Back in prehistoric times grid parity was called
Electric Parity with natural gas
or less commonly
Natural gas parity with electricity.
The former refers to the price point at which electricity is cheaper to heat with than natural gas and the latter is when natural gas is cheaper for the production of electrity.
The company I work for has mission critical setups that allow them to run the place off waste oil / natural gas or off the grid. They no longer use the setup for primary electricity but historically companies did use whichever was cheaper, I started wondering.
What price per therm equates into parity with electricity at 10 cents per KW.
(and not for heating, that is too bloody easy, for actual production)
Then looking further I pay roughly $300 a year in hookup fees just to have electricity there, then usage based fees, lastly the actual cost of the electricity and end up using very little of it anyway.
Add to this there are co-generation setups that also provide heating or cooling from the waste heat generated making overall system efficiency 96%
Honda Worldwide | Technology Picture Book | Cogeneration
After reading about co generation I started thinking I could probably use a $50 conversion kit on the 3kw inverter generator I already have and I could probably figure out how to use heat from the genset in winter if I want.
(my peak usage is 3.5kw when my fridge is running, car is charging and I have a TV and a bunch of LED lights on, a bit of common sense and I could get this down the to 3kw max)
I would need to box it up and make a remote start to comply with noise laws but all in all looks simple. (also I am in a rented duplex so this is all mental masturbation but still interesting)
It appears I would actually get relatively quick payback (using very rough numbers) and oddly the price per KW does not appear to be much different than off the tap anyway, cheaper if I consider the fact I get winter heating energy.
Anyone have a better set of numbers? I figure the genset is 28% efficient, but it may actually be better, not sure which conversions are realistic for this comparison.
Looking further it appears natural gas produced electricity (at home) costs about half what electricity from the grid costs not considering fees, very interesting, this explains why the place I work used to generate their own electricity all summer.
I only pay $0.398 per therm, electricity would cost $3.077 for the same amount in terms of "heating" values.
Thanx
Ryan