promising to provide an effective means of generating electricity from waste heat for decades, but has been held back by a number of fabrication and materials challenges resulting in low efficiency, high cost and an upper temperature limit of 250°C.

In addition to a considerable amount of time and effort, more than $70MM has been spent addressing these deficiencies and advancing the technology to a stage where management feel it is ready to tackle large scale high temperature industrial applications, enabling plant owners in “hard to abate” industries such as steel and cement production to generate electricity from their own wasted heat. This reduces their reliance on traditional forms of electricity generation and therefore decreases the concurrent emission of CO2 and other harmful gases.

Thermoelectric generators (“TEGs”) are solid-state devices that convert a heat differential directly into electrical energy – when one side of the device is hot and the other remains cool, an electric current is generated. TEGs offer an elegant energy-harvesting option as they have no moving parts, are not based on chemical reactions, have a long operating life with minimal maintenance requirements and can be applied in multiple industrial environments. While several technologies are being commercially applied to capture lower temperature (<250°C) waste heat, MicroPower’s technology is one of only a few that has the ability to capture high temperature (>300°C) waste heat and the inherently higher potential value associated with it.