Roll over photos for details of energy recycling projects.
Waste energy, which primarily comes in the form of excess heat, is a natural byproduct of 1) power plants, and 2) manufacturing processes that bake, boil, cook, burn, dry, distill, melt or otherwise heat things — in short, most industrial processes. Vast amounts of waste energy are thrown out or vented into the atmosphere, leading to smokestack after smokestack of untapped energy. Energy recycling captures this waste energy and converts it into power as clean as wind or solar, slashing energy costs and global warming pollution at the same time.
Recent U.S. Evironmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy studies suggest that energy recycling could provide 200,000 megawatts of power — enough to replace about 400 coal plants and provide 40 percent of the country’s electricity needs.
In all, energy recycling could cut U.S. greenhouse emissions by 20 percent while reducing power costs by an estimated $70 billion a year.
The U.S. electric industry’s average efficiency—which hasn’t improved measurably since the 1950s—is about 33 percent, meaning a power plant burns three units of fuel to generate just one unit of power. To put that into perspective, Thomas Edison’s early power plants were approximately 50 percent efficient. How did Edison achieve what today’s power generators cannot? Simple: he recycled energy by using the plant’s excess heat to warm nearby buildings. The stakes today, of course, are far greater, as two-thirds of all U.S. global warming pollution comes from the production of power and heat.
The answer is simple: our electricity regulations are out of date. Crafted in the early 1900s, they were designed to protect the utilities that were rapidly electrifying the countryside. Today, however, these rules stifle competition and innovation. In most places, no one but the local utility is allowed to run an electric wire across a public street, thereby keeping would-be energy recyclers from selling excess power and heat to neighboring buildings. Meanwhile, the utilities themselves have no incentive to be efficient since they are allowed (indeed mandated) to pass all operating costs on to consumers.
Moreover, our environmental rules have erected inadvertent barriers to efficiency. Under the Clean Air Act, for instance, old power plants are permitted to make efficiency improvements only if they invest millions of dollars to meet modern pollution control standards. The result is that many plants choose to make no improvements at all.
The good news is that these rules are changing, in part because of RED’s advocacy efforts at the state and federal level. While RED will continue to tackle barriers, we are working within the existing system to obtain as much value as possible from our projects.
Both forms of energy recycling take energy that’s normally wasted and turn it into clean power and heat.
CHP involves a power plant located on site at a manufacturing facility, hospital, university, or other large institution. A CHP plant typically runs on natural gas or some other traditional fuel source. But as it produces electricity, it recycles and reuses the excess heat emitted in the process, generating power two or three times more efficiently than the large, centralized plants that generate most of the country’s electricity.
WER, on the other hand, simply captures the waste energy that a manufacturer is already emitting and turns it into clean electricity and useful forms of heating and cooling. No additional fossil fuels are used. WER therefore piggybacks on an industrial plant’s existing energy infrastructure rather than building it anew.