Recycling the heat that spews from industrial smokestacks may be
one of the biggest opportunities for reducing greenhouse gas
emissions, yet not many climate-savvy entrepreneurs are aware of
it. When it comes to energy conservation, "[b]y and large, the
world ignores the biggest, single most cost-effective, most
profitable thing to do, which is recycle the energy that we're
wasting," says Thomas Casten, chairman of the Illinois-based
company Recycled Energy Development (RED). Of the 500,000
smokestacks in the United States, the 47,500 stacks that produce
waste heat above 260 degrees Celsius (500 degrees Fahrenheit)
could produce at least 50,000 megawatts of power, says Casten.
That's almost half the energy produced by the U. S. nuclear
fleet, he notes. Companies like RED and its competitors, Cain
Industries and GTS Energy, Inc., all work to help develop waste
heat recovery in the United States. RED retrofits smokestacks
with "waste-heat recovery boilers" that use the stack's heat to
produce steam to spin a tu