Dr Weaver works on a massive Metrology for Energy Harvesting Project, involving 7 European research establishments, which is developing common standards and measures for judging the efficiency of different electricity generating materials and technologies.
By 2020, when the electricity generating mix has a higher renewable content, the figure for the GNER train should drop to 30gms/passenger km, and as trains become fuller, so their efficiency increases.
This cost difference is equivalent to the "carbon price", for new supercritical coal plants this is currently about €24 35/tonCO22 (one should note that the amount of tons of CO2 released per MW h of electricity generated depend on the efficiency of the plant on the nature of the coal).
The current micro-CHP generated 861 W electricity and 47.26 kWth heat, corresponding to electricity generation efficiency of 1.41% and CHP efficiency of 78.69%.
(42) We further assumed that biogas was combusted on-site at 40% thermodynamic efficiency, and the electricity generated was sold to a utility at market prices averaged across users and states.
The electricity to electricity efficiency can reach 42 % with natural gas combustion, and the total electricity generated yearly reached 294465 MWh in 2007 [17].
Even the relatively higher efficiency coal plants they export which burn less coal per unit of electricity, generate greenhouse gas emissions that are clearly unacceptably high.
Although the biogas production decreased by 4%, the electricity generated and the district heat produced increased by 14%and12%2%, respectively, which resulted in the same overall energy efficiency as for scenario B and an ethanol production cost of 4.28 SEK/L.
Supply of electricity generated by NG, kW.
Supply of electricity generated by coal, kW.
