Honda's "third pillar" will be solar, gas cogeneration

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Back on July 14th, Takuji Yamada, Honda's chief operating officer of power product operations, made it known the Japanese automaker sees solar gas cogeneration technology as its "third pillar." What are the first two? Passenger vehicles and motorcycles, which means that cogeneration is about to become a very big deal indeed for Honda.

So, what's cogeneration? Well, in Honda's own words, cogeneration is producing household electricity by using a combination of a natural gas- or liquid propane-fueled generator and solar panels. Basically, cogeneration units allow households to produce their own electricity on site. An engineer that has been involved with the development of Honda's household cogeneration units, says:
Although the amount of power generated is small at one kilowatt, I get excited about the possibilities when I think that our system installed in one million households would be the equivalent of one electric power plant, and dream about the possibilities.
So why do it? From Honda's point of view, this technology can play nicely with plug-in vehicles and, perhaps even more importantly, means that an event like the Fukushima nuclear reactor crisis would not leave thousands of Japan's residents powerless.

[Source: Integrity Exports]

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