Where's the Efficiency?

Efficient Energy Source?


The world is waiting for new technologies, for photovoltaics to be built into the design of houses and buisnesses, for infrared rays to charge up our offices even overnight, heck for a modified pea plant to power us to the moon, but as we wait climate changes are happening at rates that scare many science minded people.


Jim Hansen, a senior climate expert at NASA has recently announced his belief that we have no more than perhaps a decade to reduce greehouse gases if we are to avoid toppling a disasterous climate threshold. If you don't belive him perhaps you can look to the Inuits and shipping capatains in the Antarctic where ice blocks are splitting increasing the speed of of thinning of sea ice, the melting of glaciers, the thawing of permafrost. All this activity has led native villages to erode into the sea causing their relocation and has put a smile on the shipping industry as the glacial thinning has opened new shipping lanes. Sea ice has decresased 8% in the Arctic.


We as a global society cannot wait and wait and wait....For the past 45 years, the power industry in the US has been stuck operating at a 33% efficiency rate.



To take a look at what some entrepreneurs have done in the US, we can look at Tom Casten, CEO of Primary Energy Ventures. They specialize in a new (and unfortunately not growing rapidly enough) field of large scale energy recycling and cogeneration. This is a process where existing facilities use waste energy to produce heat or electricity called "combined heat and power" or CHP. These efficiency designs are being recognized as successful solutions that can help slow climate change if adopted on a widescale while new technologies are developed and implemented.


The science being utilized here is pretty straightforward, energy recycling captures the heat that otherwise becomes a byproduct of industry. In Erope where energy costs are more expensive, it is common for excess manufacturing steam to heat local homes. Denmark, the Netherland and Finland produce more than 1/3 their electricity from CHP, currently in the US we are at 9%. India has had major success in implementing cogeneration technologies, notably in their sugar cane mills which burn the bagasse (leftover sugar cane).

The technology works and the profits from such a system are real as well. Casten's company calculates that it saves 2 million tons of CO2 per year in the US alone. According to ecologists, that like planting 1.5 million trees or removing 400,000 cars off the road. His company also generates more than $80 million a year in revenue.

Recently in the US, Casten has proposed the Fossil Fuel Efficiency Standard, a federal law which would eliminate the $25 billion in government subsidies afforded to the fossil fuel industries. This could be a major push in deregulating the electric industry while ratcheting up regulations yearly for stricter energy efficiency standards. The EPA supports such industrial techniques and they should be widely considered especially in urban areas where industry is constructed alongside housing options. While energy and CO2 relaease is a growing problem, new solutions to increase efficiency have to be taken seriosuly, especially when economically they make a lot of sense to implement.