The Department of Energy wants America's manufacturing and information technology sectors to do more with less energy, and it's directing $256 million in stimulus package grants to help out.
The funding announced Monday includes $50 million for projects that can lead to more energy efficient IT and communication technology, and another $50 million for developing advanced materials for clean energy technologies and energy-intensive processes.
But the biggest chunk is $156 million for projects to install combined heat and power systems, waste energy recovery systems and more efficient industrial equipment. The grants will be aimed at projects that can improve efficiency and control costs in both industrial and residential settings, the DOE announced.
Combined heat and power, also known as cogeneration, means capturing heat that's otherwise wasted in industrial processes or other arenas to generate more power. Waste heat recovery means capturing wasted heat to feed other processes such as making low-pressure steam or heating buildings.
It's little surprise that DOE would direct grants toward such projects, given that it sees combined heat and power (CHP) as a huge low-hanging energy efficiency fruit. According to a December report, the roughly 9 percent of American factories that had CHP systems in 2006 produced about 500 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, or about 12 percent of all the power consumed that year.
Growing the number of factories using CHP to 20 percent could save the same amount of power that's used by half the households in the country today, reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by about 850 million tons per year, the report found.
Making it happen also could generate $234 billion in new investments and create nearly one million jobs, making it a prime stimulus target, the report found (see DOE calls CHP a Big Fat Target for Energy Savings).
Waste heat may be as unavoidable as the laws of thermodynamics, but that doesn't mean it can't be captured in some way. According to Arun Majumdar, the Almy and Agnes Maynard professor of mechanical engineering at University of California at Berkeley, up to 60 percent of the energy the U.S. consumes per year is wasted as heat (see Tapping America's Secret Power Source).
As for the $50 million for more energy efficient IT and communications equipment, that will stimulate investments already underway. Data centers, for one, are struggling to find more energy-efficient equipment to meet the growing costs and constraints of power supplies (see Symantec Report: Green IT Now 'Essential Item' and Will Energy Accelerate the Computer Refresh Cycle?).
