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Originally Posted by aerohead
It's the best thing we have for fossil-fuels.
In Italy they're doing combined heat and power,with mechanical efficiencies up to 90%.
In Denmark,they're boot-strapping home heating onto the waste heat stream and exceeding 90% overall.
Lithium-bromide absorption chillers can be bootstrapped on to get some refrigeration,cool-pools,to augment chilled-water systems.(flat-plate solar can do likewise).
Some industrial planners advocate locating manufacturing at power generation facilities to take advantage of 'free' process heat,pre-heating,drying operations,etc..
Dr.Wyesessions only peeve with natural gas,was the fracking issue,and inadvertent methane release associated with it.
Also,fossil-fuel electric power production is the US' largest water user,exceeding even that of US' agriculture.Evaporative losses for a single-pass,cooling system on a 1-GW unit equals 300,000 gallons an hour,at 83,333 gpm.
No doubt,we'll be using gas into the near future,but ultimately,we've got to get away from all combustion unless we can nail the carbon-capture & sequestration issue at 100%.
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I've always wondered why we're boiling water to generate electricity and just letting it go. Seems more efficient to use the heat directly to provide mechanical force for power generation, and then capture waste heat for other uses.
If water must be boiled, might as well combine it in a desalination process and condenser to create fresh water.