Cool Energy Announces First Customers for SolarHeart® Engines

BOULDER, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Cool Energy, Inc., a developer of clean energy heat and power systems, today announced that it has received its first two customer orders for its novel renewable energy Stirling engines.
   
Two European institutional customers have purchased the engines for separate solar power development projects to provide solar heat and solar electricity from a single system. While the first customer remains undisclosed, it is a major European equipment supplier that is developing a novel hybrid stand-alone power system for deployment in developing nations without significant electrical grid infrastructure. This customer is evaluating the engine behavior and performance in off-grid applications for providing heat and electricity to some of the two billion people without dependable power. The second SolarHeart® Engine customer announced is the DiGeSPo project (http://www.digespo.eu/) for solar thermal combined heat and power, hosted at an Italian research institution, the Bruno Kessler Foundation (FBK) of Trento.

“We are very pleased to be able to receive one of the Cool Energy Stirling engines for our system demonstration at the Hilton Hotel in Malta,” said Luigi Crema of the Renewable Energies and Environmental Technologies unit of FBK. “We looked at many potential sources for a power generation unit that would operate with our novel solar collector, and Cool Energy at this moment is the only supplier whose technology was proven at our scale and temperatures. We look forward to integrating our first prototype with the Cool Energy SolarHeart Engine to deliver clean and abundant solar heat and power in the Mediterranean region.”

Both customer applications are variants of the Cool Energy SolarFlow® System, which is a combined heat and power (CHP) generation system sized for residential and small commercial buildings that uses solar energy as its only input 'fuel'. The system approach has several novel features, including an energy storage component and a control system that maximizes customer value by optimally apportioning the system’s energy output between heat and electricity depending on the season and weather conditions (both current and forecasted). Core to the system is Cool Energy’s low-temperature SolarHeart Engine, a specialized Stirling engine powered electric generator that the system activates whenever the electricity produced is more valuable than the heat consumed. Under laboratory conditions with a temperature differential of 210ºC, the third generation SolarHeart Engine has consistently produced 2000 watts of electric power, and reached a thermal to electrical conversion efficiency of over 16%. The fourth generation units are expected to produce up to 3000 Watts of electricity at temperatures up to 300°C.

“The closing of these two orders for pilot systems is an important step for us as a company,” said Sam Weaver, CEO and President of Cool Energy. “Both of these customer sales give further operational and performance validation for our technology used in different geographical locations, and with different solar collector technologies. Along with industrial waste heat recovery, the solar market represents an impactful application of our low-temperature power generation approach.”