Wasting Our Watts: Efficiency and Conservation
Time Magazine writer Michael Grunwald gets it. Energy efficiency is the fifth fuel. His 3,000-word article in the most recent issue explores the potential and the barriers. Here are the main points.
January 06, 2009
"This may sound too good to be true," begins Grunwald's article, "Wasting Our Watts," in Time this week. "But the U.S. has a renewable-energy resource that is perfectly clean, remarkably cheap, surprisingly abundant and immediately available...This miracle juice goes by the distinctly boring name of energy efficiency..."
"Part of the answer involves marketing... politicians don't get to cut ribbons for efficiency tweaks."
--Time
Unlike so many journalists, Grunwald grasps not only the the difference between efficiency and conservation, but also the importance of efficiency in solving the developed world's energy and climate crises.
Efficiency is buying us time to make clean and renewable energy sources mature and cost-competitive. We have made some efficiency gains since my generation's first energy crisis in the 1970s, but we have a large pool of resources -- inefficient loads -- yet to save.
Time cites the usual studies by groups like NRDC and McKinsey, and interviews the usual suspects like EPRI, Ted Schultz at Duke Energy, Honeywell's Dave Cote, and Kateri Callahan at the Alliance to Save Energy. No one disagrees that efficiency has an important role to play.
If the experts consider efficiency a no-brainer, why haven't we do more of it? The problem is that energy efficiency isn't sexy. It can't rise above the noise of more interesting approaches represented by the Prius, wave energy, T. Boone Pickens, biofuels, and the so-called nuclear renaissance.
"Part of the answer involves marketing. Even superefficient motors, boilers, routers and compressors lack a wow factor, and politicians don't get to cut ribbons for efficiency tweaks."
Efficiency may not be a silver bullet, but it is a critical part of the "silver buckshot" we need to get out of the situation we find ourselves in. The incoming Obama administration should not stop articulating its plans to remove barriers through mandates and incentives.
"Efficiency's growth has been stunted by perverse financial disincentives that we need to understand and untangle if we want to avoid a future of unaffordable new plants, catastrophic new emissions and dangerous dependence on dictatorial oil merchants."
Comments
Why would an oil company want to promote efficiency when their profits are based on how much oil is sold? Now that special interests, like big oil have the ability to mak unlimited contributions to political candidates I worry about how responsible our politicians will be with creating energy policy. Is the agenda of Corporate America always in the best interest of Americans? Will Corporations all of a sudden become socially responsible and promote conservation? Conservatives who dislike government agendas to regulate for resposible policy do not have the corner on the market for prayer as much as they might make it seem. I think prayer may be the best hope for Americans now that our Supreme Court has effectively put political candidates up for sale.
Posted by: Lawrence A. Ryan | January 22, 2010 06:59 AM