Economic Benefits of Energy Efficiency

This article from Salon.com discusses the benefits to power companies, consumers and the nation of government promoting energy efficiency programs. The author worked for DOE where a competition to save energy resulted in annual savings of $90 million per year, at upfront costs of just $20 million. The idea for the competition was based on something tried at Dow, an ongoing contest where efficiency savings resulting in serious cost savings continue to be discovered year after year, when no one at the start would have thought it was possible to continue saving energy and money.

Discussed are a number of interesting examples of energy savings, plus governmental programs at both the state and federal level, which facilitate the efficiency trend. For example:

Significantly, California adopted regulations so that utility company profits are not tied to how much electricity they sell. This is called "decoupling." It also allowed utilities to take a share of any energy savings they help consumers and businesses achieve. The bottom line is that California utilities can make money when their customers save money. That puts energy-efficiency investments on the same competitive playing field as generation from new power plants.

There is also this interesting observation:

Economic models greatly overestimate the cost of carbon mitigation because economists simply don't believe that the economy has lots of high-return energy-efficiency opportunities. In their theory, the economy is always operating near efficiency. Reality is very different than economic models.

The story ends on a political note, noting a senator in a hearing calling the author's ideas "poppycock." The facts suggest otherwise.

Enviro-SUV

Just have a look here.

One Wheel is Better Than Two

Here's another move in the efficiency direction. The picture is worth a thousand words. There actually are two wheels, just side by side rather than one in front of the other.

The machine balances with gyroscopes and there's no controls other than "on/off". You lean forward, backward, and side to side to accelerate, slow down and turn. An eight-year-old can ride it. Right now, it does a maximum of 15 mph, but the young designer/engineer, Ben Gulak, who has just been accepted at MIT, says he thinks it could eventually be engineered to do a max of 40mph safely.

By the way, it's electric powered.

Impact of Fuel Prices

I looked at gas top $4 for cheap unleaded, and thought ruefully that we'd probably never see it below that price again. The New York Times reported on June 21, 2008 that "Travelers Shift to Rail as Cost of Fuel Rises:" (sign in may be required)

Amtrak set records in May, both for the number of passengers it carried and for ticket revenues — all the more remarkable because May is not usually a strong travel month.

The angle of the article is that despite higher use, Amtrak may not be in any position to really build on higher demand because of how it has scaled back operations and it may take years to get more trains on-line where they're needed.

The article also notes that passenger trains, at least as presently designed, net a rather small overall energy savings:

Oil costs hurt Amtrak, too. Fuel is projected to reach 11 percent of Amtrak’s budget this year, up from 6 percent in 2004. The railroad is not radically more energy-efficient than other means of travel. Amtrak can move a passenger a mile with 17.4 percent less fuel than a passenger car can, and about 32.9 percent less than an airline can, according to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

This spring and summer the general population is just beginning to see the impact of higher fuel costs, and behavior is starting to change. People talk of driving less or merging trips. See this piece by Joel Hirschorn, for instance, arguing that going green should be taken seriously by individuals, and not be subjected to marketing scams. While real estate was on everybody's mind four or five years ago, today it's the twin problems of global warming and the high prices of fuel.

That's effecting food prices, too, which is a big part of what has made people start to sit up and take notice. The front page of my local paper, in a June 18 story about how food pantries are struggling to meet rising demand at the same time food prices are jumping dramatically, published this chart which shows food price increases just between April and July! (Hamphire Gazette, "Price hikes skewer food program," Dayna Malek, June 19, 2008 - subscription required)



Public consciousness is shifting, of necessity. Up to now, responses have largely been local and small scale, scattered here and there. I'll be curious to see how big business and state, federal and international political agencies begin to respond to these problems, which threaten to rapidly grow out of hand.

Step Into My Laboratory

This article from the (London) Times Online, "Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol," sounds like a hoax (this isn't April 1, is it?) but claims that scientists in Silicon Valley are genuinely genetically modifying bacteria to eat wood and food waste and excrete petroleum. The claims are that the process takes place in a tank and won't hurt anything and that the process is carbon neutral or better. Check it out for yourself.

Radical Changes for Energy Business

A big supplier of gas and electric in Britain, reports that it sees big changes ahead for the energy business, according to an article from the Guardian newspaper:

Centralised fossil fuel fired generation would have to give way to a combination of energy efficiency and diversity of generation.

"The days of meeting an unchecked demand for energy through monolithic carbon intensive power stations are coming to an end. Increasingly the emphasis will be on energy efficiency, renewables, cleaned up fossil fuel plant and micro generation," the company said in a statement accompanying its full-year results.

My sense, too, is that energy providers will need to become facilitators of power generation and delivery, and that power will be distributed in thousands of smaller and larger locations, including residences and businesses.

Read the full story here.

Signs of the Times

This spring, with the latest spike in gas prices, and the steady rise in food prices and numerous food riots around the world, there's seems to be a broad recognition that change is coming, and that we need to change our behavior to adjust to a reality which has been predicted for a long time -- though largely ignored -- but which clearly is now arriving.

Here's a news snippet showing that American driving habits have changed in the last year, with a 10% reduction in total driving miles from one year to the next. This story points to a bus company in North Dakota, which is thriving as cities like New York and Houston increase their orders of buses to accommodate greater demand. Incidentally, the buses are diesel/electric hybrids. My local paper, the Hampshire Gazette in Northampton, Massachusetts, reported today that local bike shops are reporting spikes in sales, as more people choose to bike rather drive to work and around town.

But then there's this longer piece, presented at the Seattle Green Festival in April, which forecasts how a broad change in perspective may pave the way for significant cultural, political and economic revision. Take some time with this story, because I think it paints the way out of the hole we're in as well as anything I've seen lately.