By Mike Bush
Editor
575magazine.com
ROSWELL — Berken Energy expects to begin production of its film that makes electricity from heat in mid-2010, the company’s president said.
“We’ll do a prototype demonstration for those contracts we’ve signed,” Berken President Ken Newman said. “We expect to be in production in 2010. Modifications will take 2-3 months.”
The company currently has six full-time employees, with three positions unfilled, but Newman said in an ideal situation, Berken could eventually employ “on the low side of 175 people.”
Berken’s basic product is a thin film “similar to a semiconductor or transistor” that, depending on the specific product, is attached to a “substrate” or bottom material such as glass, copper, aluminum and some polymer films, Newman said. It can even be bonded to stainless steel or titanium for some high-temperature applications.
Berken Energy will use this Laybold A500 roll-to-roll vacuum pump to deposit its product on various substrates such as glass, copper, aluminum or polymer film.
“We capture heat and we turn that heat into electricity,” Newman said.
He said the company expects to produce enough film each year to produce 20 megawatts of electricity, enough to power about 20,000 homes.
“In three years, we expect that number to be closer to 100 or 200 megawatts, and in five years about a gigawatt,” he said, adding, “That depends on market acceptance and competitiveness. These aren’t guarantees.”
Newman’s partner, Bert Amick, vice president of Berken, has a “long, long-storied history” of working with thin-film vacuum deposition, Newman said.
“He had a team of contractors and they would … basically help rocket scientist with their thin-film challenges,” Newman said, adding Amick has patents on things from superconductors to the thin explosive film that deploys airbags and exploding film the Department of Defense uses for kinetic defense.
“Bert and his guys had noticed some properties as they had been doing different projects throughout the years, and came up with this idea,” Newman said.
The concept of producing heat from electricity goes back to early-19th-century scientists Thomas Johann Seebeck and Jean-Charles Peltier, he added.
“All we have done is we have changed the way people view those products in the fact that we re-engineered and redesigned different elements and the structures around them,” he said.
One product is photothermalvoltaic (PTV) film, which uses heat from the sun, for which Berken Energy has commercial and residential applications, Newman said.
Wires connect photothermalvoltaic film to a voltmeter to measure the voltage output per square foot while heat lamps heat one side and fans cool the other to maintain a temperature differential, which produces a current.
The Berken film can be attached to more conventional photovoltaic (PV) panels and increases their efficiency a lot, according to Newman. PV panels use light, which is only about 20 percent of the sun’s energy, which means it wastes the other 80 percent, which is heat energy, Newman noted.
“Their products capture the light, our products capture the heat, so when you combine them together, it’s a more robust product, more efficient product,” he added.
Heat actually is a problem for PV cells, he said. In warmer climates, such as New Mexico, Arizona, southern Nevada and California, PV panels can get so hot their chemistry is distorted, making them ineffective.
“So our product on the back acts like a heat sink,” he said. “It sucks the heat out of it … It makes it a little more efficient, and then we increase the output because we’re capturing the electrical output.”
PV panels can produce electricity only about five hours a day, Newman said, and then they stop working — during the late afternoon, what the electric companies call the peak demand period, between 3 and 7 p.m.
“Peak usage time is usually when the solar’s not around,” he said “It goes down at like 3 o’clock.”
Newman said the output of Berken’s PTV film matches the peak demand.
“So we can actually put our power out when utilities need it,” he added.
The Berken film can convert heat from any source to power, Newman said. It can capture heat from geothermal sources such as hot oil from an oil well or waste heat produced by commercial dryers — such as those at Leprino Foods’ cheese plant, Xcel Energy’s power plants and Navajo Refinery.
The film also can capture waste heat from data centers, Newman said, adding Berken is now working with Science Applications International Corp., a Fortune 500 company that wants to use Berken air exchangers in its data centers.
“There are different apparatuses, so one of them is in a frame … and it goes behind the photovoltaics of the solar panel, and so it has several uses there and the others are in an exchanger, whether it is a heat exchanger or an air exchanger,” Newman said.
Berken also is working with several groups on residential applications, he said.
“We have one that is going into a passive and radiant heat system collecting infrared from the sun,” he added. Such a system might use a blower to blow warm air from an attic into the house as a passive heating system, or water would be pumped through tubes in the attic, providing heat.
“And now they want to wrap the (Berken) product and capture (the heat) and create power, so it’s very exciting to that industry,” Newman said, adding he had talked to “the largest retrofitter in the country” and Berken is looking at putting products in ceilings, walls and insulation.
“There are different applications that we’re looking at,” Newman said, adding, “Those are not developed. That’s new stuff right there, that’s drawing-board stuff, and we have people that are going to pay for that.
“We have people who want to take the flexible version of this and put it on their tents, put it on their sails for their sailboats and put it on the roofs of their RVs,” he said. “We have all kinds of applications on the (drawing) board, but we’re very small. We just launched out patents and our products to the world and now people are coming from all walks of life with ideas to take advantage of this product.”
The geothermal application is exciting because the utility companies view the Berken application as a “baseload” product, similar to hydro, nuclear and coal in that it operates around 95 percent of the time, compared to 30-35 percent for wind and solar.
Efficiency determines how much power actually is produced, compared to the plant’s rating. That means a wind or solar farm with a rating of 1 megawatt would produce an average of only about 300-350 kilowatts of power.
Berken’ GeoThermalVoltaic product also produces power from geothermal sources at lower temperatures than traditional geothermal producers, Newman said. Currently, less than 1 percent of U.S. land produces enough geothermal energy that it can be used to produce electricity, whereas there place in all 50 states where GTV film can produce power.
Hot water runs through red-colored panels and cold water through blue-colored. The temperature difference produces electricity, which is measured by a voltmeter.
Berken also produces air and water exchangers to gather waste heat from industrial plants and use it to make electricity. For instance, data centers have thousands and thousands of blade servers and other computer equipment, Newman said, and it all produces heat.
“Forty percent of the power they use is just to cool the computers down,” he said. Air exchangers can capture that heat and turn it into electricity.
Air and water exchangers also can be used in food plants, steel mills and oil and chemical refineries, he added.
“We’re working on products with incinerators with airports right now, so we will be capturing the heat from those incinerators and big dryers they use to dry food,” he said. “We’ll be doing that at airports and using that power to help light LED lights at the airport and give extra deicing on the runways.”
Newman said he also is in discussions with Xcel Energy, NV Energy and Duke Energy to harness waste heat at their power plants, he added.
“They have a lot of waste heat come out of their power plants because they’re either (using) nuclear or burning natural gas or burning coal,” he said. “Most of the time there’s heat all over these power plants.”
Newman said one problem he has had in keeping employees is that many he has hired have been younger people who are used to larger cities and don’t fit into Roswell.
“We want to try to get more people from the area,” he added. “They’re here and they like it here.