An enormous ice jam has backed up the Kankakee River. What to do about it? Well, it so happens they have a four-gigawatt heat source in the form of Dresden Units 2 and 3. Each reactor generates about 3 GW of heat, of which 1 GW goes out on the busbars as electricity, and the remainder has to be disposed of somehow.

Workers are siphoning water from the Dresden Generating Station's cooling lake. The water in the lake is used to cool the nuclear power plant, but it's warm enough to melt ice. Since before 11 a.m. on Wednesday, the county was pumping the warm water into the Kankakee River.

Where will the power to operate these all-electric buildings come from?

What transmission lines will that power flow through?

Policies which cannot be implemented will not be implemented.

The page claims that “New York is rapidly increasing its grid capacity with renewable energy sources”. Are these sources near the load centers? Are they going to be available, say, in the middle of winter?

It also states that “energy-efficient all-electric buildings will use significantly less electricity than buildings which run on fossil fuels”. We feel inclined to skepticism, especially since the Rocky Mountain Institute ― meaning Amory Lovins ― seems to be a major information source, and we may infer, involved in the policy-making process. There may well be apples-to-oranges comparisons involved.

Lovins is the guy who warned us all that a kilogram of plutonium would cause 20 billion lung cancers if it escaped into the environment, so that we absolutely must not use nuclear power. No such effect has been observed from the tens of tonnes of Pu injected directly into the atmosphere in the course of about 40 years of thermonuclear weapons testing.

That is only the beginning of the reasons to suspect any quantitative information received from Lovins of being fudged and manipulated. But he is widely regarded as an infallible guru as far as energy policy is concerned.

The reason why refrigeration has become the default, universally–accepted means of conserving food — and a defining symbol of modernity — is that it is really effective.

If, out of some moral feeling that people need to be “closer to nature”, and to “bring back the connection between different levels of living beings, we as human beings and food ingredients as other living beings“, you discourage people from using refrigeration, you are advocating a massive increase in the amount of food which goes to waste.

In wealthy countries where refrigeration is widespread, food waste by the consumer is modest. In fact, modern methods (including the preservatives and packaging that people may dislike but have come to expect) have greatly reduced loss to spoilage, insect damage, and so on. Most food waste occurs when perfectly good food is discarded by producers or middlemen, to protect their profits or because they have no market to sell their product.

The idea that refrigeration is a wasteful use of energy which must be curtailed is hard to swallow. If there are energy constraints in the future, it is not because there must be. It is because people have voluntarily chosen privation over cracking atoms ― more than likely, that they have made that choice for others. Encouraging the vague feeling that even the most obviously beneficial uses of energy are somehow immoral and unjustifiable encourages that kind of choice, the morality and justice of which we must in turn question.

We might mention here that, if you want to store food for longer without refrigeration, irradiation is quite effective at (for instance) retarding the sprouting of potatoes and onions.

This should not be a surprise. Wishful thinking has dominated the electricity supply sector in recent years, not only in respect of where power is to come from, but also as regards the effects on demand (which is regularly described as “stagnant” despite significant consumption increases) of efforts to electrify transport and the heating of buildings.

We suggest a four-point plan to avoid the projected shortfall.

Do not force Pickering Block B (10 years newer than Block A) to close in 2025, according to a political deadline with no particular technical rationale

Proceed with the long-planned Darlington Block B, a duplicate of the existing 4×900 MW block, and potentially the often-discussed 4×800 MW Bruce Block C

Replace Pickering Block A (of which two units have been shut down for some years now) with a 4×1200 MW CANDU block of the type AECL already had firm designs for in the 1970s

Construct a pressurized-hot-water pipeline from Pickering to serve large campuses and other major heat loads in the Toronto area, as was seriously proposed about 1980 (and study the feasibility of a further line from Darlington)

If such a plan is not implemented, the use of fossil fuels for electric generation in Ontario is bound to rise sharply. The heat pipeline has a function in addition to reducing the overall demand for electricity in the heating sector : thermal accumulators (essentially, large insulated tanks of water) provide a simple way to time-shift heat demand away from power demand, improving the overall system performance. It should be recalled, because Toronto is also a good market for summer cooling, that “single-effect” absorption chillers for air conditioning are successfully being used in New York City (fed from the steam system there) to blunt summer demand peaks.

Note also that the much-discussed “small modular reactors” have no particular application to the current need : the Greater Toronto Area contains many millions of people, about 40% of the whole population of Canada. Such a concentration of people and industries is a perfect match for very large stations.

The report in question can be downloaded here.

The future of any industry is written in its data, and for the Boilers Market, the data is pointing toward a period of robust, sustainable growth. By examining the Boilers Market statistics, we can see a clear picture of an industry that is successfully reinventing itself for a low-carbon world. The transition from traditional coal and heavy-oil systems to natural gas, biomass, and electricity is not just a trend; it is the fundamental core of the Boilers industry trends observed across all major global regions.

The headline figures are a testament to this resilience. The Boilers market was valued at USD 123,681 Million in 2024 and is projected to reach USD 195,802 Million by 2030. This 7.8% CAGR is significant because it outpaces many other traditional industrial equipment sectors. A deep dive into the Boilers Market analysis shows that this growth is not uniform; while standard low-efficiency boilers are seeing declining sales, the market for "Ultra-Low NOx" and condensing boilers is exploding. This "quality over quantity" shift is a primary driver of the increasing Boilers Market size.

Another fascinating insight from the Boilers Market study is the impact of "Retrofitting." Because the lifespan of a boiler can be 20 to 30 years, many companies are choosing to upgrade their existing systems with new burners and control systems rather than buying an entirely new unit. This has created a massive Boilers Market opportunity for service and component manufacturers. The Global Boilers Market is thus becoming more of a "circular economy," where parts are upgraded and recycled to maintain peak efficiency over decades of operation.

The Boilers Market share is also being influenced by the rise of district heating. In this model, one massive boiler plant provides heat to an entire neighborhood or industrial park. This is much more efficient than having a hundred small boilers in separate buildings. According to recent Boilers Market insights, district heating projects are a major driver of Boilers Market volume in Northern Europe and North America. These large-scale projects require specialized engineering and long-term planning, making them high-value contracts for industry leaders.

“The Miracle of Ice from Heat”

One important way of conserving energy is through combined-heat-and-power schemes, which direct heat from the bottom end of the thermodynamic cycle of a steam power station into a district-heating system, rather than discharging it to the environment. Nuclear power is not only a prime contender for meeting future electricity needs, but is also an excellent fit for CHP, because it can be located close to the cities where the largest heat loads are.

District heating can be made more economically attractive, and thus brought into wider use sooner, if it can meet refrigeration and air-conditioning as well. This will also make solar heating systems more attractive.

The key technology is the “absorption chiller”, an elegant thermodynamic machine patented by Albert Einstein, which you may have encountered as the gas-fired refrigerator in a travel trailer. This 1940 booklet from the Electrolux Servel company seeks to explain how it works.