A city that generates electricity but ignores district heating is a building failure.
A steam turbine is merely an energy converter with an inherent smooth speed limit.
Even with overload earth-heat fluid at seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit, Turbine 01 converted roughly thirty-eight percent of its heat enthalpy into rotating shaft power.
The leftover sixty-two percent exited the low-pressure turbine exhaust casing as five-pound-per-square-inch soaked steam.
To an amateur, that exhaust was waste heat to be condensed and dumped into the river.
To Giles Croft, it was forty million BTUs per hour of free, high-pressure domestic warmth waiting to be piped into the living quarters of forty-five thousand people.
Giles stood in the central casting shed of the lower foundry district. His wooden ruler measured the internal core posture of a newly split sand mold.
Behind his eyes, the test model screen was calculating radiant surface emissivity and fluid rising heat rates.
