green washing dirty laundry — my love affair w CHP continues.

So several weeks ago, while doing laundry across the street from my apartment, I tried speaking w the Chinese owners about an Idea.  The idea of using his natural gas to generate electricity before running the dryers.  His english was not so good and my mandarin was non-existent.  He thought I was trying to sell him something.  He thought it was a scam.  He said electricity was too expensive so how could he make it.  He said he already had a private natural gas contract.  He basically flipped me away w his hand.

But hold on.  I live across the street from a pharmacy, a pizza shop, a chinese joint, and a grocery store loaded with refrigerators.  And of course, a laundry and drycleaner that doesn’t seem to do any of its own drycleaning.

Not only that, there are a ton of residential buildings.  And the laundramat is open from 7am to 8pm, hitting both the morning and evening residential peak loads.

Here is the basic flaw in logic.  People know that generating heat from natural gas is >80% efficient.  So why make electricity?  well, bc electricity is being made elsewhere at 35% efficiency and wasting heat all over the place.  What is so great about the stores across the street from my apartment, is that they have diverse energy needs, not all complementary, but certainly, my laudremat would make more money selling its natural gas fueled electricity to its neighbors than burning straight w my 4 quarters to dry my clothes for 28 minutes.

Combined Heat and Power (CHP) is appropriate in certain circumstances and city laundry would be one of them.  (Say nothing of the fact that CO2 IS the organic dry-cleaning solvent and why organic drycleaning makes me crazy that it is more expensive – so wouldn’t it be neat if someone captured the exhaust CO2 and compressed it into liquid form to make the solvent).

Good News!  This weekend, I spoke w Llew Wells of Living City Block… an initiative to develop a green neighborhood in the dirtiest community in the 5 borroughs.  He said there was a gigantic laundry facility in the middle of their target block… NYC is going to have CHP and it’s going to be SMART and Very clean.  My kind of green washing.

Combined Heat and Power and Distributed Generation

Combined Heat and Power (CHP) is my favorite energy solution.

Large scale electric generation is most often a huge waste of energy resources.  Electric generation needs a kind of energy intensity to spin a turbine to spin an electron flow and as a result roughly half the input BTU’s are released as ‘waste’ heat.  Heat is not a bad thing, the problem is, we often site plants in rural areas where the heat is not used. Second, moving the electron stream over powerlines, another 15% of the input BTUs are lost as friction on the line.  That means, when you plug in an appliance to your wall socket, your one unit of energy pulled required 3 units to make.

There are roughly 60 centralized, large-scale power plants in NYS (coal, hydro, natural gas, nuclear) and we are part of a national grid system where we push and pull electricity to and from VT, NJ, PA and Canada across massive powerlines.  That is why, a plant failure in Ohio can cause a brown-out in NY– the inter-state flow was crippled and the demand drained the system.

However, there are wonderful examples of systems that use the waste heat and reduce the losses to the grid lines.  In addition these examples begin building a distributed generation system. Distributed generation is a move away from a few centralized large scale plant toward developing lots of smaller plants along the grid.  Distributed generation diversifies the larger system, making the whole system less vulnerable to human or technical failure, terrorist attack or natural disaster.  That is, distributed generation is a diversified portfolio of scale (small to large), type (hydro to nuclear), timing (daylight solar capture to variable wind patterns) and location (near biomass resources, near particular energy demands) of energy generation.

CHP as part of a distributed generation is generally smaller scale but sized appropriate to the local demands so the electricity and heat are used thus reducing grid friction losses and waste heat losses.  Using the co-products from electricity,  CHP transforms 35% efficient systems to more than 80% for well-designed systems (that means our finite natural resources go twice as far, a great ROI both financially, ethically, and environmentally).

Ex. 1.  Cornell University CHP.  Cornell has just recently moved from a coal based CHP to a natural gas based CHP in order to reduce it’s greenhouse gas footprint.  They generate electricity as the co-product based on the univeristy need for heat. That is, there is little waste heat, bc the plant is scaled to cull the highly priced electricity off the top and direct the ‘waste’ heat to warm campus through a maze of steam tunnels across campus.  Unlike most electric generation in NYS which is only 35% efficient, the Cornell plant is ~80% efficient as the ‘waste’ heat is used on campus and the electricity is used on campus reducing the grid line friction losses.

