KHOU has a (confused) report on a Texas man who is experimenting with adding a Stirling engine to a hybrid car - San Antonio man has engine that gets 100 mpg.

Greentech Media has an article on one of Dean Kamen's cleantech experiments (in this case a Stirling Engine cogeneration device) - NRG Energy Deploying Dean Kamen’s Solar-Smart In-Home Generator

Few executives are more outspoken about the threat that distributed energy poses to utilities than NRG Energy CEO David Crane, so it’s not surprising that NRG Energy plans to sell a product that is disruptive to the centralized power business model.

The company is working with Deka Research on an on-site “energy appliance,” according to NRG Energy’s corporate sustainability report. In an interview last week with The Atlantic, Crane said the device, called Beacon 10, can generate electricity from natural gas, work with a battery and rooftop solar, and provide backup in the case of a grid outage. “When there’s not enough solar, you turn on the Beacon 10. Then, ideally, the grid itself would just be the ultimate backup. It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said.

Deka Research is headed by Dean Kamen, a renowned inventor best known for creating the Segway transporter who has worked extensively with Stirling engines. Earlier this year at the Fortune Brainstorm Green conference, NRG Energy showed a portable Stirling engine, and Crane said that the company is working with Kamen to test 200 of the machines in homes. Kamen has already made a multi-fuel, Stirling-engine-based water purifier called the Slingshot, which Coca-Cola will distribute to rural Latin America and African villages.

A specification sheet seen by the website Energy Choice Matters indicated that the Stirling engine of Beacon 10 is capable of producing 15 kilowatts of power, can send excess energy to the grid, and is slightly larger than a washing machine. The NRGBeacon10.com website has apparently since been taken down, and an NRG representative declined to provide more details on Beacon 10.

Beacon 10 is one of a number of products NRG Energy has that are outside the typical offerings of conventional utilities. The company has developed a solar canopy and has installed EV charging stations at retail locations. It’s also one of the utilities working with Nest Labs to offer consumers a two-way thermostat.

Technology Review has an article on solar power technology for the higher latitudes based on Stirling engines - Solar for Dark Climates.

Cool Energy, a startup based in Boulder, CO, is developing a system that produces heat and electricity from the sun. It could help make solar energy competitive with conventional sources of energy in relatively dark and cold climates, such as the northern half of the United States and countries such as Canada and Germany.

The company's system combines a conventional solar water heater with a new Stirling-engine-based generator that it is developing. In cool months, the solar heater provides hot water and space heating. In warmer months, excess heat is used to drive the Stirling engine and generate electricity.

Samuel Weaver, the company's president and CEO, says that the system is more economical than solar water heaters alone because it makes use of heat that would otherwise be wasted during summer months. The system will also pay for itself about twice as quickly as conventional solar photovoltaics will, he says. That's in part because it can efficiently offset heating bills in the winter--something that photovoltaics can't do--and in part because the evacuated tubes used to collect heat from the sun make better use of diffuse light than conventional solar panels do.

The system is designed to provide almost all of a house's heating needs. But the generator, which will produce only 1.5 kilowatts of power, won't be enough to power a house on its own. The system is designed to work with power from the grid, although the power is enough to run a refrigerator and a few lights in the event of a power failure.

The company's key innovation is the Stirling engine, which is designed to work at temperatures much lower than ordinary Stirling engines. In these engines, a piston is driven by heating up one side of the engine while keeping the opposite side cool. Ordinarily, the engines require temperatures of above 500 °C, but Cool Energy's engine is designed to run at the 200 degrees that solar water heaters provide.

Gizmag has an article on Dean Maken's hybrid scooter design, which uses a Stirling engine - Dean Kamen developing eco hybrid that will run on anything that burns

Dean Kamen – the multimillionaire inventor behind the Segway personal transporter – is well down the road in the development of a new bike that combines electric power and a radical generator which will allow it to burn almost any fuel.

Built around a fairly conventional battery and electric motor combination to provide the drive to the wheel, something Kamen's experience with the much-hyped Segway makes relatively easy, the radical part of the design is the inclusion of a Stirling engine to recharge the bike's battery pack. Based on technology that pre-dates the internal combustion engine by nearly a century, the Stirling engine is closer in concept to a steam engine, using external combustion, and without the need for a fuel that can be injected and burned incredibly fast inside a normal engine's combustion chamber, it can run on virtually anything that burns – opening the door to easily renewable fuels rather than relying on dwindling fossil fuel supplies.

Although the prototype bike has yet to be shown in public, unlike Kamen's Stirling-engined car which has been demonstrated several times, Kamen himself is understood to have been using the prototype to zip around his own estate.

As revealed in Kamen's own patent for the technology, the bike looks like a conventional scooter, with the Stirling engine and its fuel tank mounted under the seat, a rechargeable battery pack in the floor and a radiator in the front fairing. Although the Stirling engine's low output – one this size is unlikely to make any more than 5bhp – means it can't give the bike much performance on its own, it's able to keep the battery topped up by continuing to supply electricity even when you're not moving. The energy reserves in the battery can be used when more power is needed. And as the Stirling engine could be left running at low speed even when the bike is parked, the battery would never be likely to go flat.

