Recycled Energy Development
The web’s resource for energy recycling news and information
Many of the world’s best brains are focused on reducing fossil fuel use to mitigate climate change. Strangely, little attention is paid to the source of the greatest inefficiency – the generation of heat and power, which accounts for 69% of carbon-dioxide emissions. Capturing and recycling the currently wasted energy could displace nearly 30 percent of U.S. fossil-fueled generation, slash U.S. CO2 by 20 percent, and save $150 to $250 billion per year.
Such numbers sound too good to be true, largely because everyone assumes electric utilities and large manufacturers must be optimally generating their electricity and thermal energy. That assumption, however, is totally flawed. In fact, current energy and environmental regulatory policies are barriers — barries that block the deployment of clean and efficient generation.
That these barriers exist is proven by the fact that the power industry has made no overall efficiency gain in the past five decades, since Dwight Eisenhower occupied the White House. Electricity generators burn three units of fuel to deliver just one unit of power, resulting in an efficiency rate of only 33 percent. Monopoly utility regulation had already stopped efficiency gains when Congress enacted the 1970 Clean Air Act, which ignores efficient generation as pollution control and inadvertently penalizes investments in efficiency.
In fairness, global warming and problems with fossil fuel use were not on the radar screen when monopoly regulations were formulated or when the Clean Air Act tackled air quality. But these rules block efficiency and force society to pay to warm the planet. Since the needless release of carbon dioxide is threatening life as we know it on earth, these rules must be modernized.
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