Ex. 2.  Boston University was heating a gigantic swimming pool.  Heat generation is 80-90% efficient – so why bother putting in CHP?  Well, bc there is waste heat generated all over the place in order to produced electricity.  Why not localized that waste heat at a swimming pool and earn money from the high value electricity.  I believe, BU, is actually making money from their electricity (savings or sales) while they heat their swimming pool.

Ex. 3.  Lyonsdale Biomass in Lyons Falls NY is a wood biomass powerplant that used to be a CHP system.  That is their waste heat used to go to a pulp plant across the way to dry the paper that was being produced.  It is unclear to me why this stopped, but the paper plant is now using natural gas heat and I’m throroughly bummed.  What kind of economic, political, or technical hang-up is involved in this regression of logic?

Ex. 4.  East River Electric Generating Station on 14th St in NYC uses natural gas to generate a large portion of NYC’s electricity, and a lot of the waste heat (no I don’t know how much) is used by neighboring businesses and buildings.

NYC Marathon and horsepower.

Last year was the first time I watched a marathon.  I was glib about it, but my mom was visiting, a friend was running, so it all came together and I said, Why not?  Turns out, it made me cry.  In my 1-block area at mile 6, hundreds of people all came out to support the runners.  Runners who had been preparing their muscles, nursing their knees and tendons for months, were now pushing the limits of their being, physically and emotionally.  But that is not what made me cry.  What made me cry, is that the by-standers weren’t just cheering for their one friend, they were cheering everyone on.  I was cheering everyone on. We were invested not only in the success of total strangers, but in their earnest desire to try to meet a personal challenge. If I had seen 10 runners, I would have been non-plussed.  There were 10s of 1000s of runners and even more supporters.  This was real.  Those people were not stuck in some cubicle pushing paper and toner around, they were pursuing something very personal.  En masse, I saw the freedom and willfulness of choiceful agency I long to see daily.

In the background of this experience I noted –with a kind of perverse glee — that the Brooklyn Queens expressway was backed up with traffic.  With all their promise of power, speed and freedom, those 1 and 2-ton EnergyIntensiveSteelAndPlasticGhouls spewing carbon dioxide were at a standstill;  this year’s marathon winner averaged ~13 miles per hour.

This summer, I was home in NH and I went to our famous country fair to watch the horse-pulls – teams of 2 horses collectively weighing less than 3300 lbs.  The winning team pulled 10,900 lbs loaded on a ~6′x10′ sheet of metal across packed dirt (I refused to watch the ox pull bc they incentivize the ox by pulling a nose-ring; the winning ox team pulled 12,600 lbs!).  Including their own body weight, the horses carried more than 14,000 lbs or 7 tons.   Watching their loins is the stuff of legends.  It’s great design.  It’s powerful.  It’s erotic.  The horses prance off – seemingly proud of their accomplishment- when untethered from the massive load.

According to wiki, “horsepower is the name of several units of measurement of power. The most common definitions equal ~750 watts. Horsepower was originally defined to compare the output of steam engines with the power of draft horses in continuous operation. The unit was widely adopted to measure the output of piston engines, turbines, electric motors, and other machinery.”

The 2012 Toyota Hybrid Camry boasts its “engine produces 156 horsepower”.  Yes, horses are slower, but horses eat hay.  And not only that, hay grown in the summer and stored in sheds during the non-photosynthetic months.  Like their own personal canning-closet, horses garner calories from high cellulose food that the biochemistry and fauna in our intestinal track can’t even begin to digest.  Years of bleak access to dead grass buried under the snow, has built layers of efficiency mechanisms to make them survive winters and run up to 55mph at their peak.

Humans can run 27mph, but neither horses nor humans can sustain the speed the way the internal combustion engine can.  But it all comes down to how one defines efficiency.  Efficient use of time or efficient use of resources.  How fast one accomplishes work, or how sustainable?  Over thousands of years of evolution (aka biological invention and innovation conjured by the persistent and notorious scientist named Time), horses and man have evolved incredibly efficient systems to capture and thrive on real-time photosynthetic energy.  Cars are neanderthals dragging their knuckles.

Now I am very American and I do love a car ride, but in general driving is overrated and ecologically insane.  I’m certainly not anti-design or anti-machine. The fastest man has gone 83mph (Sam Whittingham) and the fastest woman has gone 75mph (Barbara Bursford) with a regular bicycle on a paved surface.

A human on a bicycle is pure evolutionary genius.  It’s hot.