Good points.
100 pound person, 60 pounds of water, 1150 btus per pound to vaporize the water = 69,000 btus.
40 pounds of dry matter left. Let us assume, possibly inaccurately but no doubt conservatively, that one pound of dry human matter produces as much heat as dry wood when burned, about 8600 btus. Therefore, the 40 pounds of dry matter should produce about 344,000 btus, leaving about 275,000 after vaporization of the water to contribute to the heating of the building, assuming all heat is captured, which of course it isn’t.
So I appear to have been in error. Human bodies can be used as a source of fuel. I think I jumped to this conclusion because of the very large amounts of fuel used in cremation. But of course the purpose of cremation is not to provide energy, it’s to reduce the body to as small an amount of ash as possible, so they pour on the fuel well beyond what is needed just to burn the body.
Mea culpa for jumping to conclusions. In my partial defense, I think it is logical to expect that the actual contribution of baby corpses to heating of the facility is minimal.
Incidentally, modern boilers with flue gas condensation systems can recover so much of the condensation heat of all of the water vapor contained (or chemically produced, by combustion) in the fuel that the temperature of the waste gas is lowered to about 45 °C. Thus, roughly the same amount of energy is released and recovered as would be when burning totally dehydrated fuel.
I would guess that, pound for pound, human bodies contain even more chemical energy than wood.
Regards,