BeGreen said:
Odd how the rest of the advanced industrialized world is already on the path toward figuring a lot of this out, yet we want to dispute it and keep our sacred temples in place.
Not at all, I guess I was being unclear. I think we DO need to to do better, but I think calling the heat from a heat engine 'waste' is misleading, sorry. IF we leave a light on when we leave the house, or a door open in the winter, that is waste. We can get rid of that by a simple change of behavior, or a light timer or a door closing spring.
I was just pointing out that the biggest slices of the 'waste' on the chart is, curiously, those same sectors where the primary energy is being poured into heat engines to make electricity and spin our wheels....looking at the chart 46 out of 64 quads of waste. How much is thermodynamically required? When 'we' decided to build our economy on heat engines those 'losses' were baked in. They are not the result of some plant engineer or auto engineer being negligent, the eff of both turbines and IC engines has not been ignored for the last 100 years. We can make IC engines that are 25% more thermodynamically eff playing with temp and air ratio, reducing that bad waste, but they will pour out NOX (and wear out faster). When it gets cheaper to save the gas and capture the NOX, that tech is sitting on the table for rollout by the auto companies.
I know this was not your intent, but can we march down to the local power plant with pitchforks and tell them to stop 'wasting' 67% of the primary energy they burn to furnish us with juice? Can we demand our auto companies stop 'wasting' 75% in the engines of the cars we buy? Lets all shake our fists at thermodynamics.
To address this waste we all could...
--use co-gen electricity on our combustion devices, either large scale (district heating in cities) or small scale (cogen elec heaters in your basement).
--decide as a country we want to keep coal plants idle wen possible and gas turbines spinning, rather than the reverse we do currently. This is just a choice we make, which is rooted in antiquated habits and the misinformed idea that coal is 'cheap' (externalized costs not included properly). We could do this tomorrow and cut that electricity waste heat (and CO2) a lot.
--switch our elec supplier (if possible). If you live in a state with coal fed utilities, you could change your elec supplier for one that sells green or low-carbon juice by using hydro/wind/gas. You might pay a small premium, but those sources put comparatively little into that 'waste' stream. As a PA resident, I felt it was my duty to do this--I pay a premium. In quebec or the PNW, I suspect you can skip this step.
OR we could reduce our 'energy services'. You know, buy a smaller car or drive less (with an engine that prob still makes a similar proportion of waste heat)
Yeah, I guess thats my point--if we look only at this chart, it makes 'waste' look like something that is happening somewhere else, in a power plant, in an engine, and is not the consequence of our choices and actions--those are 'services', such a benign word. A question, look at 'residential', only 20% of the primary energy delivered to our homes is wasted....we rock! We are doing waaay better than those elec plants and nerdy auto engineers. I guess we don't need to do anything--turn up the AC and I'll sleep under a nice cozy blanket. I'm sorry, but in my opinion ALL of the BTUs we use to heat our homes are 'waste', not just the 20-30% we send up the flue (likely used in this chart). ALL of it. we could live n passive houses and get rid of it, almost ALL of it. It is waste, but this chart calls it a 'service' so its not bad.
Sorry you touched a nerve beeg. I think these charts confuse the issues a lot more than they help. The same approach is used to say that 'wind produces less than 1% of nation's total energy', when in fact it is >3% of total US electricity output, and thus _displaces_ 6-9% of primary fossil BTUs input to that sector! But that was a rant in an earlier thread. In other words, is it helpful that the 'wind input' goes through the box with the 67% waste cut? Does 67% of the elec produced by a wind turbine end up as waste, or is the 67% an average over the industry that obscures the smaller contribution to the waste made by renewable energy...hmmmm?