Energy isn’t merely an enabler of things. In a real sense it is the thing itself. The flow of electricity, the digestion of food, the extraction of metal from ore: Energy is perpetually being consumed, transformed and put to new use.
Figure 1. A power plant in Manhattan supplies both electricity and steam heat to customers of ConEdison, the descendant of Thomas Edison’s company from the late 1800s. It’s one of the few municipal systems in the United States that still uses its byproduct waste heat for a purpose. Most electrical generation now happens in locations far removed from end users, so heat is simply vented to the air. Figuring out how to recycle this heat back into electrical generation or other useful purposes would go a long way toward improving the efficiency of the energy conversion process in the U.S. Several other countries are also markedly ahead of the U.S. in the use of combined heat-and-power generation.
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