Written on: September 19, 2026
By Tucker Perkins, President and CEO of the Propane Education & Research Council. Host of the Path to Zero podcast.
As electricity demand grows, one of our most overlooked energy resources may be the energy we’re already producing and throwing away.
Most conversations about America’s growing electricity demand eventually arrive at the same question: Where are we going to get all the additional power?
We talk about building more natural gas generation. More nuclear. More renewables and storage. New geothermal technologies. And increasingly, onsite generation for data centers and other large loads.
Those are all important conversations.
But after my recent Path to Zero podcast conversation with Janice Tran, co-founder and CEO of Kanin Energy, I’ve been thinking about a slightly different question:
Before we build all that new generation, how much energy are we already producing and simply wasting?
The answer is surprisingly large.
Janice told me that over half of the energy that goes into a typical industrial process is usually wasted in the form of waste heat. And by Kanin’s estimate, there may be roughly 15 gigawatts of technical potential for waste-heat-to-power projects across the United States.
That’s a lot of potential electricity hiding in plain sight.
An Overlooked Source of Power
Kanin Energy’s business is built around capturing heat that industrial facilities are already producing and converting it into electricity.
One example is a project in Ohio involving a natural gas pipeline compressor station. Compressors help move natural gas through pipelines, generating heat that would ordinarily be released into the atmosphere.
Kanin and its partners are capturing that heat and using it to generate electricity for the nearby University of Dayton. The 9.2-megawatt system is expected to produce roughly 78,000 megawatt-hours a year, enough electricity to meet the university’s annual needs.
I find that remarkable. Not because the underlying technology is revolutionary. In fact, that’s part of the point.
The energy was already there. The challenge was figuring out how to capture it, finance the project and put it to work.
But Is It Really Carbon-Free?
There’s an obvious question here. If the waste heat comes from natural gas infrastructure, how can the electricity be described as carbon-free?
I asked Janice exactly that.
The distinction is that the project isn’t burning additional natural gas to produce the electricity. The compressor station is already operating and producing the heat. The waste-heat system captures energy that otherwise would simply be released.
Waste heat doesn’t make the underlying industrial process carbon-free. But if the process is already occurring, capturing its wasted energy can produce additional electricity without burning additional fuel.
That’s an important distinction as we look for ways to get more useful energy from infrastructure that’s already operating.
Efficiency Is Becoming a Supply Strategy
For years, we’ve tended to put energy efficiency and energy production into separate buckets. Efficiency meant using less. Generation meant producing more.
Waste heat blurs that line.
If an industrial facility can capture energy it is already discarding and turn it into electricity, efficiency effectively becomes a new source of power.
That matters as electricity demand rises, driven by AI and data centers, manufacturing, electrification and other large new loads. At the same time, new generation can face transmission constraints, interconnection delays, permitting challenges and long development timelines.
Getting more useful energy from the infrastructure we already have may need to become a much bigger part of the supply conversation.
The Economics May Matter More Than the Carbon
Another point from our conversation stuck with me: industrial customers aren’t necessarily coming to Kanin because they’re trying to make a climate statement.
They’re trying to solve an energy problem.
Janice said some customers have seen power prices double or even triple over the last several years. For a manufacturer or other large industrial user, finding a source of reliable, predictable power can be every bit as important as reducing emissions.
The value proposition isn’t just lower emissions. It’s reliability. It’s predictable economics. It’s making productive use of energy that was previously wasted.
That’s an equation we’ve heard from a number of guests on Path to Zero: the energy solutions that scale are often the ones that solve several problems at once.
The Technology Isn’t Always the Problem
Janice made another observation that applies well beyond waste heat:
“We don’t think that the problem is technology in our field. We think the problem is actually implementation.”
The energy conversation tends to gravitate toward breakthrough technologies. But sometimes the bigger opportunity is figuring out how to deploy technologies we already understand – how to finance them, permit them, connect them to the grid and make the economics work for customers.
Sometimes innovation isn’t inventing a better machine. It’s figuring out how to actually get the machine built.
That challenge becomes even more apparent with data centers. Kanin is developing onsite power solutions that could involve gas turbines, reciprocating engines, fuel cells, waste heat, battery storage, grid power or some combination.
The starting point isn’t: Which technology do we want to sell?
It’s: What problem does the customer need solved?
Increasingly, that problem is simple to describe and difficult to solve: How do I get enough reliable power, quickly and affordably?
One Thing I’m Watching
Near the end of our conversation, I gave Janice our Path to Zero magic wand and asked what she would change if she could fix one thing in energy.
Her answer was interconnection.
“The grid and the interconnection queues in the United States are just insane right now.”
That fits a pattern I’ve heard repeatedly. We don’t have a shortage of energy ideas. The challenge is increasingly how quickly we can connect those solutions to the customers who need them.
Waste heat won’t solve America’s electricity challenge by itself. Neither will any single technology.
But 15 gigawatts of potential power that we’re largely throwing away deserves more attention.
And that’s my biggest takeaway from my conversation with Janice:
Before we ask where all our new energy is going to come from, maybe we should take a harder look at how much of the energy we already have is disappearing into thin air.
