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Week of 30 May 2016: A flight of fantasy--wild and crazy energy ideas

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As we wrap up energy month, let's look at some completely kooky ideas for saving energy. The naysayers will have their negative comments, but keep in mind what looks kooky now may be the greatest thing in just a few years. After all, if a mere two hundred years ago had you tried to speculate on humankind's harnessing and use of electricity coming in just a couple of centuries, you would have been labeled a complete nut-job.

So, here we go. Since these are wild ideas, we are free to ignore economics and just present concepts. We'll leave it to the serious folks who see a grain of logic in these to quietly make them economical once the laughter dies down.

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First idea--it has always driven me crazy how much energy and water we exhaust out of dryer sections. Conventional wisdom says blow it to the atmosphere--it is not worth saving or it is not practical to save. However, what if we were able to run these exhaust streams through some sort of exhauster and then bubble the resulting high pressure, moisture laden stream through stock tanks? We could use the mechanical energy in the stream to replace agitators, we could use the thermal energy in the stream to heat the water, and at the same time we could condense and save all that moisture, bubbling out a fairly dry and cool stream of spent air. Sort of a giant bong, if you will, for those of you familiar with "wacky tobacky."

Second idea--turbines' and air compressors' locations. I have always thought turbines and air compressors should be located in such a manner that the air that passes through the building in which they are located is pushed into the paper machine building. This idea could be particularly valuable in cooler climates where much of the year building make up air is heated. Turbines and air compressors, despite cooling systems, still release a lot of heat to the atmosphere. Save this heat and push it into space you are already heating. It may not be much, but it is worthwhile to save this heat rather than exhausting it to the atmosphere.

Third idea--incoming water lines and outgoing effluent lines. This idea will work best with recycled mills which purchase water and discharge their effluent back to a municipal system. Do this--build these systems with concentric pipes starting near the public source and coming into the mill. In the outer pipe, bring in the water supply and in the center pipe send out the effluent. The idea is to pull as much heat out of the effluent as possible, for you have just made a counterflow heat exchanger out of the entire system. If this system runs for a half a mile, you have a very nice heat exchanger capable of extracting a lot of heat from the effluent system.

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Fourth idea--build tanks underground. When I promoted this with the Light Green Machine Institute crowd few years ago, I received a lot of pushback, for they were worried about detecting and repairing leaks. However, this will save a lot of heat lost through side walls. Further, the tanks can be fairly cheap (think of "gunnite" swimming pools).

All four of the above ideas have one basic theme--let's keep the heat we have paid for and not just blow it off to the atmosphere or export it to some water treatment system. They are all relatively small ideas, but taken together, they could add up to significant energy savings.

What do you think? Do you have any wild ideas? Please take our quiz for the week here.

For safety this week, the more we can keep humans away from hot surfaces, the better our safety record will be.

Be safe and we will talk next week.

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