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August 02, 2007 Dean Kamen's Stirling Solution
photos: green wombat
“If you have enough Thinks out there you would literally change the architecture of the grid,” says Kamen, taking Green Wombat for a drive around Westwind and past his wind turbine before parking the blue Think City near his pair of Enstrom helicopters. (He keeps the Think in a garage that also houses his 1898 steam-driven car and a 1913 Model T.) Kamen heads to the control room of his 33,000-square foot house. An Internet-enabled blue box called a Teletrol controls the home’s power systems, including a Stirling engine about the size of an air conditioner that can act as a backup generator or a mini power plant that kicks on when electricity demand soars. Kamen invented the Teletrol and his company of the same name remotely operates the heating and air-conditioning systems of buildings like the Sydney Opera House. Kamen, of course, would like to see a Teletrol in every house, acting as the interface between your Web-enabled Think and the grid (and, ideally, the Stirling engine that sits in your basement or utility room.) "The big advantage is once we’re in production with that engine, where it will really be uniquely valuable is to the 1.6 billion people on this plant who’ve never used electricity," says Kamen. "We will become the Con Edison of every village in Asia, Africa and Central America." http://blogs.business2.com/greenwombat/2007/08/a-visit-to-dean.html
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In a world of Stepford executives who never deviate from the corporate
party line, there's something refreshing about an entrepreneur willing
to take a tumble - literally - for his latest innovation. In
uber-inventor Dean Kamen's case that meant crashing his Stirling
electric hybrid scooter in front of Green Wombat and a photographer. In
June, Green Wombat visited Westwind, Kamen's estate outside Manchester,
New Hampshire, to talk to the Segway inventor about his plans to
install a Stirling heat engine in an electric car made by Norway's 
Over the past decade, Kamen, who made a fortune as inventor of the
insulin pump and other medical devices, has spent some $40 million
developing Stirling engines. They can use virtually any fuel source to
heat a sealed container containing a gas - hydrogen or helium, for
instance - that expands and contracts to drive a piston and produce
electricity. "We run two villages in Bangladesh on Stirlings that run
on freakin' cow dung," says Kamen, who envisions Stirling engines
powering the world's off-the-grid villages and using the waste heat
produced by the engine to purify water.
But Kamen needs to get to mass production to realize that dream and
that's where Think comes in. Kamen met Think CEO Jan-Olaf Willums last
year at MIT. "I took him up to New Hampshire and we spent half the
night speculating about how cool the world could be if you put the
right technologies in the right place at the right time," says Kamen.
"I need some killer app to put this thing into production. And one way
to do that would be to create the world’s first hybrid Stirling
electric car." So Willums shipped a Think City to Kamen, who is now
modifying the two-seater coupe to carry a Stirling engine (photo at
right) that would not only extend its range by hundreds of miles but
turn the car into a mobile generator. When electricity demand peaks
during the day, thousands of Thinks plugged in at office parks could
feed power back to the grid so utilities like PG&E (PCG) and Edison
(EIX) could avoid having to fire up planet-warming power plants. The
Stirling engine would then recharge the car's battery for the commute
home. When we last spoke in July, Kamen had the autmotive version of
the Stirling engine up and running. The next step is to hook it up to
the City and see if it'll work as planned. You probably won't see a
Stirling in a Toyota (TM) or Ford (F) but the device gives Think
another power plant to offer its customers.
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