Discuss: The Unsung Solution

Ahh, recycling. This is a great idea [and practice] as long as it doesn’t evolve into an excuse for not cleaning up emissions or preventing their needless discharge in the first place.

As the article alludes, the barrier to selling small [or perhaps in this case not so small]scale home or factory generated power is small but large-technical problems are absent and the choke point is physically small, but the utility industry guarding the gate quite large and well connected.

Germany of course has had an excellent system in place for a number of years paying small scale producers quite well for their power understanding the environmental and economic benefits and security this provides as well as avoided capital costs. Here in the US, it’s relatively easy to get a grid tie or net metering sysytem for what alternative power you produce but for the most part what you produce is only credited [and only to a point] against what you use from the utitily. There is no incentive to actually build a system that could easily produce a surplus of power.

But meanwhile, as I heard on the radio a couple of days ago as the TVA readies a second nuke plant option-let’s throw another 50 billion dollar subsidy at nuclear power [and where goes the waste?]-while coal enjoys a resurgence-just proving the point that we can be counted on to take the most obviously harmful causes of action pretty much every time.

Oy!

Good article on turning smokestack heat into lighting.
How do we get past the zero-sum equation? 30 years ago, power utility districts north of Seattle were already subsidising ceiling and wall insulation to slow power demand. Happy economists will find ways to manage grid or tax incentives toward solutions.
As Ed Friedman suggests, Germany is a good place to look for precedents on recycling heat. The US should also see that Europe deems biodiesel from canola (Raps) as cleaner motor fuel than ethanol from corn.

Great idea in the short term and one that will help give us time to address the implications of peaking oil and other fossil fuels.  Considering that our oil has. or is in the process of peaking. and that natural gas is not far behind, shouldn’t we also be looking at how we are using our resources?  We need to make a transition from these finite, dwindling and less viable energy sources and, we need enough time and resources to bridge the gap.  I don’t see the point of using a diminishing energy resource to make a cheap plastic toy that will break within an hour of purchase and be thrown into landfill, just for the sake of making a few pennies.  The more durable our manufactured goods are, the less pennies each of us will have to generate to buy more, whereby eliminating the necessity for bloated paypackets supported by built in obsolesence in the first place.

Great article, Mr. McKibben. I live in Pohang, South Korea, and my apartment complex is heated by the heat generated at the Pohang Iron and Steel Company’s plant several miles away.

another good overview by mckibben.  why haven’t I ever heard of this before now?

All that pressuring...to try and get private utilities to do what we need them to do....problem is, power generation and distribution needs to be in the direct hands of the public and not in for-profit private hands...We don’t need profiteering middle men in the production of those goods and services that are needed broadly and easily monopolized and oligopolized…

I just forwarded relevant sections of this to my ol’ pal, Sandman the Rappin’ Cowboy [rappincowboy.com] in the hopes that he’ll get to work on the sitchiation, ya’ll.

Relevant="there aren’t any good songs about waste-heat-recovery boilers”

Q: what songs about solar panels and windmills are there?

Casten asks, “How much time do you think about the useful things you could be doing with your urine?”

I’d say that I spend, on average, about seven hours a day thinking about my urine. Does that make me weird?