Science Magazine — Leaping the Efficiency Gap

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/325/5942/804

Science 14 August 2009:
Vol. 325. no. 5942, pp. 804 - 811
DOI: 10.1126/science.325_804

News Focus

Energy Efficiency:

Leaping the Efficiency Gap

Dan Charles

Experience has shown that there is more to saving energy than designing better light bulbs and refrigerators. Researchers say it will need a mixture of persuasion, regulation, and taxation.

Thirty-five years ago in Berkeley, California, two young physicists named Steven Chu and John Holdren were present at the birth of a campaign to curb Americans' appetite for energy. They saw their colleague Arthur Rosenfeld abandon a successful career in particle physics and set up a new research division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) devoted to energy efficiency. Then-Governor Jerry Brown and state regulatory agencies adopted Rosenfeld's ideas with astonishing speed. California canceled planned nuclear power plants, passed pathbreaking efficiency standards for refrigerators and buildings, and ordered electric utilities to spend money persuading their customers to use less power.

Today, Chu, now the U.S. secretary of energy, cites Rosenfeld as a model for scientists and California as a example for the nation. He points out that per capita electricity consumption in California stayed flat for the past 30 years yet rose 40% in the rest of the United States. That flattened curve even has a name: the Rosenfeld Effect. Together with Holdren, now President Barack Obama's science adviser, Chu has made efficiency the heart of the Obama Administration's energy strategy. Tighter appliance standards are on a fast track through the Department of Energy bureaucracy. Billions of dollars from the stimulus package are pouring into programs to weatherize and retrofit homes with energy-saving technology. Chu says such investments quickly pay for themselves in lower energy bills: "Energy efficiency isn't just low hanging fruit; it's fruit lying on the ground."

David Goldstein, who studied with Rosenfeld and now co-directs work on energy policy for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), says California's experience proves that carbon emissions can be contained and even reduced at minimal cost. "The most important lesson is: Success is possible, and a fairly limited set of policies gets you most of the way there," Goldstein says. And, he adds, it's not hard to go even further with energy saving: "The practical limits have never been tested."

But not everyone views California's success story as so clear-cut. Alan Sanstad, an LBNL researcher who also worked with Rosenfeld, looks at the same data and concludes that California's efficiency offensive wasn't nearly effective enough. He points out that California's total energy use over the past 3 decades grew at almost the same rate as it did in the rest of the country, while the state's population soared. Anant Sudarshan and James Sweeney of Stanford University's Precourt Energy Efficiency Center (PEEC) recently calculated that the state's energy policies can take credit for only a quarter of California's lower per capita electricity use. The rest is due to "structural factors" such as mild weather, increasing urbanization, larger numbers of people in each household, and high prices for energy and land that drove heavy industry out of the state.

…

[hunter]

1. Sudarshan and Sweeney's criticism rings false.

Anant Sudarshan and James Sweeney of Stanford University's Precourt Energy Efficiency Center (PEEC) recently calculated that the state's energy policies can take credit for only a quarter of California's lower per capita electricity use. The rest is due to "structural factors" such as mild weather, increasing urbanization, larger numbers of people in each household, and high prices for energy and land that drove heavy industry out of the state.

They wrongly assume their "structural factors" are a bad thing. Mild weather is what it is, but increasing urbanization, large numbers of people in each household, reduction of heavy industry, and prices high enough to encourage conservation and support alternative energy systems all greatly reduce per capita environmental impacts.

The only major downside I see is when heavy, dirty industrial production is simply exported to places like China. In much of the "first world" we've reached a point where consumerism is detrimental to our overall standard of living.

[Dogmudgeon]

2. A Big Ol' Honkin' Rec

THIS is the approach we need.

It's the only way to make efficiency increases an effective energy and resource-use policy. It's the only way around Jevons' paradox. It's also why the Right is so vehemently anti-environmental.

There's only one problem: Science is embargoed from the public. Can't have the riff-raff self-educating, y'know. Is there a reprint link anywhere?

--d!