"Opening the grid to competition is one of the more important steps to take if we’re serious about reducing fossil-fuel use and carbon emissions, yet no one’s talking about doing that. Democratic legislators are nervous about creating incentives for cleaner, cheaper generation that may also benefit nuclear power. Neither party wants to do the dirty work of shutting down old, wasteful generators. And of course the Enron debacle looms over everything.
Technocratic changes to the grid and to industrial plants don’t easily capture the imagination. Recycling industrial energy is a solution that looks, well, gray, not green. Steel plants, coated with rust, grime, and a century’s worth of effluvia, do not make for inspiring photos. Yet Casten, pointing to the 16 heat-recycling contraptions that sit on top of the coke ovens at the East Chicago steel plant, notes that in 2004 they produced as much clean energy as all the grid-connected solar panels in the world. Green power may pay great dividends years from now. Gray power, if we would embrace it, is a realistic goal for today."
Lisa Margonelli is a fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank, just published in paperback.
Related article, "The Unsung Solution," by Bill McKibben
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