A focus on
flexibility and sustainability
Whether you’re a greentech investor, manager of an industrial plant with excess waste heat, a conventional electricity generating utility, a renewable energy company, or an academic researcher, KD Innovations’ groundbreaking approach is poised to redefine your thinking about electricity generation from thermal sources.
Introducing KDI-Voltera
KDI-Voltera is a patent pending technology for direct conversion of low grade heat into electricity, without the need for heat engines, such as turbines, or other moving parts. KDI-Voltera uses commodity-based inexpensive materials, allowing installation of generating capacity for less than $2,000/kW.
Industry
The industrial sector is the largest user of energy in the developed world. Roughly one-third of the energy consumed is discharged directly as thermal losses, and a significant fraction of those are suitable resources for KDI-Voltera. If you manage an industrial plant producing significant amounts of waste heat, KDI-Voltera will offer a way for utilizing this heat to produce zero-carbon electricity, thus reducing your energy bills and carbon footprint.
Renewable Resources
KDI-Voltera is ideally suited for electricity generation from geothermal heat sources as well as from passively heated solar ponds. Such renewable heat resources have low costs and produce zero carbon emissions. However, their moderate temperatures classify them as Low Grade Heat (LGH), which makes conversion into electricity with conventional technologies economically challenging. KDI-Voltera, with its direct and low-cost conversion of LGH into electricity, can invigorate the use of geothermal and passive solar heat, and make it a significant component of tomorrow’s electrogeneration landscape.
Economic comparison of KDI-Voltera costs to industry standard technology
| Heat Collection | Electro-Generation | Heat Rejection | Fuel | Supply Leveling | Demand Following | CO2 compliance | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| KDI-Voltera-solar pond | $ | $$ | $$ | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| PV | 0 | $$$ | 0 | 0 | $$$ | $$$ | 0 |
| CSP | $$$ | $$ | $$$ | 0 | $ | $$$ | 0 |
| NGCC | $ | $ | $$ | $$ | 0 | $$ | $$ |
Relative cost contributions of various factors towards the total costs of four different generation technologies: PV-photovoltaics, CSP-Concentrated Solar Power, NGCC- Natural Gas Combined Cycle (non-renewable)
Conventional Thermal Power Plant Generators
In addition to its implementation as standalone generation systems, KDI-Voltera can be integrated into conventional thermal power plants to provide flexible management of generation and coolant use. When storage tanks for electrolyte are added to the basic KD Innovations patented thermoelectric generation (TEG) system, “fresh” electrolyte can be stored on site and deployed for additional generation during peak demand intervals, while absorbing reject heat.
Residential Solar Systems
Rooftop solar heaters are currently widely used for hot-water generation. KDI-Voltera would allow the same hot water to be used for distributed electricity generation. A small-scale KDI-Voltera system can allow a household to use the solar hot water for electricity generation as well, using the inexpensive rooftop collector for dual purpose
