A New Feature

I've decided a new feature of this blog will linking to interesting articles that I read accompanied by a brief summary by yours truly. First up:

"Heat Is Power. Let's Stop Throwing It Away!" by Thomas Blakeslee

Summary: Just about everything we do when producing electricity and using vehicles creates lots of wasted heat. Coal-fired power plants and nuclear facilities have huge cooling towers and our cars have cooling systems. That heat represents wasted energy. In fact, coal-fire power plants only use 1/3 of the power from the coal and the rest is sent up the cooling tower. I was told by the bike mechanic that only 4% of the energy in gasoline goes to moving the person down the road and the other 96% moves the car, breaks wind, overcomes friction, etc. The author concludes that we could drastically improve our energy efficiency by using all that wasted heat.

Apparently government policies do not encourage efficiency, but as energy prices rise and technology improves, use of wasted heat becomes more economically viable. The bottom line: wasted heat in the form of hot water and steam should be used to heat buildings and turn turbines that create electricity. Makes sense to me!