In the modern world, a reliable energy supply is essential for everything from agriculture to manufacturing to communications.
Tapping into powerful, portable, and flexible sources of energy from fossil fuels was a central part of what made the industrial revolutions of the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries possible, but the emissions from these fossil fuels are now driving runaway climate change that threatens the very economies industrialism made possible.
Facing these threats means switching to more renewable energy sources, but it also means finding more efficient ways to generate, store, and use energy.
For this reason, energy capture, storage, and recovery has become an important dimension in fighting for a more sustainable energy future. Using energy more efficiently means using less energy overall, and investing in tools and technologies for energy capture is one of the best short-term steps the manufacturing and agricultural sectors can take.
Waste Not, Want Not: The Principles Behind Energy Capture
As anyone familiar with the law of conservation of energy knows, energy cannot be created or destroyed, but only transformed or transferred from one object to another.
When drying processed solids being used for plastics production, for example, the chemical energy latent in oil to heat air. Some of that energy will go into drying the plastics, and the rest of it will be dispersed into the atmosphere.
Energy capture is about making sure that as much of that energy is stored for future use as possible. This often requires a sophisticated mix of technologies, as hot air is not readily useful for other industrial processes.
For example, one of the key energy capture solutions used in the manufacturing industry recycles waste energy from cooker vapours, hot oil, and sub-cooling condensate using next-generation heat exchanger technology that uses sand and ceramics to trap heat for future use.
These modern heat exchangers are incredibly efficient, using as much as ninety percent less energy than traditional heat exchangers, which also contributes to reducing the overall carbon footprint of a manufacturing plant.
Energy Capture an Essential Aspect for Feasible Wind and Solar
In a ground breaking interactive story published late in 2018, The New York Times broke down electricity generation state-by-state to show where the nation’s power is coming from.
Many Americans were surprised to see that, despite recent gains made in the area of wind and solar energy, natural gas, oil, and coal still provide a lot of power for Americans, especially in the Midwest and south.
There are many reasons for this, some of which are simply about politics, but the truth is that for wind and solar energy to be feasible on a large scale, better energy capture and storage technology is needed.
In order for a plant to be solar powered, it needs to be able to store and access enough energy to continue operations through the night. A wind farm needs to be able to store kinetic energy from turbines and make it reliably accessible to the power grid. This means improving practical capture and storage technology and making it available for industrial applications.
Fortunately, energy capture solutions are one of the major areas of innovation in environmental technology today, and promising new tools are coming onto the market that help improve efficiency.
The future of the industrialized world hangs on our ability to build a more sustainable energy future, and practical energy capture and storage solutions are one of the most essential aspects of this struggle.
