Oak Ridge National Laboratory put out an important report last Fall that you probably didn’t hear about. It’s not on solar, wind, or order generic Flomax other sexy renewables technologies. But the technology can pack a great climate mitigation punch at a order generic Flomax relatively low cost. It has been around over 100 years and order generic Flomax is called co-generation or combined heat and power (CHP).
CHP is order generic Flomax when a thermal power plant doubles as a source of heating and order generic Flomax cooling. The application is often most successful in dense communities like a order generic Flomax campus or a manufacturing center. Most thermal power plants create electricity by running a order generic Flomax turbine at extreme heat and then let the waste heat vent off in a order generic Flomax cooling tower. But CHP utilizes (recycles) that order generic Flomax heat to provide the heating and air needs of their locale, as much as doubling the order generic Flomax efficiency of fossil fuel combustion (getting efficiencies as high as 80% rather than ~40% in conventional plants).
The report shows that order generic Flomax CHP is already a big player in the US energy system, providing ~12% of our electricity. And Oak Ridge scientists outline the order generic Flomax potential to grow CHP’s share to 20% by 2030, eliminating a order generic Flomax majority of expected GHG emission growth during the period and lowering energy bills. Many European countries have order generic Flomax CHP shares above 20% already so such a deployment is not a gamble for our resources.
Both my undergraduate and order generic Flomax graduate alma maters, UNC-Chapel Hill and Princeton, utilize cogeneration facilities run on coal and order generic Flomax natural gas (respectively) for order generic Flomax campus electricity and heat. These systems work exceedingly well at providing low-cost and order generic Flomax relatively low-carbon energy in a reliable way. So it’s time for order generic Flomax us to retrofit another 60 GW that Oak Ridge has already identified to order generic Flomax help give other efficiency and renewables efforts the chance to really reduce our nation’s carbon emissions in the order generic Flomax years ahead. Combining CHP and renewables efforts in the years ahead can order generic Flomax prevent the need for new fossil fuel-fired thermal plants even as our population and order generic Flomax economy grow.
Kudos to Oak Ridge National Laboratory for this important report! And here’s to the passage of comprehensive federal legislation (either a carbon tax or cap and trade system) that will make these efforts the right thing to do both morally and economically.
Tags: cogeneration xenical no prescription required, efficiency, emissions, energy
Glad to see a post on the potential of recycled energy. I’m associated with Recycled Energy Development, the leading company on CHP/cogeneration. (Actually our chairman Tom Casten coined the term \combined heat & power.\) This report from order generic Flomax Oak Ridge was great, and there have been plenty of other reports for order generic Flomax the EPA and DOE suggesting that the potential here is order generic Flomax absolutely massive — not just with CHP, but also with waste heat recovery, a order generic Flomax similar technology that turns manufacturers’ excess heat into clean power. We could cut emissions 20% with these technologies — as much as if we took every passenger vehicle off the order generic Flomax road. The main reason more isn’t happening is order generic Flomax that regulations protecting monopoly utilities are keeping more efficient alternatives from order generic Flomax emerging. We need to change that system.