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I am old enough to remember heating with coal stoves. Everything you touched had black soot on it. Just imagine what it did breathing it in. My Mom was constantly facing a losing battle trying to clean the house of it.
Oil heat is not much better. Natural Gas is far, far better method of heating, but that won't be creating very many jobs. What point in time do these people want to go back to? 1800's?
Sawdust burners used to be very popular. When I was in college in the 1960s, the whole Oregon State University campus was heated with sawdust generated steam. My dad also had a cousin whose house was heated with a sawdust burning hypocaust. The rise of press board used up a lot of the sawdust that used to be just burned, but wood pellets (pressed from sawdust) are still a popular heating fuel.
That only applies when your growth equals your consumption. Out of curiosity I did some quick calculations on this a few years back and I came up with a forested area the size of California, Alaska and some other state that would need to be managed if you wanted to meet the energy needs of the US with wood.
The USA still needs a method of dealing with the excessive inventory of trees, and we have several times that much area growing trees. Just a couple of years ago we burned 6 million acres of timber in wildfires, and the smoke reduced visibility in the western US to a quarter of a mile for over a month. We really need to get those trees into a high temperature combustion chamber.
There is a large lumber mill about 5 miles from my house that runs entirely on biomass. It's a co-gen facility that uses low pressure steam from the turbine exhaust to run lumber kilns, pellet presses and hardboard presses. Part of the high pressure steam also runs resin stills that extract the adhesive from wood. The residues are burned in the boilers. Excess electricity is sold onto the grid. During the Enron power manipulation in California, they fired up every mothballed mill in Oregon to generate electricity using chipped up junk trees as hog fuel. Waste heat from the turbines can be used to dry the chips.
PGE is looking closely at converting the Boardman coal plant to biomass. They need to come up with a couple million tons of biomass a year. We have plenty of trees to do that, but thanks to federal regulation we can't cut them.
Remember the good old days during the Cold War when we thought the end of the world would be relatively quick and painless (nuclear war) vs slow and painful (global warming)?
Steam is horribly inefficient unless you have a use for waste heat. Any time you see a cooling tower you are looking at lousy planning. Steam locomotives just exhaust the heat. Modern diesel-electric locomotives do the job on only a fraction of the fuel, and now that the old firemen have all died off, a fraction of the labor too.
The waste heat of a steam generating plant could easily heat and light 100 acres of greenhouses through a northern winter. Instead, they throw away heat that could be the difference between profit and closing. Waste heat from power plants used to heat whole cities. It still could, if the energy utilities would pull their head out of their asses and work with city planners. Somebody has to pay for steam tunnels, but after that the heat is essentially free. You would only need cooling towers in the summer, the rest of the time every subdivision resident could pay their heating bill to the power plant, and it would be a small bill. Blowing all that energy off in a cooling tower is monumentally stupid.
Steam is horribly inefficient unless you have a use for waste heat. Any time you see a cooling tower you are looking at lousy planning. Steam locomotives just exhaust the heat. Modern diesel-electric locomotives do the job on only a fraction of the fuel, and now that the old firemen have all died off, a fraction of the labor too.
The waste heat of a steam generating plant could easily heat and light 100 acres of greenhouses through a northern winter. Instead, they throw away heat that could be the difference between profit and closing. Waste heat from power plants used to heat whole cities. It still could, if the energy utilities would pull their head out of their asses and work with city planners. Somebody has to pay for steam tunnels, but after that the heat is essentially free. You would only need cooling towers in the summer, the rest of the time every subdivision resident could pay their heating bill to the power plant, and it would be a small bill. Blowing all that energy off in a cooling tower is monumentally stupid.
Yes, understand that steam powered locomotives (oil or coal fired) are terribly inefficient. Hence my (*LOL*) in post.
Best use for steam far as railroads are concerned is for the generation of electricity that will power locomotives.
Besides being inefficient steam locomotives were a maintenance nightmare, especially those fired by coal. A study was done during WWII (IIRC) that determined at any given time a good majority of the nation's steam locomotives were laid up in shops awaiting repair and or mandated overhaul (literally taking apart and rebuilding). This and or the required "shed days" where a locomotive was taken out of service for a boiler washing and other cleaning.
South African Railways came up with a condensing steam locomotive that in theory (and on paper) was nearly efficient as diesel. In reality however the thing proved a nightmare on other levels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_...Class_25_4-8-4
As for steam generation and district heating; here in NYC we do have that on some scale via Con Edison. That utility provides steam to commercial and large residential buildings for heating, cooling and other purposes. Sadly the idea of district (steam) heating never really caught on in both NYC (it was tried with limited success by the New York Steam Company, then abandoned). Outside of a few other US urban areas the only places with such steam heating systems are large hospital, college and other such campuses.
I say we keep the clean burning coal plants and continue on with research into the better elec battery for elec/hybrid cars and fewer cars on the road. Encourage and give tax breaks to companies that give their employees the option to work at home.
Give families tax breaks to drive efficient cars and to get by with one car per family.
Develop AI driven cars to make carpooling much more practical.
The utility that serves my area just made a big deal out of shutting down two huge, modern coal plants and replacing those gigawatts with wind and solar (pipe dream power).
Now that we have some common sense in Washington, can things like this be headed off? Might be a good time to buy stock in railroads and coal mining.
Coal is a dying industry. Maybe it can be propped up a little longer, but the country, and the world, has moved on, what with progress and all. Natural gas and solar and wind are where it's at, these days. And that's the reality.
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