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.