Comments on: Profitably reducing greenhouse gas emissions

By: Ric Evans

Ric Evans — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 17:40:33 +0000

I heard To speak on NPR a few weeks ago and his story has haunted me ever since. When the environmental movement first started dealing with regulated waste everything was sent to waste treatment or storage facilities and the companies paid dearly to dispose of their waste. Now many manufactures have found a way to make that waste someone elses resource. Why can’t the same strategy be used to recover waste heat with the possible advantage of capturing waste byproducts at the same time. No need to have that sulfer dioxide go up in smoke if you can capture and sell it to an end user.

This could solve the problem of new source review rules if the company generating the waste heat simply sold it as a resource to the companies willing to extract the heat and due to lowered thermal losses recapturing the other goodies along the way. No need to permit the process along the way as it is a purchased commodity instead of a waste.

Thanks for listening.

Ric Evans

By: Tom Casten

Tom Casten — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 18:45:58 +0000

Paul Horbal:

It is seldom feasible to recycle the waste energy from existing central plants for two reasons. First, the amount of waste heat is enormous. The heat vented by the two nuclear plants forty miles north of New York City is sufficient to heat all of Manhattan, but it would be a monstrous job to pipe that heat 40 miles. This is the classic issue. It is difficult to bring the mountain to Mohamed.

The second problem is technical. The heart of a central generation plant is a steam turbine that condenses nearly all of the exhaust to achieve a 33 to 38% conversion efficiency. Combined heat and power plants use different steam turbines that are designed to extract most of the steam before it is condensed. This reduces the amount of fuel energy that becomes electricity, but then uses all of the rejected heat to displace steam from boilers. The CHP plant, if it is sized for the thermal load, can achieve 85% overall efficiency.

The regulators do not reward utilities for efficiency. If a regulated utilitiy increases the efficiency of its generation, all of the savings pass through to the users. But zero percent of the savings does not motivate the utility, and 100% of nothing doesn’t do anything for the user. As long as we base utility rewards on how much cap8tal they deploy, we cannot expect those utilities to focus on efficiency.

Tom

By: Brian Peters

Brian Peters — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:04:40 +0000

I, too, saw Tom Casten’s op-ed in the Detroit Free Press. My observation is that the problem is that we’ve isolated the electricity industry for so long from any competitive pressures that there’s been no willingness to increase efficiency or to attempt innovation.

By: Paul Horbal

Paul Horbal — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:53:51 +0000

Dear Mr. Casten,

I read your op-ed that was printed in the Detroit Free Press yesterday and was greatly intrigued by your claims.

Are you saying that existing power plants can be retro-fitted with the equipment to re-cycle heat, or are you saying that entirely new plants must be built.

Surely, if it was profitable for existing plants to be retro-fitted, they would be lined up outside your door to get the necessary equipment installed.

Sincerely,

Paul Horbal
6060 Candler
Shelby Township, MI 48316