Wind and solar have been made to appear expensive by their competitors.  

It is a poison pill.  Don't eat the red pill.

The EPA has conservatively estimated that there are 65 GW (65 million kW) of power that could be produced in this country from presently wasted energy.  These include lots of waste heat recovery at industrials (think of the flares on top of some factories, where waste products are incinerated in EPA-mandated flares - these are throwing off heat that gets thrown into the environment, but could be recovered to make power), numerous opportunity fuels (paper mills make "black liquor" as a byproduct of removing fiber from wood) and lots of pressure recovery options (steam and gas distribution pipelines are overpressurized to save on distribution costs, and the energy recoverable from the expansion of that pressure is dissipated).  

None of these opportunities would pass an existing definition of renewable energy, and yet they are all vastly cheaper than conventional options.  They are also just as clean as conventional renewables, since all could be converted into electricity with no marginal fuel consumption.  

In fact, they can be even cleaner.  Consider the flare example - the process of moving the combustion of those gases from an external flare to an internal steam boiler reduces overall NOx an particulate emissions because it is inherently cleaner to burn these species in a controlled environment.  Or to take a personal example, we worked on a project in a steel mill recovering pressure drop in an existing steam flow.  Because their steam was made from flare gas - and because any flare gas that didn't make steam had to go to expensive, EPA-mandated pollution controls - they had a very strong bias towards INEFFICIENT steam use, to divert as much gas as possible from their flares.  By tightening up their steam network, we were able to find an opportunity for 10 MW of power generation that wouldn't have otherwise existed.  The example is far more common than you would think - and never incentivized by RPS policy (although some rules in CT, PA and NV do get it partially right).

And to put 65 GW in perspective, our entire national fleet of nuclear power is about 100 GW.  If we cast an RPS as a goal, we would expedite the deployment of all these sources.

But these are not the only options. Lots of jurisdictions have regular fights about what gets included in an RPS, not all of which are flawed.  For example, Massachusetts wrote their RPS such that biomass only counts if it is burned in an "advanced combustion device", widely interpreted to mean gasification.  The law made assumptions about the maturity of that technology that were flawed, which caused lots of MA biomass to get shipped up to Maine where it would be eligible for use in more robust technologies.  So we burn fuel in ships to move fuel to another market with a slightly different definition.  Dumb!  To their credit, MA is now changing this law, but it took 10 years - during which time we have ever-more-firmly established the renewables-are-expensive belief.  Put it as a goal and the markets will respond much more quickly.  Had MA fixed this sooner, we would have seen more carbon reduction sooner and lower energy costs.  Which is hardly a bad thing.

One final point - energy getting cheaper is only an ecological disaster if there are ecological costs per unit of energy consumption.  But energy getting more expensive is an economic cost no matter what happens.  Be careful what you wish for.

No need to assume renewable energy is more expensive.  The demand for wind in Texas has surpassed the supply, wind machines are back ordered.

RPS should include conservation/storage as well.  For instance a system that operates with internet over the power grid that turns on appliances like freezers that can operate in off peak or whenever wind and solar peaks to store cold for the whole 24 hour cycle.

Your freezer need only run a few minutes per day in offpeak, instead of running and running all day long.  Add in water heating, home heating/cooling (with geothermal), plugin vehicles, and every device in home, business, and factory....and..

This new combination of conservation with storage applied across an internet enabled grid could make large scale storage or backup generation for wind and solar unecessary.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

...is that 2/3rds of the energy of centralized electrical generation is wasted at the generating plant.  Keep emphasizing that, because clearing that up would reduce greatly reduce the need for coal/nuclear plants.

Also, to what extent is manufacturing already using their waste heat?  Are there any readily available stats on that?  The reason I'm asking is that most people seem to think that industry uses most of the electricity, when it fact it's more like a third, but to get it down to something sustainable -- that would be doable with solar/wind, say - it would be critical to use waste heat, particularly in the big electricity users in industry, metallurgy, chemicals, and paper.

The point Colin made about making electricity cheaper is partly the Jevons paradox, that as you make things more efficient, the use goes up and you don't wind up saving anything (or much).  Look at cars over the last 30 years, instead of using more efficient engines to increase mileage per gallon, they have been used to make more powerful cars -- even the small ones.  If, on the other hand, all electrical generation is coming from something environmentally benign, such as solar or wind, then increased electricity use would not be harmful.  But if fuels were being made, it would tear up the planet because of the growth of biofuels.  So I think some combination of on site generation, using waste heat, and wind/solar/geothermal is the long-term goal, while we use what's left of coal to construct that infrastructure (hopefully efficient use of coal, that is -- although I'd still like to get rid of coal as fast as possible).

This discussion was about cogenerating power with industrial waste heat.  

A larger and less costly form of cogeneration is making industrial process heat from the rejected heat of power generation.  

