News Brief 4-18-17

"Passion for Energy" Statement

It is an honor to serve on this state wide Florida Engineering Society  Energy subcommittee and I appreciate the warm welcome from chairmen Don Voigt. I have reviewed the various documents that were sent to me and offer my “passion for energy” thoughts. Cogeneration should be used more often, natural gas use should be expanded to all homes where available, solar water heating is very cost effective, Florida needs to improve in energy efficiency, and Florida needs to reduce its carbon footprint.

I am an advocate for cogeneration (combined heat and power) and have designed and constructed many units across the United States and the world including the 40 MW University of Florida “Gator Power” unit where I served as project manager and on site project engineer. Cogeneration at 70% to 85% efficiency is far better than a 35% central unit coal plant.

Natural gas is very efficient, cost effective, and according to Florida Public Utilities  is eligible for rebates as follows…

Solar water heating is also very cost effective and an example calculation is as follows……

Question:
What is the cost of heating water?

Answer:
Calculate the energy required to heat a quantity of water. Calculate the cost of that quantity of energy. Adjust calculations for variables.

As a starting point, assume:

• 20 gallons of water per day
• Entering water temperature is 75°F
• Water is heated to 125°F
• Water weighs 8.34 pounds per gallon
• The specific heat of water is 1 BTU/#°F
• There are 3,413 BTU/hour watt
• There are 1,000 watts in a kilowatt
• Electricity is priced at $0.16 per kWh

The energy required to heat water is given by this equation:

The dollar cost per day to heat the water will be:

$ = $0.39 per day

The annual cost will be:

$ = $142.71 per year

The ten (10) year life cost will be:

$ = $1,427.06

Question:
Rework the above problem and heat the water with natural gas. Now what is the cost?

Answer:
Use the same BTU/day calculated above. Calculate the cost of that quantity of energy. Adjust calculations for variables.

 As a starting point, assume:

• 100,000 BTU per hour is one
• Therm Natural gas is priced at $1.30 per Therm
• As a start ignore the fired heater efficiency which is typically between 85% and 90%

The energy required to heat water is:

Q = 8,340 BTU per day

The dollar cost per day to heat the water will be:

$ = $0.11 per day

The annual cost will be:

 $ = $39.57 per year

The ten (10) year life cost will be:

 $ = $395.73

Question:
Rework the above problem and heat the water with solar energy. Now what is the cost?

Answer:
zero ($0.00)

The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE) has been calculating a national scorecard for ten years now and Florida ranks #25 when compared to other states across six policy areas. The following is a portion of the summary table from the Executive Summary of the 175 page report.

As you can see from table ES1 Florida falls short in all six categories. The most glaring to me is the utility & public benefits programs & policies where Florida scored a 1 on a 20 point scale. It shows that government and utilities are not very interested in energy efficiency. I am also disappointed in the score of 1 on a 4 point scale in the category of combined heat & power. I think there are great opportunities for cogeneration at shopping malls all across the state. They are large consumers of electricity for air conditioning during the peak daylight hours. Install a 5, 10, or 15 MW natural gas fired combustion turbine coupled to an electric generator. Use the exhaust heat to produce low pressure steam to drive absorption chillers. In this way the energy consuming mall becomes electricity producing distributed resource back feeding the distribution system in an area that could use extra resources.

In January 2017 the U.S. Energy Information Administration which is a subset of The United States Department of Energy published “Energy-Related Carbon Dioxide Emissions at the State Level, 2000 – 2014. Florida is the #6 emitter of carbon dioxide at 228.2 million metric tons per year which represents 4.2% of the US total emissions of 5,405. The two largest contributors to the 228.2 total are electric power at 109 MT or 47.8% of the total and transportation at 101 MT or 44.4% of the total. The following Figure 1 is copied from that January 2017 report and shows Florida’s position relative to other states.