On April 25, 00:52 JST, Jim Torson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Here's a very interesting article posted on Joe Romm's blog that
> I encourage everybody to read. Wasting energy is bad for
> the economy.
I think that co-generation is a good thing as far as we need some
amount of electricity. If the demand of real benefit of energy use
does not change, the technology reduces consumption of primary energy
resources. Also it shifts the discussion of where, and at what
magnitude, electric power should be produced: To supply steam (or
something else that contain useful heat), the power plants need to be
located near the consumer.
But the word in the title, "recycled energy", is a kind of misnomer.
If we use the physical term "energy" properly, energy is always
recycled. But not all the energy is equally useful. If we use
another physical term, energy with lower entropy is more useful than
energy with higher entropy. Just for a more intuitive metaphor, I say
"high grade vs. low grade" of energy instead of "low entropy vs. high
entropy". We utilize the cascade of energy from high grade to low
grade. Resources of high grade energy is limited, and some of them
such as fossil fuel and uranium are not sustainable. So we should try
to live on smaller amount of cascading energy flow. Often we waste
energy resources in the sense that some parts of the cascading flow
are not utilized yet. Technology like co-generation attempts to tap
as many parts of the cascading flow as possible.
Ko-1 M. (Kooiti Masuda)
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