I became involved with Dennis near the end of his heat pump efforts. Dennis became involved with that LamCo heat pump at an interesting phase of his
life:
www.ahealedplanet.net...
He did not get involved from a technological end, but from his sales, marketing and entrepreneurialism background. However, he ended up being a
primary developer of that technology, but with the craziness that he lived through, with his companies being stolen so often or snuffed out, it is
kind of hard to follow a well-planned technological development chart. I brought in this technology:
www.ahealedplanet.net...
but I sure was not the inventor. I was the money guy more than anything else, and was being directed by a disembodied voice (one that I don’t want
to hear from again, if it leads to adventures like those):
www.ahealedplanet.net...
www.ahealedplanet.net...
It would be nice to be able to decide on a course of development, have the money to pursue it and gather the needed talent, have the peace of not
getting the kind of attention that we did (from “friends” or foes), but that is not how I have seen it work.
Also, there is something important to understand about the economics of that LamCo-style heat pump. At a COP of eight, if electricity was four times
as expensive as gas, then the heat pump would operate at half the cost of a gas furnace. If the heat pump got a COP of 12, it would operate at a
third of gas cost. So, half the potential savings are realized at the COP of eight, and for making the COP go to 12, only another 17% is saved. At a
COP of 16, then only another 8% is saved. It is like an asymptote (or diminishing returns). Double the COP, and only save 25% more in energy bills.
Gas being 25% as expensive as electricity is a macroeconomic measure, and it could vary widely over certain markets and conditions:
www.ahealedplanet.net...
Gas heat pumps can be more efficient, but there are still the thermodynamic losses to get the thing to work and other factors. Dennis was never in a
position to spend millions developing a gas heat pump in the middle of all that.
In Washington State in 1984, when so many houses were all-electric, a COP of five gave an 80% savings over electric heaters. There was not much more
the homeowner could have saved. At a COP of ten, they would have saved 90%, so why even try to go there? That was the play Dennis was making in
Washington, and that was why the electric interests pulled all the stops to wipe out the Seattle effort. Somebody ran the numbers back then, and for
each one of Dennis’ heat pumps installed in Seattle, to replace electric heat, the electric companies were projected to lose something like $20K in
electricity revenues per heat pump over 10 years, and Dennis was trying to carpet Puget Sound with them.
They were looking at billions in lost revenues. In the end, that was all that mattered to them, as they even admitted:
www.ahealedplanet.net...
Whether it was run by gas or not would have been a non-issue.
Our journey was due to a unique confluence of technology, talent, macroeconomic dynamics, timing and so on. It is not something that can be easily
reproduced, although Dennis has been trying ever since. Many lives were wrecked and prematurely ended,
www.ahealedplanet.net...
and only somebody with the crazed persistence of a Dennis will even try to pick up the pieces from that train wreck.
Almost everybody else just tried surviving with the years they had left in their lives, some quite bitterly.
I have to make a second post, as this fourm limits the size of my responses...
[edit on 29-4-2006 by wadefrazier3]