Undertaken at manufacturing facilities, power plants, and large institutions such as hospitals and universities, it significantly increases efficiency, thereby reducing energy costs and greenhouse gas pollution simultaneously.
When high-temperature heat meets the boiler, steam is produced, which in turn powers a turbine that creates electricity.
Metals, glass, pulp and paper, silicon and other production plants are typical locations where waste heat recovery can be effective.
This elegant approach saves energy - and carbon - in both seasons by recycling summer heat for winter use.
While enhancing the temperature of available renewable thermal energy, heat pumps have the additional property of leveraging electrical power (or in some cases mechanical or thermal power) by using it to extract additional energy from a low quality source (such as seawater, lake water, the ground, the air, or waste heat from a process).
Thermal storage technologies allow heat or cold to be stored for periods of time ranging from hours or overnight to interseasonal, and can involve storage of sensible energy (i.e. by changing the temperature of a medium) or latent energy (i.e. through phase changes of a medium, such between water and slush or ice).
By the early 1900s, regulations emerged to promote rural electrification through the construction of centralized plants managed by regional utilities.
CHP plants proliferated, soon producing about 8 percent of all energy in the U.S.[21] However, the bill left implementation and enforcement up to individual states, resulting in little or nothing being done in many parts of the country.
In 2008 Tom Casten, chairman of Recycled Energy Development, said that "We think we could make about 19 to 20 percent of U.S. electricity with heat that is currently thrown away by industry.
Other large countries, including Germany, Russia, and India, also obtain a much higher share of their energy from decentralized sources.