Roll over photos for details of energy recycling projects.
Think you can’t fight climate change while cutting energy costs? Think bigger.
In the face of growing demand for more electricity and less greenhouse gas pollution, energy recycling has the revolutionary potential to generate vast amounts of power that’s both clean and cheap. The result would be a dramatic increase in energy efficiency that benefits businesses, consumers and the environment alike.
For every three units of fuel the U.S. electricity industry burns, it generates one unit of power – resulting in a dismal 33 percent average efficiency rate. To put that into perspective, Thomas Edison’s early power plants were about 50 percent efficient.
How did Edison achieve what today’s electric utilities cannot? Simple: he took his plants’ excess heat and used it to warm nearby buildings. That is, he found a use for energy that would have otherwise been wasted. That’s energy recycling.
Waste energy is a natural byproduct of both power plants and industrial facilities that manufacture products like metals and glass. In the U.S., this energy is usually vented into the atmosphere, representing smokestack after smokestack of untapped energy. But most of this energy could be turned into clean power and useful steam.
In fact, recent studies done for the U.S. EPA and Department of Energy suggest energy recycling could create 200,000 megawatts of electricity in this country – enough to provide about 40 percent of our electric supply. About a third of that would be fuel-free power harnessed from waste energy at industrial facilities. The rest would come from small, efficient combined heat and power (CHP) plants located on-site at big energy users like manufacturing facilities, universities, and hospitals.
If all of this waste energy were recycled, the gains would be dramatic. Greenhouse gas emissions would drop by an estimated 20 percent – as much as if every passenger vehicle were taken off the road. Meanwhile, as energy efficiency rose, power costs would fall, resulting in a bigger bang for the energy consumer’s buck.
The generation of power and heat accounts for 67 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. That means increasing efficiency in these areas is vital to curbing climate change. With CHP – also called “cogeneration” – manufacturers generate their own heat and electricity on site instead of relying on remote, centralized power plants. Since heat can’t travel far before cooling, energy recycling is impractical for most centrally located plants. Decentralizing power production generates energy at about half the cost and more than twice the efficiency.
Most of these savings come from the ability of CHP plants to recycle their own waste heat to produce more electricity and steam, which can be used on site or at surrounding buildings. CHP also virtually eliminates the high cost and power losses associated with long-distance energy transmission and delivery.
In addition, widespread use of CHP would result in an estimated 80 percent reduction in the massive energy reserves that utilities must maintain to ensure reliability when demand spikes – along with a corresponding reduction in the $150 billion annual cost of blackouts and power fluctuations.
Similar gains are generated from “waste heat recovery,” which recycles the heat that manufacturers are already releasing out smokestacks. The power and heat generated in this process are 100% clean, emitting no greenhouse gas emissions whatsoever. In an increasingly carbon-constrained world, energy recycling can be a boon to manufacturers by slashing their power costs and reducing their carbon footprint.
Sound too good to be true? Tell that to Denmark, where the government decided more than 30 years ago not to rely too heavily on fossil fuels and centralized energy production. Denmark implemented broad policies to promote energy efficiency and now makes extensive use of CHP and waste heat recovery to produce more than 50% of its power. The U.S. rate, by contrast, languishes in the single digits.
All of this begs the trillion-dollar question: if recycled energy is so efficient, why isn’t the U.S. doing more? In a word, regulations. Although our regulatory system was crafted in the early 1900s to electrify the country, it has become antiquated. Instead of promoting efficiency, our regulations subsidize and protect monopoly utilities.
In many states, it is legally burdensome for any company other than the local electric utility to sell power. And in virtually every state, no one other than the local utility is allowed to run an electric wire across a public street, preventing many would-be energy recyclers from selling excess power to nearby buildings.
Indeed, current laws actually penalize efficiency. Utilities are generally allowed to “pass on” all operating costs to electricity consumers; as a result, power producers can only lose by investing in efficiency. Moreover, under grandfather provisions in the Clean Air Act, old power plants are prohibited from making efficiency improvements unless they invest millions of dollars to meet state-of-the-art pollution standards – leading many dirty plants to make no improvements at all. In short, the incentives are backwards and the results predictable.
With modest changes in public policy, the U.S. could have a far more efficient energy system. The upshot would be lower energy costs, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and greater competitiveness for American businesses. As renewable energy options like wind and solar power become more feasible on a large scale, energy recycling could serve as a bridge to a clean energy future. We must remember the lessons Thomas Edison taught more than a century ago and increase our use of recycled energy.