Excellent piece, and good info on distributed generation / CHP. Since you're associated with Rocky Mountain Institute, I'm sure you know of the work of Tom Casten. He's the founding chair of Recycled Energy Development, a company with which I'm associated. And yes, the potential with CHP and other forms of energy recycling (mainly waste heat recovery) is massive. Studies done for the EPA and DOE suggest there's enough recoverable waste energy in this country to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 20%. That's as much as if we pulled every passenger vehicle off the road. And meanwhile, we'd be saving money. There's truly some no-brainer measures out there that we need to be undertaking.

Great piece. Particularly useful to be looking at what can be done now, and what will need to be done in decades to come - all backed by energy modeling data.

what a really great article.