Kamen has already sunk more than $50 million into his development of Stirling engine technology, using the idea for everything from bikes to cars and even to water-purifiers to be used in the developing world.

One of the large CSP projects I mentioned in my solar thermal power post was Stirling Energy Systems' proposed 900 MW project in southern California. Sign On San Diego reports this has been reduced in size to 750 MW, ironically to appease environmentalists who objected to a large grid expansion across the desert - Massive solar plan is linked to SDG&E. The project still consists of a massive 30,000 dishes.

An Arizona startup company yesterday asked government regulators for approval to build a massive solar energy power plant that proponents say is crucial to San Diego Gas & Electric's proposed Sunrise Powerlink. The project planned by Stirling Energy Systems of Phoenix calls for erecting 30,000 mirrored dishes, each 38 feet tall and 40 feet wide, in the desert near El Centro. It would convert solar energy into electricity to power 500,000 San Diego homes.

Stirling's proposal has become a crucial part of SDG&E's plans to comply with a state mandate that requires the utility to provide 20 percent of its electricity from renewable power sources by 2010. ... Stirling officials say the underlying solar technology has taken decades to refine. They say the proposed 750-megawatt solar generation facility, to be called SES Solar Two, would be the world's biggest solar energy generating system.

The company initially had proposed building a 900-megawatt solar plant on 7,650 acres of mostly federal land between Interstate 8 and state Route 80 near Plaster City, about 10 miles west of El Centro. But it reduced the scope of the project to a 750-megawatt facility on 6,500 acres to avoid potential adverse environmental effects from grading the eastern portion of the site, according to the application.

Stirling has proposed building the project in two phases, so that only the second phase would require completion of Sunrise, a 150-mile, high-voltage transmission line SDG&E proposes to build between San Diego and the Imperial Valley.

The first phase calls for erecting 12,000 “SunCatcher” solar dishes on 2,600 acres, which would generate about 300 megawatts of electricity. That power would be transmitted to San Diego along the existing Southwest transmission line that runs near I-8, Stirling said. The second phase calls for building 18,000 solar dishes that would generate 450 megawatts and would require completion of the Sunrise Powerlink.

“We can deliver the first phase to San Diego on existing power lines, but new transmission infrastructure is critical to achieving full realization of the Solar Two facility,” Bruce Osborn, Stirling's chief operating officer, said in a statement.

The company intends to find another site in the Imperial Valley suitable for 6,000 solar dishes needed to generate an additional 150 megawatts, said Bob Liden, Stirling's vice president of special projects. Under a 20-year contract signed in 2005, SDG&E agreed to buy all power produced by the 300-megawatt solar plant proposed in the first phase. Under the agreement, Stirling is to provide 600 megawatts of additional solar energy to the San Diego power grid by expanding the facility.

Stirling says it can build the first phase of the project for about $400 million, which Sunrise opponent Bill Powers has derided as “the stuff of fantasy.” A more likely estimate is $1.8 billion, said Powers, a local engineering consultant. Liden said Stirling spent roughly $250,000 apiece to develop prototypes of its SunCatcher solar dishes, but bulk raw-materials purchases and high-volume manufacturing will reduce production cost to a fraction of that.

Bruce Sterling has a post on "The Segway for Water" (I'm not sure the Segway is a good comparison to use when promoting something, but whatever) - a small scale water purification unit at a low price from Segway inventor Dean Kamen. As usual, Bruce's interjections are the bits marked "(())".

More at Wired Science - it sounds like the device works in conjunction with Kamen's other new invention, a Stirling engine based power generation unit - and Red Ferret.

(((Wired Science, these guys rock. I can't wait to see what they get up to when we've got an Administration that doesn't hate, fear and attack science.)))

"There has been much buzz about the water purifying machine that Segway inventor Dean Kamen demonstrated on the Colbert Report last week (even taking on the bag of Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos that Colbert added). Everyone has been trying to find out more about his claim that "you stick a hose into anything that looks wet ...and it comes out...as perfect distilled clean water."

"So far as I can tell however, it is true..."

(((The kicker:)))

"The slingshot is a David and Goliath reference aimed at putting water and power back in the hands of the individuals."

"The most interesting comments I came across were to the effect that inventing something great is only half the problem. The other half is getting it to the people who need it in a way that works. Luckily, as Gizmodo commenter enginblue points out, if units came down to $1,000 each, this new wave of micro-lending could have people pooling money to purchase units for groups of entrepreneurs wanting to bring this to their village."

((("Village," hell! For the cost-overruns on Austin's water-treatment plant we could buy a zillion of these. If it's a matter of a thousand dollars, I'll buy one myself and give disease-free distilled water to the neighbors. I'd make the money back in lowered medical costs to my community.)))

MetaEfficient reports that Sandia Laboratories has achieved a new efficiency record at their Solar Thermal Test Facility for solar to grid efficiency, using a concentrating dish with 82 mirrors combined with a stirling engine filled with hydrogen.

