WASTED HEAT.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 3143, 22 March 1909, Page 4

WASTED HEAT.

Some interesting facts have recently transpired in England in regard to the intrinsic value of heat at present allowed to go to waste. A conservative estimate places the value of heat-energy wasted in the United Kingdom at £50,000,000 per annum —a sum sufficient to provide a respectable number of Dreadnoughts. Striking confirmation uf the contention is supplied by the fact that a generating station which produces 3,000 h.p. of electrical energy derived entirely Irom waste heat has been started to work at Crook, County Durham. It appears that, apart from the waste in factories, the blast furnace and coke ovens of Britain alone produce heat equivalent to about half a trillion horse-power. On the northeast coast alone, according to a recent paper read before the Iron and Steel Institute, they emit waste heat equal to 200,000 h.p. night and day. In this particular locality, however, a solution of the difficulty presented by the large and continuous loss of heat-energy appears to have been reached, for there the district is covered by a network of mains belonging to the great electric power companies. These mains supply electric power to the railways, shipyards, collieries, etc., throughout the district, thus enabling the nominal owner of waste heat tu turn it to profitable account, as apparently all that he requires to do is to transform it into electric power at the point of wastage and whisk it away twenty or thirty miles to where there is a demand for its assistance. The waste gasas are used instead of fuel to raise steam in water tube boilers, and steam driving, a turbine, which in turn drives a dynamo, and the electric power thus produced is turned into the mains of the big cower companies. All parts of Britain, however, have not been seized of the same practical notion of turning an otherwise waste product to profitable account. An expert engineer computes the amount of coal burned in Britain at the prodigious ■ total of 167,0u0,000 tons per annum, and of this amount he estimates that at least the virtue of half is lost in the process of burning. Not only is England wasting her carboniferous substance with a prodigal hand, but she is contributing to the wealth of fogs that annually envelopes the "tight little island."