As I sit on the train into London this morning, I see lots of steam rising from small industrial units, the same from the boiler exhausts of houses.
I once heard this called Low Entropy Heat. It’s the waste heat that isn’t quite hot enough to do anything useful – typically it’s water vapour at about 40 degrees.
There are some great stories about how this energy can be harnessed. The iconic steam rising from the streets of New York is the waste heat from electricity generation that is being reused to heat buildings. There was a story about using a data centre to heat a swimming pool on the BBC this week.
We put a lot of energy into heating things – houses, buildings, water. I saw a statistic that said that over half of one motor manufacturer’s energy use was in heating the buildings in which it made cars.
We’ve all be encouraged to turn down the flow temperatures on our boilers, so we are getting use to having homes heated for longer, another potential use of waste heat.
Co-location of the sources and users of this waste heat could save £bns and avoid many millions of tonnes of CO2. Putting the brewer next to the power station, using the (now green) heat from cooling steel to heat homes, data centres heating pools.
This will of course require planning and as we lay out the blueprint for society for the next century, we need to consider how heat and energy flows through our spaces, making the best use of it as it goes, and before it evaporates into the atmosphere.
