Serious energy efficiency is not a one-shot resource, where you pick the low-hanging fruit and you’re done. In fact, the fruit grows back. The efficiency resource never gets exhausted because technology keeps improving and knowledge spreads to more people.
Recycled Energy Development is one example of for-profit enterprises who are delivering fast payback efficiencies to their customers. There is a big opportunity here!
As an example, consider this Salon piece by Joe Romm, where he reviews California energy efficiency strategies. In addition to the California results, Joe offers up info on energy efficiency paybacks in general.
July 28, 2008 | Suppose I paid you for every pound of pollution you generated and punished you for every pound you reduced. You would probably spend most of your time trying to figure out how to generate more pollution. And suppose that if you generated enough pollution, I had to pay you to build a new plant, no matter what the cost, and no matter how much cheaper it might be to not pollute in the first place.
Well, that’s pretty much how we have run the U.S. electric grid for nearly a century. The more electricity a utility sells, the more money it makes. If it’s able to boost electricity demand enough, the utility is allowed to build a new power plant with a guaranteed profit. The only way a typical utility can lose money is if demand drops. So the last thing most utilities want to do is seriously push strategies that save energy, strategies that do not pollute in the first place.
America is the Saudi Arabia of energy waste. A 2007 report from the international consulting firm McKinsey and Co. found that improving energy efficiency in buildings, appliances and factories could offset almost all of the projected demand for electricity in 2030 and largely negate the need for new coal-fired power plants. McKinsey estimates that one-third of the U.S. greenhouse gas reductions by 2030 could come from electricity efficiency and be achieved at negative marginal costs. In short, the cost of the efficient equipment would quickly pay for itself in energy savings.
While a few states have energy-efficiency strategies, none matches what California has done. In the past three decades, electricity consumption per capita grew 60 percent in the rest of the nation, while it stayed flat in high-tech, fast-growing California. If all Americans had the same per capita electricity demand as Californians currently do, we would cut electricity consumption 40 percent…
Thanks for giving a shout out to Recycled Energy Development (recycled-energy.com), a company with which I’m associated. As you may recall, I’ve commented on your blog before. It’s really pretty amazing what an opportunity we have here. EPA and DoE studies suggest we could cut greenhouse emissions by 20% simply by recycling energy at manufacturing plants. Making our energy system more efficient is where the real action is in fighting global warming; the other stuff is just nibbling around the edges.
Thanks for your comments. “What an opportunity” indeed! Hopefully Recycled Energy Development will have lots of competitors before long :-) There remains a LOT of low-hanging fruit.
What does RED think of the McKinsey study?