the blog of nathan loding

I remem­ber a time when I was a kid that I just could not under­stand why a car needed to burn as gaso­line as it did. Why not have a small amount of gas burn to start a gen­er­a­tor; that gen­er­a­tor in turn pow­ers the car and as the wheels turn, they pro­vide more power to the gen­er­a­tor in a way sim­i­lar to how dams gen­er­ate elec­tric­ity. To a child, this plan was flaw­less, bril­liant, and incred­i­bly obvi­ous. In high school, I learned the physics behind it, and found that the con­ver­sion of energy isn’t quite that simple.

Or is it?

The U.S. econ­omy wastes 55 per­cent of the energy it con­sumes, and while Amer­i­can com­pa­nies have ruth­lessly wrung out other forms of inef­fi­ciency, that fig­ure hasn’t changed much in recent decades. The amount lost by elec­tric util­i­ties alone could power all of Japan.

Waste Not is an eye-opener. I sug­gest any­one who fan­cies them­selves remotely eco-conscious read it. The con­cept of tak­ing the plumes of steam gush­ing out of so many fac­to­ries and recy­cling into elec­tric­ity is one that I was instantly in love with. The fact that it actu­ally lessens the power that fac­tory requires from the grid and, for some plants, becomes self-sustaining, is phenomenal.

… the mill has cut its pur­chases of coal-fired power by half, reduced car­bon emis­sions by 1.3 mil­lion tons a year, and saved more than $100 mil­lion. In March, the plant won an EPA Energy Star award.

The ‘mill’ men­tioned above is the Arcelor­Mit­tal steel mill. That’s right — a steel mill has won an EPA Energy Star award. And you thought those were only given to dishwashers.

The arti­cle fin­ishes on a rel­a­tively depress­ing note, elab­o­rat­ing on the amount of energy lost and how easy it is to recap­ture it. Cap­ture only part of the heat the pres­sure lost by natural-gas pipelines and “the U.S. could take four coal-fired power plants offline.”

So why not? As the arti­cle explains, cur­rent U.S. reg­u­la­tions make fac­to­ries hes­i­tant to sign up. Installing the new equip­ment into their cur­rently exhaust sys­tems would prompt an imme­di­ate inspec­tion, which could cause fur­ther headaches the com­pa­nies would rather avoid. Beyond any reg­u­la­tory issues, there would be a need to open the power grid to new com­pe­ti­tion. And, of course, “nei­ther [the Democ­rats or the Repub­li­cans] want to do the dirty work of shut­ting down old, waste­ful generators.”

To learn more about EPCOR (for­merly Pri­mary Energy), click here.