Energy Recycling
Using watts, again
New regenerator technology uses
previously wasted energy
By Tim Heston,
Contributing Editor
Who is John Galt?
Anyone who’s read Ayn Rand’s Atlas
Shrugged is familiar with the
question and probably
will give a glint of
a knowing
smile. In the book, the question is an
expression of helplessness and despair
about the current state of affairs. As the
plot unfolds, we find that John Galt is
actually an engineer who developed a
motor that runs on static electricity, a
technology that could change the
way we power the world.
As the pragmatic pres-
ident of Laser
Cutting Northwest
(LCNW), Pete
Agtuca’s vision
isn’t so
grandiose as
Rand’s fic-
tion, but he
and his
team of
engineers and technicians may have
developed something big all the same.
They’ve maximized efficiency with a
generator that produces more watts at
lower rotations per minute.
The Aha! Moment
Agtuca long had been on a quest to
reduce energy consumption at his 28-
employee, 30,000-square-foot metal
fabrication shop, LCNW. In 2006 the
voters of Washington State passed an
act that directed the state’s utilities to
get a portion of their power from renewable resources. The ultimate effect,
Agtuca found, was that power rates
were going to increase from 6 to 18
cents a kilowatt (k W). The contract
metal fabricator has several Amada cutting lasers, a MultiCam high-speed
router, waterjets, press brakes, and
welding cells—and together they add
up to quite a power bill.
“We were using a lot of energy,”
said John Shoemaker, vice president.
“Our power bill was roughly $12,000 a
month.”
So the company invested in high-effi-
ciency lighting as well as variable-speed
motors for the compressors, and even
sealed up all the cracks in the building
walls. But all this, unfortunately, wasn’t
making much of a dent in the power bill.
At this point Agtuca and his team
noticed the shop’s Donaldson® dust collectors that filter particulates produced
as the lasers cut metal. The collectors
blew exhaust constantly to the outside.
FIGURE 1
A regenerator is installed at an industrial
facility. The device can produce electricity
from the exhausted air of dust collectors.
