At 11:25 PM 2/5/2003, Marc Perdue wrote:
>One other note about heaters that David didn't mention, for those of you
>concerned about the environment and squandering of resources (oh wait, we
>drive
>big old gas-guzzling vehicles...), is that for every unit of electricity that
>you convert completely to heat, a seemingly 100% efficient operation, 3 units
>of some other fuel source are required to create it.  In other words, even if
>you convert all the electricity to heat, you're still only operating at 33 1/3

I was going to let that lie... <g>  The thing is that the numbers are
getting better.  Modern-technology power plants co-generating steam with
recovered heat from the stack gases can achieve something astonishing --
close to 90% total energy recovery IIRC.  Unfortunately the Federal
regulatory structure, at least as it was when I was reading an article on
this a few years ago, actually discourages this sort of investment because
of the greatly differing requirements for new plant as opposed to
maintenance and improvements on old plant.  And when smaller outfits (MIT
was a case study in this article) want to build efficient cogenerating
facilities for internal operation they still need to have peak  and
emergency capacity available from the utilities -- which often charge so
much merely to keep the hookup active (and of course to maintain the peak
capacity they need) that the brilliant economic win becomes a net loss and
the plant doesn't get built.  So in practice the average conversion
efficiency is still down in the 35% region...but it doesn't have to be.

david

--
David Beierl - Providence RI USA -- http://pws.prserv.net/synergy/Vanagon/
'84 Westy "Dutiful Passage"
'85 GL "Poor Relation"