Template:Casten Aug-07

From Lauraibm

Full article: Interview with Thomas Casten (13-Aug-07)

Factories and power plants are wasting energy. If it could be captured and put to good use, greenhouse gas emissions could be substantially reduced, at a profit. 38% of U.S. CO₂ comes from the generation of electricity -- a bigger percentage than transportation or anything else -- and that number is growing.

While electricity travels relatively economically through the wires -- you lose 9 percent of it on average -- heat takes about seven times as much energy to travel. So if you've got a power plant located 50 miles from Seattle, there is no economic way to move the waste heat from that power plant to downtown Seattle. By moving the power local, he's maybe 85% efficient.

It is cheaper per kilowatt capacity to build a generating plant 100 miles out of Seattle than in downtown Seattle. Expensive real estate, tight spaces, difficult to be small scale. But that's absolutely the wrong question. You don't care. What you care about is how much capital it will cost to deliver a new kilowatt to you.

Let's say you're building a new apartment building, and it's going to be new electric load on the system; it's going to need 10 megawatts. The question is: how much capital are we going to spend to generate and deliver 10 megawatts to that apartment house? Well, it turns out that the wires, the distribution, the transmission, the substations, and the auxiliary equipment you need cost more than the central plant.

So local power costs less capital. It also uses half the fuel. It also puts out half or less of the pollution. It's also far less vulnerable to extreme weather and terrorists than central stations.