Untapped Energy Market: Waste Heat

If you’re not familiar with the term waste heat recovery it is, in short, exactly what it sounds like: capturing heat from exhaust as a source of energy.

The World Watch Institute recently ran an article called Clean Energy’s Best-Kept Secret that highlighted the fact that most heat energy, from smokestacks in particular, is wasted.

Implementing heat recovery strategies is an efficient way to conserve energy and boost the bottom line. Heat-recycling equipment has a short payback, shorter than solar or other renewable energy systems.

The WWI points out that even if just a tenth of the smokestacks in the US were fitted with equipment to capture waste heat the amount of energy created would equal half of what’s produced by US nuclear power plants.

That’s a lot of energy.

And it’s not just for heating. Recycled heat can produce steam, spin a turbine and produce electricity. The process is efficient and pretty simple. Waste heat recovery can be used on any scale from residential to big industry. In fact, I was recently discussing this possibility for a client in a small residential project.

WWI mentioned several companies on the forefront of this market including Recycled Energy Development (RED), Cain Industries and GTS Energy, Inc - all of them working to advance waste heat recovery in the United States.

In other countries, like Germany, waste heat recovery is built in to the infrastructure. Düsseldorf’s Energy Efficient Stadttor Gate, a high tech commercial building along the city’s main artery, uses recaptured heat energy from an electrical plant upriver on the Rhine.