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For Release Sunday, December 13, 2009
© 2009 Washington Post Writers Group

Copenhagen isn’t just host to the global climate summit this month. The Danish capital offers proof positive of a way to reduce greenhouse gases: build a district heating system.

The setup in Copenhagen, created by a regional accord of five mayors in 1984, captures heated water from electricity production that would normally be pumped into the sea, and channels it back into homes and businesses for heating through a 1,300-kilometer system of underground pipes.

The result: 97 percent of the region now gets clean and affordable heating with sharply reduced carbon emissions. The system’s steadily switched from coal to natural gas and biofuels such as straw and wood pellets. Plus, it taps waste heat from incineration plants.

The result: Copenhagen’s individual homeowners save close to $2,000 in yearly utility costs. And the system reduces carbon emissions by hundreds of thousands of tons each year.

District heating qualifies as an “invented-in-America, exploited elsewhere” phenomena. Birdsill Holly, a Lockport, N.Y.-businessman and visionary, initiated the world’s first district system, with steam pipes, in the 1870s. Systems proliferated around America to a peak of about 150 in 1909–but then tapered off as oil and gas for individual buildings became cheap and plentiful.

But some visionaries fought the trend. A prime example: George Latimer, St. Paul’s mayor (1976-1990) who pushed his city to initiate a full district heating system that now serves 185 downtown buildings. Shifting over time from coal to wood waste (and solar soon), St. Paul’s system is registering significant carbon reductions.

Across the nation, some campuses and industrial complexes employ district heating, and some $156 million was appropriated for new projects in the recovery stimulus bill Congress passed last winter. Among them: Seattle Steam, a 115-year old company that provides steam heat to some 200 office buildings, hospitals, hotels and college campuses in and near downtown. Helped along by a $19 million Department of Energy grant, it will construct a gas-powered energy turbine to produce electricity and steam simultaneously.

To heat its 6-million square foot development for athletes during the 2010 Olympics, Vancouver is going further down the conservation path by tapping the heat in raw sewage water (through a series of compressors and condensers). It’s the first system of its kind in North America, emulating an example set by Oslo.

To meet ambitious carbon saving goals in Portland, Ore., the city and private developers are looking into a thermal plant, to supply heat for the downtown area, using waste beer mash as its fuel.

In one form or another, 9 percent of the nation’s total electric power capacity comes from combined heat and power facilities. Yet if we moved up to 20 percent by 2030, according to Department of Energy estimates, we could avoid 60 percent of the projected growth in the country’s carbon dioxide emissions. And in the process potentially generate 1 million new jobs and $234 billion in new investments.

So what’s missing in the United States–Why are our efforts in these directions so infrequent, so scattered? Why can’t we generate several hundred Copenhagen-style regional energy accords?

Part of the problem, to be sure, is lack of imagination and our tone-deafness even when we hear of smart innovations elsewhere around the world.

Then there’s a money barrier, too. New systems, with their extensive underground transmission pipes, do not come cheap. It seems easier to just hook on with the local utility, even if the long-term savings of district heat and power–in dollars and carbon reductions–could be immense.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) suggests earmarking 2 percent of the revenues from auctioning emissions permits under the currently debated global warming legislation to support installation of efficient thermal systems. Cities, towns, schools, hospitals, universities, even such federal facilities as military bases, would all be eligible.

Big government intervention? You could call it that. But as surely as the Erie Canal and first transcontinental railway, we need federal incentives to promote future prosperity–and in our time, climate safety.

The district systems with their underground pipes won’t be as attractive for the kind of spread-out housing locations we Americans have built so heavily since the 1950s. For them, there’s now a prospect of “mini thermal stations” in homeowners’ own basements.

How? Again, light from Europe. The German firm Lichtblick (“glimmer of hope”) seems on the verge of an accord with Volkswagen, adopting the same type of natural gas powered units used in VW Golf models. The engines’ highly intelligent design, Business Week-Europe reports, could achieve an energy factor of 94 percent–contrasted to 30-40 percent energy efficiency of a nuclear power plant, or 40-60 percent in modern gas-fired plants.

How can we afford to wait? These are the kinds innovations, in a perilous 21st century, that Americans need to embrace–now, not off sometime in the future.

(Sources for more background: “Heating the ‘Hood,” by Linda Baker, Planning (American Planning Assn., December 2009, and Wikipedia entry.)

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