Guest post by Thomas Fuller
Although I’m a big fan of solar power and think it has a bright future, I must admit that our focus on the Big Three renewable energy sources–solar, wind and biofuels–has been a wasted opportunity, if not a waste of money.
The orientation of our policies to favor the adoption of The Big Three have led to our ignoring proven technologies that could have had an immediate impact and lessened not only our emissions, but reduced our gas bills as well.
The biggest example is with combined heat and power (CHP), also known as cogeneration. Amazingly, this technology that many people have never heard of produces 9% of the world’s primary energy. Here in the States it produces 7% of our energy. But in countries like Finland and Denmark, it produces up to 40% of all energy.
CHP is the simplest idea in the world. A typical power plant producing electricity wastes about 65% of the fuel it burns. CHP plants capture the heat released and put it to good work, heating buildings or even cooling them with the right configuration. It takes the efficiency of the plant from 35% up to as much as 80% in some cases. The very first power plant built in America was a CHP plant, built in New York. Continuing in that tradition, New York’s Con Edison heats 100,000 buildings with district heating powered by CHP.
CHP gets little attention from environmentalists, because it is powered (mostly) by fossil fuels. Most new facilities use natural gas for fuel, but CHP is pretty agnostic about fuel. I say mostly because there are new CHP plants being fueled by wood pellets, which (Ta-da!) makes it renewable.
But we produce less energy today from CHP than we did ten years ago. If we had focused on CHP instead of wind power (which is really starting to annoy me–and a lot of others, I think), and had built our capacity to the level of some Nordic countries, we would already today be close to the level of emission reductions President Obama promised the world we’d reach by 2020. And there’s a whole lot of money we wouldn’t have spent on fuel that we could have spent on other things.
CHP won’t solve all our problems. It is more economically viable in colder regions with expensive energy prices that make the capital investment more attractive, so unless we subsidized it the way we do solar and wind take-up would be slower than ideal. But in the U.S. it is not currently treated like other energy efficiency and renewable energy schemes, with tax breaks and feed-in tariffs and obligated purchases.
So the technology that we know works well, has done wonders in other parts of the world, and could make an immediate difference to our pocketbooks and our emissions is being neglected. While wind turbines are getting more expensive, taking more land and generally turning into a nuisance.
Where are our priorities?
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“which is really starting to annoy me–and a lot of others, I think”
Don’t even think, there are a LOT of people getting annoyed and growing by the day!
Tom asks: “Where are our priorities?”
Haven’t you been listening, Tom? Our — or more correctly those who hold the aces of power — priorities are power and profit.
Should we ever decide our priorities all must rest within the cradle of innovation and efficiency we will surge ahead.
At that point, bring on CHP — until then, just sigh, and vote…
Aargh… sure; maybe protest some, too.
Wait 20 years when they have to be replaced or some “cheaper” technology appears.
Politicians are all big mouths to new technology but when put to the test, they ignore what shoulda or coulda many years later.
There is superior technology on hold for the big green profits many turbines are more profitable than just a few highly efficient ones.
My garbage comes back to me as heat, next year also as electricity.
CHP works economically only with relatively short pipelines (a few kms) because of heat losses and cost of insulation. That results in many more power/heat plants with less economies of scale, but also impact from one brown/black out and possibly less monopolies.
The Greens are so blinded by their fossil fuel fear that they missed this golden old timer.
The USSR used CHP a lot: the Western Greenies don’t know this because they never visited the “workers paradise”, they only praised it to heaven for ideological reasons, not practical ones.
“Three renewable energy sources–solar, wind and biofuels–has been a wasted opportunity, if not a waste of money.”
It is right to ask why there has been an emphasis on those three, and not for example on tidal power, which has the benefit of being highly predictabe in strength and timing, making it particularly suitable for integration with conventional sources.
However, like biofuels, is is geographically dependent, that is not all countries are in a situation to exploit it, and so it may not benefit from global or supra-national initiatives. The EU concentrates on solar and wind because there is something for all regions. Whereas, the huge tidal and ocean current benefits which could be obtained for the UK have no traction in EU politics. What this demonstrates is that relying on international bodies to seek the best solutions, or to allow essential diversity of approaches is likely to miss many good opportunities, and at best is incomplete in its coverage.
In the UK towards the end of the eighties, when there was a switchover from coal-fired power stations to natural gas which could be located in population centres, district heating schemes featured prominently in the plans, but have failed to materialise. Possibly because of inertia, or perhaps in the nineties we were distracted by the apparent need to take immediate action to reduce all carbon power sources, so nobody though it worthwhile to invest in gas power beyond electricity generation. Again, another example of clumsy ‘Big Lever’ concensus governmental thinking overruling practical realites.
