This paper focuses on the use of internal combustion engine as the prime mover of the distributed power system

and reviews the research progress and application situation of the technology both at home and abroad. Three kind of distributed power systems under different load demand is been compared

combined with different ways of waste heat recovery. The internal combustion engine DPS is more efficient and has less initial investment comparing to gas turbine

which is suitable for the distributed system under the scale of 5 MW. A distributed project in Shanghai as an example. The results show that the energy consumption of this distributed co-production system in summer is 65.41% of the individual system and 56.58% in winter.