On a perfect New Mexico winter day — with the sky almost 10 percent brighter than usual — Sandia National Laboratories and Stirling Energy Systems (SES) set a new solar-to-grid system conversion efficiency record by achieving a 31.25 percent net efficiency rate. The old 1984 record of 29.4 percent was toppled Jan. 31 on SES’s “Serial #3” solar dish Stirling system at Sandia’s National Solar Thermal Test Facility.

The conversion efficiency is calculated by measuring the net energy delivered to the grid and dividing it by the solar energy hitting the dish mirrors. Auxiliary loads, such as water pumps, computers and tracking motors, are accounted for in the net power measurement.

“Gaining two whole points of conversion efficiency in this type of system is phenomenal,” says Bruce Osborn, SES president and CEO. “This is a significant advancement that takes our dish engine systems well beyond the capacities of any other solar dish collectors and one step closer to commercializing an affordable system.”

Erick Schonfeld at TechChrunch has a post on solar energy company Infinia and their Stirling Engine based technology.

If you thought clean energy financings were hot last year, 2008 promises to be scorching. Case in point: Infinia today raised a $50 million series B, led by British hedge fund GLG partners. Existing investors Equus, Khosla Ventures, Bill Gross’ Idealab, and Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital also participated in the round (after putting in $9.5 million just last June).

Infinia has developed utility-scale renewable energy technology that combines a Stirling engine with a large solar collector. The Stirling engine, a technology that’s been around since the 19th century, converts the heat into electricity. Infinia used to be called Stirling Cycles, and has been around for more than two decades. It has designed Stirling engines as power sources for NASA missions, implantable artificial hearts, and cooling devices that the army uses in Iraq. Now, it is focussed exclusively on using the technology to create 14-foot diameter solar collectors that can generate 3.5 kilowatts of energy apiece. Gang together 50 or 100 (at about $20,000 a pop) and you have the energy producing capacity of a small power plant.

Infinia’s Stirling engine is powered by a free-moving piston that requires no lubricants, and thus no maintenance. “What makes this unique is the no-maintenance profile,” says chief financial officer, Gregg Clevenger, “the ability to deploy a Stirling engine out in the desert and it is engineered to run for 20 years without you having to do anything.” It is also designed to be assembled with common mass-produced parts that an auto-parts supplier could manufacture. Getting the cost down is the key to creating a technology that is competitive with other forms of energy.

Using its Stirling engine technology, Inifnia thinks it can eventually produce electricity 20 to 30 percent cheaper than today’s existing solar panels. And in times of peak energy demand—on a hot summer day, for instance—it could even be competitive with electricity from gas-powered or coal-fired plants.

When it comes to providing solar system technology on mass scale, Infinia is far from alone.

Companies like Palo Alto, Calif.-based Ausra, also are in the race. In December, Ausra said it was building the world's largest factory for solar-thermal power systems in Las Vegas (see Ausra to Build World's Largest Solar-Thermal Factory).

Unlike Infinia, Ausra's technology uses fields of mirrors to heat water into steam, which is then converted into electricity using a standard steam turbine.

And others have turned to a type of concentrating solar that takes sunlight from a larger area and uses lenses or glass to direct and concentrate it onto smaller solar cells.

In January, Mountain View, Calif.-based SolFocus installed its first array of solar cells in what will be a 3-megawatt project in Spain. And Germany's Concentrix Solar installed 12 of its solar-tracking systems for a Spanish project, according to Gunther Portfolio.

But despite the slew of companies gunning to deliver concentrating solar technologies, few have been able to deliver the goods on a large scale and at an economical price.

Among the challenges concentrating solar faces are issues of durability because it has more parts than traditional solar systems. For example, Clevenger said each Stirling solar system unit is comprised of several hundred parts.

Infinia plans on contracting with manufacturers around the world to make the individual parts and assemble them in U.S.-based facilities.

But is Infinia's piston-driving approach just one more moving part to worry about? Clevenger said no. "We have developed this engine to be zero maintenance," he said explaining the encapsulating cylinder won't ever have to be opened for such things like adding more lubricant of which there is none.

One of the biggest obstacles to full-scale rollout of alternative energy sources—beyond the fact that they cost more than traditional power sources—is getting the things built. Solar power’s development has been hampered in part by a lack of super-pure silicon. The wind power industry is just shaking off supply-chain bottlenecks that have crimped production.

One solar upstart hopes to sidestep production problems—before it even starts producing.

Infinia Corp., based in Kennewick, Wash., which makes a concentrated solar-power device, today landed $50 million in Series B financing that the company says will pave the way for commercial-scale production of the as-yet unproven solar thermal technology. ...

A big part of the cash will be used to help re-tool Infinia’s prospective component suppliers in the automotive parts industry, says chief executive J. D. Sitton. Infinia’s devices combine a small engine with a concentrating dish that directs sunlight onto the motor, which converts it into electricity more efficiently than regular photovoltaic solar panels. Its 250-odd components were purposely designed, Mr. Sitton says, so that auto parts manufacturers could use their space capacity to produce them. ...

Infinia hopes to start production in November this year and within a few years reach annual production of about 200 megawatts—that is, a few hundred thousand of the 3.5 kilowatt devices—with an eye to selling to utilities.