What's Your Energy Future Look Like?

Some parties are blowing smoke to try to come up with a post also.

The last plant I worked at (a steel mill) the section I managed consumed 55 to 75 mW of power - the overall complex consumption was in the 350 mW range.

We used waste heat recovery - good business.

Did we install wind turbines? No - That is a lot of wind turbines that are intermittent producers of power.

WTF is 'waste wind'? High-performance motors? Like Ferrari maybe?

The poster really should try to write posts where they have some minimal amount of knowledge.

"Waste wind" I suppose means curtailed wind: the energy that goes to waste when wind power can't be used. In 2010, curtailed wind amounted to 25 TWh of energy wasted. Curtailment of wind is to be expected because wind is most available at night, when there is lots of spinning reserve and power is cheap. In the spring, when there is lots of hydro, wind goes to waste. Were it not for the compulsory purchase of expensive wind power, the curtailed wind figure would be much higher. Given the fact that most wind power is at night, it is hard to see how wind could ever be a serious unsubsidized player in the power market. Better to use this wasted wind to do some other job where the intermittent energy could be stored in flywheels, like grinding things, pumping things, or cracking CO2 by shear electrolysis.

About 2/3 of the energy in the fuel for thermal power plants gets wasted as latent heat in vapor discharged to the atmosphere, which is a serious waste of fresh water and of energy. Power harvesting from turbine exhaust steam looks like a big opportunity, especially if wet cooling could be minimized by making the steam lose enthalpy doing work. See http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7987677.pdf

In this case 'waste wind' seems to be more like some fruitcake green phrase of the moment.

Very few processes are of the type you turn on only when there is excess power available. To justify the investment it normally takes a 7/24 business - ammonia was a topic a couple of years back for this point but it was a red herring.

Any new power plant surely has heat recovery where they bring the exhaust temperature down close to the acid dew point - you are going to improve on that?

due to the standardization the energy future look bright and it often need to the best practice throgh the standards,iso standards,din standards.