Conference Focuses on Advantages of Energy Efficiency

By Pam Kasey
April 17, 2008

Expert: Most Promising Alternative Is Efficiency

The most promising alternative energy is efficiency, said Richard Munson at the April 9-10 Morgantown conference "Impacts of High and Volatile Energy Costs on Energy Intensive Industries."

Munson is senior vice president of Illinois-based Recycled Energy Development.

RED recently contracted to generate 40 megawatts of electricity from waste heat at Fayette County's West Virginia Alloys, offsetting a third of the silicon manufacturer's electricity consumption. It was RED's first contract under an initiative to invest $1.5 billion in energy recycling projects.

"Most of the attention on efficiency is focused on the demand side: consumer use of new light bulbs, better insulation, more efficient appliances," Munson said. "I would suggest that the elephant in the room is on the supply side, where the production of electricity and thermal energy are unbelievably inefficient."

The electric power industry was at its most efficient around 1910, according to RED's Web site. By recovering heat created while generating electricity, the industry had achieved a fuel-conversion efficiency of 65 percent. But as power generation became more centralized and moved away from its markets for the associated heat, utilities increasingly vented that heat to the atmosphere -- through, for example, the familiar cooling towers. At the same time, industrial facilities resorted to furnaces and boilers to generate their own heat.

The Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy estimate that, nationwide, capturing and recycling waste energy could provide 200,000 MW of electric capacity -- about 20 percent of U.S. total electricity production.

By recycling its waste heat, Munson said, West Virginia Alloys suddenly will be the lowest-cost producer of silicon in the world.

"West Virginia and, I think, other industrial states are awash in this opportunity, this untapped resource of waste heat that is now vented from the state's industries," he said.

When Munson spoke before state legislators earlier this year, he said, "I tried to encourage them rather than seeking a transition to a service or a high-tech center to think about how to embrace the existing industries and help them become more efficient and productive."

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