Steve Walker created IMBY Energy in Peterborugh to make a single, efficient device that can provide electricity, heating, air conditioning and hot water to residential and commercial buildings.

Right now, people have different devices for all these things, and he said, “What we’re doing is packing it into one streamlined system.” 

Walker, the founder of New England Wood Pellet, has been working on the IMBY system for about eight years, and he said “we’re still some years out,” but they’re excited to have the community talking about it.

The first component is a heat pump, which uses electricity to efficiently heat or cool a building. Heat pumps operate on the same principle as a refrigerator. By compressing, circulating and then decompressing a refrigerant gas, they can efficiently transfer heat from outside a building to inside or cool the building by working in reverse. To cool a building, that means transferring heat from the inside to the outside.

“One of the single largest contributors to climate change is leaking refrigerants,” said Walker.

Refrigerants like hydrofluorocarbons are greenhouse gases that trap thousands of times more heat than carbon dioxide, and are used in appliances like refrigerators and heat pumps to heat or cool a space. Walker said leaking refrigerants contribute to 3 percent of global emissions, as much as the global aviation industry.

“We obviously saw this as a huge problem,” he said.

IMBY’s solution was to use natural molecules, like butane and cyclopentane, as refrigerants, which Walker said have very low to no potential to cause global warming. Plus, “natural refrigerants are much more efficient,” Walker said. 

IMBY has been working with NASA and Creare, an engineering consultant in Hanover, to create a heat pump that works for their application. The space agency uses heat pumps on satellites so they don’t get too hot, because without an atmosphere, the satellites aren’t protected from the extreme heat of direct sunlight.

“We’ve effectively taken big industrial systems and miniaturized them,” Walker said. 

The IMBY system also includes a thermal energy storage system. Walker said this provides hot water and allows heat energy to be stored, so if someone has solar panels on their house, they can store energy from sunny days to be used at night or when it’s cloudy.

Finally, the device has a generator.

“It doesn’t burn fuel, it oxidizes it,” said Walker, adding it doesn’t matter what kind of fuel is used.

Walker explained when there is a renewable fuel source in the future, such as hydrogen, his generator will be able to convert to using that. It could be useful for extreme temperatures like the very cold day the region experienced in January, as Walker said when it’s negative-20 degrees, much more energy is required to heat buildings and houses.

Gas pipelines struggle to supply both power plants and buildings, and if everyone had heat pumps, there wouldn’t be enough electricity to run them all.

The generator is meant to “kick on in peak demand to alleviate stress on the electric grid.”

The device includes two parts, an outside device similar to the size of an air conditioning unit and an inside component that looks like a water heater.

“You don’t need a furnace anymore, a boiler or hot water heater,” Walker said, which will ultimately save space.

Walker said his invention is cheaper and simpler, and with his own device and other rapidly improving energy technologies, he has hope for the future.

“We’re going to end up with better lives, a stronger economy and a more-secure nation,” he said.

A move to renewables means more energy will be coming from local sources. Right now, most oil and gas comes from other countries, including the Middle East. Walker emphasized this condition is making the nation less secure, as many wars are fights over energy.

“Renewables are much cheaper,” Walker said, “It’s old news that it costs more,” and electricity coming from renewables paired with new technology, like better light bulbs and electric motors in cars, enables energy to be converted much more efficiently, requiring less energy to be used because less is wasted.

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