The dramatic images of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico serve as a stark reminder that America needs to transition to a new clean energy economy.
It's time for Congress to get serious and enact a bill that will promote cleaner domestic power sources, cut our oil addiction and reduce global warming pollution. Waiting for tomorrow's leaders to solve today's problems will only increase the ultimate costs of tackling this challenge. That's an option America simply can't afford.
For the last 30 years, I have watched America increase our energy dependence and lose our competitive edge, in part because of a grossly inefficient energy system that pollutes our skies and jeopardizes our children's futures. A typical American power plant burns three units of fuel to generate just one unit of power, making its efficiency rating just 33 percent. Most of the waste comes in the form of excess heat that's vented into the atmosphere. Shockingly, this abysmal inefficiency hasn't changed since the days of Sputnik.
Even more energy is wasted in heat-intensive industrial plants, such as metal, glass and cement manufacturers. All this waste means higher pollution, higher energy costs and more jobs shipped overseas.
It doesn't have to be this way.
Manufacturers and power plants that capture and recycle this waste heat, through a process called energy recycling, can double their energy efficiency. Take, for instance, ArcelorMittal's steel plant in East Chicago, Ind. A series of energy recycling projects turn the plant's excess heat into clean electricity and useful steam — making productive use of an energy source that would otherwise be thrown away.
In all, this one steel plant generates more than twice as much clean power as all the grid-connected solar panels in the U.S., saving ArcelorMittal an estimated $100 million a year on its energy bills. Partly as a result of its lower operating costs, this plant has remained open through the worst of the recession.
And yet despite its potential to cut energy costs and greenhouse emissions while preserving manufacturing jobs, energy recycling languishes in the U.S. compared with other countries because of outdated and badly misguided energy policies. Denmark, for example, generates more than half its power through various energy recycling techniques, while the U.S. is stuck in single digits. The result? We need more than twice as much energy as the Danes to produce a dollar's worth of GDP.
The good news is that opportunities for similar efficiency gains abound in the U.S. According to the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a large-scale expansion of cogeneration could provide 20 percent of U.S. generating capacity by 2030, generate $234 billion in new investment, and create nearly 1 million jobs. Such an expansion would also reduce carbon dioxide emissions by more than 800 million tons per year, the equivalent of taking more than half the current U.S. passenger vehicles off the road.
As the ArcelorMittal experience shows, fewer greenhouse emissions don't have to mean fewer jobs. By enacting meaningful clean energy legislation, the federal government can finally unleash a wave of American innovation, cutting our dependence on fossil fuels while we develop both cleaner and cheaper domestic power.
Thomas R. Casten is chairman of Westmont-based Recycled Energy Development (RED) and author of "Turning Off the Heat."
This article originally published at: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-06-23/news/ct-oped-0623-casten-20100623_1_energy-costs-energy-bills-steel-plant