The Dirty Energy Solution

By Bill McKibben, Orion Magazine. Posted November 27, 2007.

From his desk in an office in Chicago, Jeff Smith has a bird's-eye view of the American landscape. Combing through a huge database of information compiled by the EPA, he can, almost literally, peer down every smokestack in the nation and figure out what's going on inside.

And what he sees is heat. Waste heat -- one of the country's largest potential sources of power, pouring up out of those smokestacks. If it could be recycled into electricity, that heat would generate immense amounts of power without our having to burn any new fossil fuels. By immense, I mean, speaking technically, humongous. Even after he's winnowed the nation's half a million smokestacks down to the most likely customers, that leaves twenty-five thousand stacks. "An astronomical number," Smith says.

His boss at Recycled Energy Development, Sean Casten, leafs through the reams of data Smith has compiled. The biggest sources of waste heat are some gas turbines used to generate power, but there are endless other examples. "Let's look at Florida," he says. "Here's a Maxwell House coffee roaster in Duval County. They're roasting beans, so all that heat has to go somewhere. About twelve megawatts' worth of potential electricity is going up the stack."

Casten could take the equipment he sells, a "waste-heat recovery boiler," and stick it on top of the stack. "Basically, there's a network of tubes with water in them. The heat would hit one side of it, produce steam, and we'd use that to turn a turbine and generate electricity. It's like any other boiler, just without a flame, because the heat is already there."

Does that sound suspiciously pie-in-the-sky? Casten can drive a few miles from his Chicago office to an East Chicago plant run by Mittal Steel. A few years ago, a predecessor energy-recycling company installed this kind of equipment on the smokestacks of the plant's coke ovens. In 2004, this single steel plant generated roughly the same amount of clean energy as was produced by all of the grid-connected solar collectors throughout the world.

Casten's company estimates that recycling waste heat from factories alone could produce 14 percent of the electric power the U.S. now uses. If you took much the same approach to electric generating stations you could, says Casten, conceivably produce the same amount of energy we use now with half the fossil fuel.

Let's cut the numbers in half to account for corporate enthusiasm. Hell, let's cut them in half again. You're still talking about one of the most effective ways to cut carbon emissions that we've got, a mature technology ready to go. You're talking about a recycling project infinitely more important than all that paper we've been bundling and glass we've been rinsing for the last two decades.

Why isn't it happening everywhere? The first answer, says Casten, is that very few companies spend much time thinking about their waste heat. "How much time do you think about the useful things you could be doing with your urine?" asks Casten. "The guy at the coffee roaster is spending all day focused on roasting coffee beans so they taste good."

In a perfectly rational market, however, lots of players would see that heat disappearing up the stack, realize they're watching hundred-dollar bills spewing into the atmosphere, and set up businesses like Casten's to try and harvest it. It's not exactly simple -- you need to understand how much heat each plant generates, how it varies day by day, how corrosive the other gases in the stack are, and so forth, but it's no harder than a million other technical feats that a million other companies perform every day. No harder, for instance, than singeing a coffee bean to produce a robust and roasty blend. The obstacle lies in the phrase "perfectly rational market." Electricity is essentially the opposite, a heavily regulated semi-monopoly where many of the laws work to protect the profits of utilities, and where, if you deregulate carelessly, you end up with fiascos like Enron's calculated bludgeoning of California's ratepayers.

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Bill McKibben is the author of 10 books, most recently Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont.

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