Pareto Energy:: How Local Power Works

How Local Power Works

The Local Power concept combines multiple strategies for gaining control over your own sources of energy, such as load reduction, renewables, and trigeneration (combined heating, cooling, and power)

Load Reduction
By leveraging high-performance building technologies and energy-efficient equipment, the amount of energy needed in the first place can be minimized.

Renewables
Renewables take advantage of site-specific opportunities to harvest renewable energy, including the oft-ignored thermal sources. Pareto Energy can provide economic feasibility analyses of these opportunities, which often include:

Solar-assisted air conditioning
Solar-driven latent cooling (dehumidification)
Solar hot-water heating
Solar thermal heating
Ground-source heat pump and ground-source cooling
Deep water and aquifer cooling

In particularly favorable sites, renewables may occasionally include:

Building-integrated and glass-integrated thin-film photovoltaics
Building-integrated small wind
Biogas from landfill, wastewater treatment, and other bio-sources
Geothermal energy
Low-impact hydroelectric

Trigeneration
Trigeneration systems (also known combined heat and power, or CHP) generate electricity and useful thermal energy in a

single, integrated system. This contrasts with the common practice of separate heat and power (SHP) where electricity is generated at a central power plant, while on-site heating and cooling equipment is used to meet non-electric energy requirements. The thermal energy recovered in a trigeneration system can be used for heating or cooling in industry or buildings. Because trigeneration captures the heat that would otherwise be rejected in traditional generation of electric power, the total efficiency of these integrated systems is much greater than from separate systems.