This approach has been around for more than a century. The challenge is proximity. You can distribute the electricity over a long distance. Not the recovered heat. The large power plant solution only works in a major metro area with a concentrated need for heat and AC. All of those opportunities have been exploited.
The long term solution is distributed power. Ultimately a unit small enough to support a single home.
I’m a big supporter of IPower Energy Systems (ipoweres.com). They build relatively small units that run on anything from natural gas to swamp gas (at a landfill). I’m convinced their engineers could run them on shoe polish if needed. To date they are cost competitive down to the level of a small office building. A single home unit may not be too far off.
OT,
How global warming is aiding – and frustrating – archaeologists.
From hunting gear to shoes, ancient artefacts once covered by ice are being unearthed in Norway. Now scientists face a race against time to preserve them
Archaeologists have gained an unexpected benefit from global warming. They have discovered melting ice sheets and glaciers are exposing ancient artefacts that had been covered with thick layers of ice for millennia.
A perfect example is provided at Juvfonna in Norway, where reindeer hunting gear used by the Vikings’ ancestors has been found littering the ground as the front edge of Juvfonna’s ice sheet has retreated. A section more than 60ft wide has disappeared over the course of 12 months, exposing several hundred artefacts. “It’s like a time machine… the ice has not been this SMALL FOR MANY, MANY CENTURIES says Lars Piloe, the Dane heading a team of “snow patch archaeologists”.
The discoveries are providing new insights into the behaviour of our ancestors – but they come at a price. So rapid is the rise in global temperatures, and so great is the rate of disintegration of the world’s glaciers, that archaeologists risk losing precious relics freed from the icy tombs. Wood rots in a few years once freed from ice while rarer feathers used on arrows, wool or leather, CRUMBLE TO DUST IN DAYS unless stored in a freezer. As a result, archaeologists are racing against time to find and save these newly exposed wonders.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/sep/26/global-warming-ancient-artefacts
So the present is the warmest in a thousand years.
Of course, you conveniently forget to mention that those same Nordic countries are also pretty much blanketed in wind turbines. To say that we should look at these clever Scandinavians, who concentrate on real solutions instead of wasting time with windmills, is rather disingenuous at best.
CHP has plenty of downsides that you cheerfully ignore. For CHP microgeneration, the capital cost is prohibitive for most home-owners and a complete show-stopper for tenants/landlords. For larger scale projects, CHP only works in areas with large, high-density populations adjacent to the power generation facility. This is why it works much better in most of Europe than in the USA. Sure, there are large, high-density populations in the US, like New York City, which… oh, already has CHP.
CHP is also basically useless in central America, Africa, Australia, South-East Asia etc. where there is not a large need for heating energy.
It’s my understanding cogeneration is profitable already in cold climates – that the payback for plant improvement falls within industry norms, and that in new construction CHP contributes to the bottom line from day one. If that is correct, then what’s called for is a push from Public Service Commissions, and not inducements or subsidies.
This is a pretty inconsistent view on energy. It suggests to be an assessment of alternative energy sources but instead focusses on efficiency rather than alternatives.
Heat transport in the form of hot water or steam requires extensive investments in infrastructure and the energy bill of the housholds supplied is no longer controllable by them as the fixed cost is dominant in the total bill. Both the energy plant kettle and the heat distribution scaling needs to cover the deep of winter heating requirements whereas the distribution infrastructure will be idle a large portion of the year. It may be a good solution if you want to get some higher value energy (power) when heating is the primary objective (e.g. tropical swimming pool), it is a very poor solution in most other cases. Common sense observation that combined heat power couplings are not popular should have hinted the author to this conclusion.
The real problem with CHP is that it doesn’t provide any clear path to political power. For that reason alone the enviro-left will never be interested. It’s just something those dirty capitalists do.
I wonder why we don’t do this more, Though district heating doesn’t work so great in Russia, many colleges do this. wind is a waste of money and biofuels are questionable, why is so little being done with geothermal?
Just a couple of comments on CHP. Air conditioning systems can be run completely on steam, from the vacuum chiller to the steam coil re-heater and the pumps. As a result, you can use a central steam plant to temperature control buildings, as is done for many large buildings. The challenge is to develop inexpensive systems for smaller commercial buildings and homes.