The best ROI is using waste industrial heat for low-grade building heat and hot water.  Sweden recovers low-grade industrial waste heat and distributes the heat city-wide via district heating.  They also store summer waste heat for winter distribution.  

District cooling is another application of waste heat using absorption chilling technology.

Compared to bread and money, our social understanding of energy is not well developed.

And too often overlooked.  A manufacturing plant will focus on their core competency before putting money into their energy islands.  Good managers tell their employees to preferentially deploy limited capital on core assets, so that a paper manufacturer will put a million dollars into a new paper machine with a 15% return before they put the same million into a boiler upgrade with a 30% return.  The general rule of thumb in the energy efficiency crowd is that industrials won't put their own money to work on energy efficiency unless they can get a simple payback of 2 years or less - but even this is over-optimistic in my experience, because that still assumes unlimited resources.  The real test becomes 2 year payback, but only if I have the money, and only if I don't have a core investment I'd rather put money in.  Bottom line is that there are lots of waste heat opportunities in industrials. Our company estimates about $350 billion worth, which could serve 20% of total US power generation.  (This includes cogen as well, so it is not pure waste heat recovery, but all is at least 2x as efficent as the grid.)

Cars are a little bit of an awkward comparison with electric because the prices are so skewed. From a purely economic perspective, current gasoline prices really don't provide much incentive to conserve.  The average american drives about 15,000 miles/year, so at 25 mpg and $3/gallon, that's $1800/year on fuel.  Doubling fuel economy therefore only saves $900/year.  Let's assume people will treat this as worthwhile at a 3 year payback or better (aggressive, given the above, but will prove my point).  This means that you're not likely to pay more than 3 x $900 = $2700 more for a car with twice the fuel economy - and that's at $3 gas!  This isn't to say that there are non-economic reasons for investing in more efficient vehicles, but note the comparison to electricity.  

Average US power prices are about 7 cents/kWh.  So  let's assume I can save 3 cents/kWh (quite reasonable) with a more efficient and/or cheaper fuel (e.g., renewable) generator.  Assume also that my generator runs for 7000 hours per year, or about 80% of the time.  This saves me $210 per installed kilowatt of capacity.  My same 3 year payback now requires that my investment costs me less than $630/kW, which is quite attainable with a whole host of generating technologies, and is ridiculously easy to hit with lots of efficiency investments (better lightbulbs, etc.)  

A part of the reason for the disparity is chronically subsidized oil costs (your income taxes pay for Persian Gulf escapades after all, not the price at the pump), but also just capacity factor.  Most of the hours of the year, your car isn't running, but a generator or efficiency investment can be sized to just about always run.  (Solar is another story on this, and part of the reason why the economics on solar is so hard.)  More hours of operation per year = more savings per year.

In any event, I don't hink your Jevon's paradox holds in electricity.  If my electricity generation efficiency goes up, it doesn't encourage me to leave the lights on longer or buy bigger bulbs.  I just save money.  

Absolutely spot on.  Denmark is an even better example, as they made it their mission to site new power plants near where people live, and size to thermal loads.  Result is that Denmark now generates almost half their power from cogen (compare to 9% in the US) and uses 1/2 as much energy per dollar of GDP as we do.

...that is an enormous amount, and a very important figure to use.  So is that half of manufacturing use of electricity?  I'm doing some research too, but it indicates that the manufacturing sector could be supported on a much lower electricity output.  Thanks again, I really apprectiate the information.

...of having a 2 year time span leads to a wider discussion of the decline of manufacturing in this country, which has been partly destroyed by a desire to hit quarterly targets and forget about long-term considerations.  I wonder if Europe and Japan are as short-sighted?  Also, if manufacturing did come back to this country (another area of research of mine), it would also increase electricty use, but that is certainly hypothetical at this point.  My own research indicates that something like half of the manufactured goods we use in this country come from abroad, so there is alot of room for expanding manufacturing.

The estimate is based on DOE and EPA analyses of total potential for cogen and recycled (e.g., power from wasted energy recovery).  Includes lots of manufacturing, but also smaller scale potential in commercial settings (hotels, etc.) and a fair amount of institutional potential (colleges, hospitals, prisons).  The bulk of the recycled though is industrial to some degree.  (I say "to some degree" because one big opportunity is waste heat recovery from natural gas compressor stations that are about every ~100 miles throughout the gas distribution system, and each has the potential to produce in the neighborhood of 5 MW from the waste heat they reject.)

There is a good management reason why they won't invest in less than 2 year payback - they focus on what they know.  Suppose you were running a hospital and someone came to you with an option to improve patient care and another person came to you with a hot stock tip.  Both cost the same, but the stock tip appears to have a greater return. Which do you do?  Good managers focus on the business they know first, and energy is no different.  

It does, however, suggest that the assumption underlying the entire GHG-reduction-is-too-expensive worldview (namely "if you could make money at this, someone would have done so already") is flawed.