Jeff St. John | December 11, 2008 at 10:26 AM 3 Comments

DOE Calls CHP a Big Fat Target for Energy Savings

Forget solar panels on every rooftop. How about a combined heat-and-power system in one out of every five factories instead?

When it comes to low-hanging energy efficiency fruit, capturing the heat wasted by the industrial sector and turning it into electricity is a huge apple ripe for the plucking.

At least that’s what a new report from the U.S. Department of Energy says. The roughly 9 percent of U.S. factories that now use these so-called combined heat and power, or CHP systems (also known as cogeneration systems) produced about 506 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2006 — about 12 percent of the power consumed that year, the report says.

That was enough to save the country 1.9 quadrillion British thermal units (quads) of fuel used to make electricity — about 2 percent of the nation’s total appetite. One BTU equals the energy of one burning match — multiply it by a quadrillion, and you’ve got about the same amount of energy that is contained in 8 billion gallons of gasoline.

But if 20 percent of U.S. industrial facilities were to install CHP systems by 2030, that energy savings would grow to 5.3 billion BTUs, about half the power U.S. households now consume, according to DOE’s report.

That would also reduce carbon dioxide emissions by about 850 million tons a year, or the equivalent of taking 154 million cars off the road, Doug Kaempf, program manager for DOE’s Industrial Technologies Program, said Thursday in a presentation for the Virtual Energy Forum.

“If you’re talking one technology that could do this, this is amazing,� Kaempf said during the online event featuring live video discussions of green technology business and research leaders.

There’s plenty of waste heat to go around. Arun Majumdar, the Almy and Agnes Maynard professor of mechanical engineering at University of California at Berkeley, estimates that up to 60 percent of the 100 quads of energy the U.S. consumer per year is wasted as heat (see Tapping America's Secret Power Source).

Cogeneration systems aren’t necessarily that complex, Kaempf added. Retrofitting an existing plant is “very easy.�

Still, a buildout of the scope DOE contemplates could generate $234 billion in new investments and create nearly 1 million new jobs, he said.

Because cogeneration systems generate electricity where it’s consumed, they’re also more efficient than shipping electricity from power plants to customers, he said.

Making electricity where it’s used “very well could help grid congestion — and it helps energy security,� he added. After all, it’s harder for would-be saboteurs to blow up a hundred factory turbines than one big power plant.