Turning Pizzas Into Power

When the question "What's for supper?" comes up, the answer is very often "Pizza!"  However, it rarely occurs to those ordering pizza what it takes in energy to make a pizza. Turns out pizza ovens need to run 24/7/365 so as to maintain a very high constant temperature of 500 ºF. And what is more startling is that only 5 to 10 percent of the energy needed by the pizza oven actually goes into cooking pizza. The majority of the energy consumed is lost to waste heat.

According to an ASME article, a professor of mechanical engineering at McMaster University in Ontario, who came to learn about the energy lost by pizza ovens, has developed a system to recover a significant amount of the waste heat. Through properly designed heat exchangers, waste heat can be used to heat the space where people come to enjoy pizza, preheat the air going into the pizza ovens, and even run a DC microgrid to power LED's. There is a lot at stake financially as the natural gas needed to run a pizza oven for a day is about the same as providing energy to a home in Canada for a month during the winter.

Thinking about the mind-boggling number of pizza ovens that are going full blast at this very moment, potential locations for a system that could save enormous amounts of energy. It would indeed be turning pizza into power. - Dr. Tom

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