Transforming America’s Industrial Sector

Today, U.S. industry generates more than 40 percent of the country’s GDP and employs almost 20 million people. In 2010, the sector consumed one-quarter of all U.S. energy in 2010, 91 percent of which came from fossil fuels.

Comprehensive energy efficiency is an opportunity to reinvigorate the sector, creating jobs and driving global competitiveness.

Reinventing Fire shows how, by adopting emerging energy efficiency technologies, widely reusing waste heat, and using integrative design, it is possible by 2050 to reduce energy consumption 9 percent below 2010 levels even while the sector grows 84 percent.

Watch now, and learn:

• How to view the industrial sector through the efficiency lens.
• How integrative design can make big savings cheaper than small savings by driving process breakthroughs that uncover clean, simple answers to solve multiple problems at once.
• How expanding cogeneration beyond official forecasts offers a huge opportunity to profitably displace nearly 60 percent of the nation’s coal-fired electricity.
• How substituting heat from increasingly renewable electricity, directly or via heat pumps, and solar process heat (fuel-switching) can avoid emissions, stabilize heat prices, and further reduce industry’s reliance on volatile fossil fuels.