Steam can travel very large distances with minmal losses, if the lines are sized correctly. If you think about supplying the buildings in New York, you realize that there are miles of steam lines required to reach all of them. Insulation is important and maintenance of the insulation is also key.
There are several technologies for converting municipal waste to fuel gas to run turbines with steam generators for efficient CHP systems. These need more attention as they do not produce the pollution issues that come with standard incinerators.
The real story: There are lots of options but the greens and the media are invested in the pretty, new technoligies, not the real engineering solutions.
If you don’t do CHP, it even heats the environment, since the wasted heat just goes into the atmosphere. I’ve tried to search for papers quantifying this, but haven’t found anything interesting…
And about wind power, just check out the trailer for “Windfall”. I’ve put it in a post in my blog: http://ecotretas.blogspot.com/2010/09/windfall.html Pretty impressive what small town folks can do against the big ones!
Ecotretas
As is mentioned, there is a great deal of waste heat in the generation of electricity. If you live in a cold climate and live close to a power plant, there is the opportunity to use this heat to warm houses and and buildings.
Power plants use as much of this heat as possible to preheat the water for before it is heated in the boilers. What this means is that the temperature of this waste heat is relatively low. This poses the problem of finding uses of the low temperature heat in close proximity of the power plant. The economics of buying the right of ways for the hot water pipes, building and maintaining the pipes, and finding a buyer to pay for it all is usually not practical.
Where it is, go for it.
I am still curious how the laws of physics get violated by “renewable energy” … It sounds like you are getting something for nothing, the perfect warmist argument, when nothing is farther from the truth.
If we only switched to renewable ethanol, all would be fine … Blah
There is no such thing as renewable energy, once the coal is burnt, the wood is burnt, the ethanol burnt, the sunlight is used, the renewable energy has to be made from something, it has to come from somewhere … Energy does not renew. And then the solar panel quits working … or the windmill explodes.
I have yet to see a cornstalk, once turned into ethanol, renew itself. No one wants to talk production and maintenance costs, it’s as if solar panels grow in the fields, windmills appear from their unicorn masters, and are maintained and kept working by gnomes from the black forests.
A little tongue and cheek, but don’t get sucked into the myth, that things like batteries recharge magically from the wall socket and require no external energy to do so. Or they are picked from “battery trees” instead of manufacturer in energy consuming factories. It’s an easy trap to fall into, work play …
Not meant as critical of the author …
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/mar/31/tidal.power
Now we have descended to sewage levels!. No need to do it as there is a lot of methane production everywhere, specially at the bottom of the oceans.
Another advantage is air quality, combustion always produces pollutants, smoke and ashes, which are more effectivly taken care of in a CHP plant.
Wind and solar are both a waste of resources given the power return. Biofuel is good for methane generation provided biowaste is used. To tear down rainforest to grow a monoculture of oil palms is a crime against the earth let alone humanity. Any land cleared from forest must be used for food production. The problem with biowaste is that the quantities required may not be available in the right place at the right time for efficient use on a very large scale. Small scale plants are in use now in the UK by enterprising farmers.
Under the right circumstances cogen systems have a very good investment pay-back time without subsidies. University campuses are good examples, best performance usually when power gen/heating and AC are combined.
Installed systems:
http://www.cogeneration.net/collegecogenlist.htm
One problem with co-generation ironically is a cooling requirement that may consume large amounts of water. In one case that I know of, the option ultimately was rejected because it would have drawn over a third of the aquifer’s normal daily capacity. Local stakeholders felt, perhaps too strongly, that the draw down would threaten other current and projected demands. For co-generation, siting is a crucial factor.
Neil Jones, Nice link re tidal power. You need also to read the telegraph report on Thanet Wind Farm. There are sad similarities. Look at those fan blades. Look at the empty space between them, very inefficient. only the tips really generate power. The tidal “inverted fans” also refers to a gear box, more energy losses.
These can be so much more efficient but the makers, Corporations for Power and Control are not interested. Most buck for the bang with least effort seems to be their motto.
There is hope, I have seen designs that generate 100MW from the same footprint as a 1mw wind tower. Now that is really cool.
The discussion should simply be on efficiency. If more efficient energy sources are developed, or if current resources can be used more efficiently, then everybody profits. I’d like to see a market solution to the energy wasting current technologies, if we can stop the (*&@ur momisugly()*& subsidies, we can get there. Co-generation is just one of a number of possibilities. Subsidies distort the market, cause mis-allocation of scarce resources, and burden productive enterprises and individuals. That is the very definition of inefficiency.