Not Spaghetti

The problem is that I think you're turning a semantic difference into a substance difference. CHP is usually more than twice as efficient as traditional, centralized power generation. Whether you call that recycling or not, what does it matter? The question is whether to be for or against greater use of CHP and waste heat recovery. And the studies from Lawrence Berkeley and numerous other places suggest there's an awful lot of recoverable waste energy out there.

You are definitely right that 'the lower the temperature the "heat", the less useful it is.' That's why most of the CHP and waste heat recovery opportunities lie in manufacturing. Recycled Energy Development, for instance, is now doing a project at a silicon (not to be confused with silicone) plant in West Virginia. Immense amounts of heat are generated in such a process, yet most such manufacturers are not making use of them.

So I think the danger here is to quibble with the wording and then use that to say that people are being misled, especially when very few people even know what CHP is, and very few energy analysts are talking about it. Gore has never made an issue of it before this minimal mention in his latest book, and Amory Lovins is hardly a household name. Tom Casten certainly isn't, and he's the leading practitioner of this in the country. What we hear about in terms of efficiency are light bulbs and home insulation -- which cannot get back the 2/3 of energy that most power plants waste before the electricity ever hits the electric wires. We should be talking more about generation inefficiency, which most people don't even know exists.