Is a federal cogeneration standard on the horizon?

July 25 2011

Over at Forbes’ energy blog, William Pentland reports on a newly released study (link goes to full PDF) from DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratories and the Georgia Institute of Technology entitled “Making Industry Part of the Climate Solution.” The nearly 300-page report goes into a lot of detail on various ways to “green up” America’s industrial sector, but one of the ideas caught our eye: the possible creation of a federal “Energy Portfolio Standard,” or EPS.

The EPS would mandate that electric companies use a certain amount of electricity generated by combined heat and power (CHP) operations at industrial facilities. It would also extend the investment tax credit already in place that covers up to 30% of the total cost of installing a CHP system. The upshot: Oak Ridge estimates that industrial CHP capacity would skyrocket from 28 gigawatts in 2010 to a staggering 90 gigawatts by 2035.

Obviously, if such a plan were to be implemented, opportunities for contractors that specialize in CHP work would skyrocket, too.

Read the entire article here.