Recycled Energy Development
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Energy waste is pervasive. Policymakers don’t seem to see it, but ask virtually any school kid to draw a picture of a power plant and you’ll see something resembling Homer Simpson’s, where massive columns of waste heat are vented into the air.
The cartoon, unfortunately, matches reality, as evidenced by this electric generating facility in Craig, Colorado, where two-thirds of the energy within the burned fuel is wasted, released into the atmosphere.
Electric generation waste is the ignored elephant in the room during climate change debates. The average U.S. power plant burns three units of fuel to generate just one unit of power. This dismal 33-percent efficiency has not improved by a single percentage point in the past 50 years, since Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House. Despite phenomenal technical advances and a six-fold increase in electricity consumption, generation efficiency has remained stagnant. No other industry is burdened with such a dismal record. The inefficiency of electricity generation is wasteful, costly, and needlessly contributes to climate change.
No law of physics requires generation efficiency to be frozen at 33 percent. Indeed, Thomas Edison’s first power plants — because he sought to profit by the sale of both power and heat — achieved 50-percent efficiencies. Denmark, over the last two decades, increased from 33 to 60 percent efficiency, and Germany, Japan, and our other international competitors do a far better job of capturing heat from power generation.
In fact, the current U.S. electric system, by focusing only on power and throwing away the heat associated with electricity generation, is less efficient than a century ago. Just returning to efficiencies achieved in the 1920s would save the U.S. some $70 billion annually.
Why are electricity and thermal generation efficiencies so important to our climate and energy debates? First, electricity generation has become the dominant source of CO2 emissions, rising from about 12 percent in 1950 to 42 percent today. Second, electricity costs are rising and will soar further as the price of fuel and power plant construction increase.
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