The feasibility of internal combustion engine based cogeneration in residential applications

An economic and environmental analysis on residential internal combustion engine (ICE) based cogeneration in Canada was performed. Information from three publicly available databases was used to model four houses to be used in simulation. One house per Canadian region was chosen and modeled in ESP-r. Annual simulations using the existing space and domestic hot water heating equipment were performed and these base case results were compared to the results using the ICE based cogeneration system. It was found that electricity priority control ICE based cogeneration is not economically feasible as the fuel cost exceeds that of the base case scenario. The environmental impact of ICE based cogeneration was dependant on the GHG electricity emissions factor. In provinces with high electricity GHG emissions factors (>750 gCO2eq/kWh), the ICE system was able to reduce the GHG emissions by approximately 10%.