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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

Yes gas is near $4 - what does that have to do with utility prices, since there aren't any gasoline powered plants in the USA since the 70s ?

I would have to assume the way the utility company produces power is far more efficient than a town with thousands of mini-engines. Only stuff like solar cells work better in distribution.

Not sure how this would work either - what fuel are you going to use to power it for 24 hours without maintaining it? Will it drive an alternator to power an inverter? How stable would the feed be?

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Unlike other engines, a Stirling engine (like other external combustion engines) is more suited for using alternative power sources like solar energy. You can heat the end using a Fresnel lens or a solar concentrator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Spain). But more importantly, with a $100 price tag, it will be an affordable engine to experiment for hobbyists.

Hi, thanks for the question - The fuel source intended for the Volo Engine is some type of biomass - for the biomass the plan is to use a gassifier to get the heat out of the biomass. Solar is a good possibility, but not enough solar in the northern part of the US to make enough heat.

The goal of the project is to spark infrastructure independent energy solutions - the stirling engine is flexible enough to run off of any type of heat (gas, wood, solar, etc). Stirlings can be very efficient, but, on top of that you're eliminating the transmission loss. You'd need both, some type of alternator, and some type of heat capacitor (fire box) to get the steady feed your talking about, but the first step is to complete the engine development.

I would put it on heating stove.

Compared to your local big-city nuclear plant, no this thing doesn't compete.

But if you are off-grid or have unreliable power it is better than a Honda gasoline generator, especially because they can pretty much burn anything - from wood chips to pig manure.

Although you do need a big cold sink for it to work well - a river/stream is ideal.

A huge amount of the generated electricity is lost on resistance of the power lines on the way to your house. So having it in your basement and going 30 feet to a lamp/outlet would be more efficient.

According to wikipedia, the average loss on the power lines is 7%. Source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Lo...

That's not what I'd call "huge".

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