Enhancing Nanogrid sustainability and cost-efficiency by Recovering household waste heat

Nanogrids are Microgrids dedicated to produce low power forms of local energy. They are self-sufficient systems with one renewable energy generation, controls and, in most cases, energy storage. These systems are suitable to serve customers within a discrete footprint. Sources are usually solar PV or a wind turbine, and a battery for an autonomous operation.Since the operation cost of a Nanogrid is a key reason for the consumer to choose this environmental way for producing energy, we will present in this paper, an enhancement of cost operation by the participation of thermoelectric energy sources in providing energy to the domestic Nanogrid.The main idea is to recover the heat dissipated from all the electrical equipments installed in the house using a thermoelectric module using the Seebeck effect.A simulation was carried from ordinary house energy consumption data. The results highlight the contribution of this source and its positive impact on the general operation of the Nanogrid, and energy saving with zero cost investment.The simulation results obtained in this work are promising, and the simplicity of the concept will make it possible to generalize this form of energy to several microgrids.