell was this – ammonia is a liquid fuel that can burn tolerably cleanly with some attention to control and emissions. We don’t want it in the house or office as it’s an inhalation hazard, but this problem of keeping combustion outside the building is already neatly solved by Central Boiler and other vendors producing outdoor wood/pellet/oil fueled boilers.
If we’re already going to run ammonia lines to a central location for each block in an urban setting and we’re going to put heat exchangers into each nearby home in order to distribute the heat from a shared boiler trying to do something about cooling is the obvious next step.
Ammonia is a gas at room temperature but it’s a liquid at minus 27F and it doesn’t become solid until about minus 108F. That eighty degree wide window means it can bear away about 400 BTUs of heat per each gallon circulated through the system and remain an easily handled liquid. A one ton air conditioner removes 12,000 BTUs of heat hourly. A large ranch house will need a three ton air conditioner or 90 gallons of ammonia an hour.
Today when we cool a 2,000 square foot ranch we’re handling 36,000 BTUs an hour or roughly 10,000 watts. The AC doesn’t run all the time, but when it does it really pulls a lot of power and we put a lot of carbon dioxide into the air.
Which is a total, complete waste.
What do you know about solar thermal power generation? OK, in a nutshell they use mirrors to focus sunlight on dark surfaces in order to heat a working fluid which is then used to spin a turbine to produce electricity. Does any of this sound familiar to you?
Someone who knows thermodynamics and refrigeration needs to go through this concept, and I’ll be pushing that along through my contacts over the next few weeks, but it seems likely that the 500 home subdivision that currently consumes a megawatt of electricity during the heat of the day could actually be a net electricity producer. The questions I’ll be asking will be related to the capital cost for doing this versus a comparable sized generating facility. How much does it cost to refit a house? Install a boiler/heat exchanger setup? Run ammonia feed lines? What’s a turbine cost? How many and where will they be?
I’m looking forward to some sensible discussion on this, some knee jerk ZoMg!@!@ SAFETY CONCERNS!!! type posts, and so forth. Can’t solve a complex problem without a good bit of ideation
Oh, geez, I guess I should say I'll be adding Home Heating With Ammonia and Ammonia Based Air Conditioning Utility to the fall update for the National Renewable Ammonia Architecture.