Engaging Energy

This one is a bit convoluted, but bear with me I wouldn’t type it all out just to annoy you.

Heat is an up and coming issue in the UK, specifically what to do with all that waste industrial heat from power stations and steel plants (if there are any left). Excess domestic heat can be dealt with by just opening the windows, or if you want to be super hi-tech pumping it into liquid or solid storage, but try that with the excess heat from even a modest power station and you’d end up standing in a pool of magma. What you really need is a set of complimentary large-scale parasitic industries that need large amounts of heat (almost) all day (almost) every day.

Apologies to proponents of domestic heating grids, but I don’t see the point of digging up the roads and changing everyone’s central heating system, if you can use the heat as efficiently in industry or agriculture. You are increasing resource use not decreasing it and I like to be able to control the heating in my house. I assume that everyone does, which means that we will all use the heat at the same time or not. Where does it go when ‘not’ is the majority thought ? The overall aim is surely, most efficient use of energy on a country-sized scale, which makes commercial or industrial use of waste heat much more preferable, especially since factories don’t care about the view and can be located next to the heat source on land that is cheap and nasty.

Here are some possibles, most of which turn out to have been mentioned before, but hey, in for a penny;
Industrial laundry – Got a few hospitals, hotels and army barracks that don’t need ‘special fabric conditioner’ ? Well, you most likely also have a full-time laundry. Its hot, it uses heat, it produces heat. Hitching these up to a waste heat system seems like a no-brainer. You have to factor in transport to and from the site to make sure that its actually a more efficient use of energy, but that happens all the time anyway.
Server Farms – what ? Don’t they need coolth rather than warmth ? Well yes, but any heat difference can be converted to the opposite heat difference with a bit of fancy thermodynamic engineering, you just can’t do it with 100% efficiency. Not only are server farms big electrical power consumers, so the shorter the cable run to them the better, but they also require large amounts of refrigeration. Instead of using electricity to power that refrigeration why not use waste heat from the local power plant. Don’t spend a million on PV so that you can tell your shareholders that you provide enough to do the server room lighting, spend it re-locating next to a power plant and knock holes in your energy budget. Or if you simply have to be somewhere else warm your own and neighboring buildings with excess heat from servers.
Greenhouses – worried about food security, food miles, invasive species, pesticide use, water consumption, whatever floats your boat really. The world of agriculture is a lot more controllable under glass. With waste heat you can heat or cool a set of glasshouses, collect & store the rainwater and you can control the humidity, exercise some degree of hygiene and you can keep more of the beasties off your cabbages. You’ll still need fertilizers and pesticides, but since they are not getting wsahed straight into the local river you need less. More to the point you can produce much more food locally over a larger portion of the year. No energy other than waste heat required.
Fish farms – along the same lines. UK fish stocks are said to be struggling. World fish stocks are said to be plummeting. I have no idea whether that is true, all I know is that whenever I’ve cast a hook over the side for mackerel I have never failed to catch my dinner. But I don’t do it very often and I’ve noticed that cod is not always alone on the menu in the chip shop these days. Anyway…..
On the shores of Lake Victoria the fishermen prize the tilapia. Its a nice looking fish with firm, white, tasty flesh. Its great fried whole, but will take the same range of flavours as a sea fish like a bass. They are freshwater, algae feeding, quick growing and easy to ‘domesticate’. They are an ideal farming fish as far as I can tell as a non-pescitorialist. They just won’t breed at a water temperature of less that 30C.
Again the food security, food miles argument comes in, but it also has a conservation element since we aren’t munching on sea-caught, wild stocks. Just a word of warning though, the tilapia that you can buy in the local UK supermarket are a farmed cousin of the tilapia nilensis that is hooked out of Lake Victoria. Its still tasty, but just not quite as nice, and a bit smaller. Maybe that’s wild vs farmed I don’t know.
You would have to do this fish farming in covered ponds with good circulation but, again, nothing but waste heat required. You could even float some aquaculture on the top of the ponds so as to grow the fishes food on-site and maybe take a crop from (I’m thinking of something like corriander with fibrous roots), but that’s only guesswork.

Other industrial-scale heat sinks
Food processing factories – all those cook-chill ready meals are prepared somewhere.
Ceramics – from tiles to toilet bowls, they all have drying facilities and large kilns that could benefit from pre-heating
Swimming pools and leisure centres – or indeed any large spaces that are heated year round like
Airports – heated runway ? well, terminal buildings anyway
Shopping Centres, hospitals, large office complexes.

Basically what I’m saying is, keep those damn heat pipes out of my house ! There’s plenty of other places to shove them before you get to me. If you want to include them in new developments that’s fine, I can decide to move into one or not, but my house is my home is my castle is my cave is my den. I don’t let just anyone in. Don’t even get me started on smart meters !
That sounds crazy but I’m only joking a little. The whole retrofit and external influence on home life is a serious issue and one that often gets forgotten in a blizzard of techno fixes and macro economics. Energy services are there to make life better. If the downsides outweigh the upsides don’t do it.