RED Alert! | January 2009

American Scientist

The January issue’s cover story argues that ”we must extract more useful work from the energy at our disposal, especially in manufacturing, processing, and power generation.” Written by Tom Casten and Phil Schewe, “Getting the Most from Energy” concludes that “we can’t afford to send the large majority of our energy, unused, into the sky.” Read it here.

New CHP reports

Two high-profile reports highlight the important current and future contributions from combined heat and power (CHP). The International Energy Agency estimates that CHP can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions in 2030 by more than 950 million tons, equivalent to one and a half times India’s total annual CO2 emissions from power generation. View the report. Focusing on the United States, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory concludes that CHP could achieve 20 percent of generation capacity by 2030, the equivalent of nearly half the total energy currently consumed by U.S. households. Read the report.

Overcoming regulatory barriers

A new report from Recycled Energy Development declares that current energy regulations 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.

Output-based allocations

“Reduce Greenhouse Gases Profitably”—an article in the January Issues in Science and Technology, the quarterly journal of the National Academies of Sciences—notes that since nearly 70 percent of U.S. greenhouse emissions come from generation electricity and heat, enhancing the efficiency of electric generation is essential in the battle against global warming, and making use of the wasted thermal energy produced in power plants is the key to improving efficiency. An elegant market-oriented approach that avoids the quicksand of government picking technology winners would be a system based on output-based allocations of carbon emissions.