Over at
Bacon's Rebellion, Jim Bacon has an excellent post on "cogeneration as a technology for district heating." Bacon cites
this article, which talks about how cogeneration is used in Copenhagen.
The setup in Copenhagen, created by a regional accord of five mayors in 1984, captures heated water from electricity production that would normally be pumped into the sea, and channels it back into homes and businesses for heating through a 1,300-kilometer system of underground pipes.
The result: 97 percent of the region now gets clean and affordable heating with sharply reduced carbon emissions. The system’s steadily switched from coal to natural gas and biofuels such as straw and wood pellets. Plus, it taps waste heat from incineration plants.
The result: Copenhagen’s individual homeowners save close to $2,000 in yearly utility costs. And the system reduces carbon emissions by hundreds of thousands of tons each year.
Once again, we have a great example of a "win-win-win" energy solution that should be a complete "no brainer" here in the United States. Why isn't it? A lot of reasons, but one of the big ones is that utilities in this country tend to be financially rewarded not for installing elegant, efficient energy technologies like cogeneration (or energy efficiency, aka "negawatts") but for more brute force, inefficient "solutions" such as building more environmentally disastrous coal-fired power plants. Change the incentive structure via
decoupling and other means, and something tells me we'll be getting a lot more cogeneration and other smart (and green) energy solutions that will save us all money (it's $2,000 a year for households in Copenhagen) while slashing fossil fuel use and protecting the environment. What on earth are we waiting for?
