The Times this morning offers the “Well, duh!” headline of the day, and possibly the week:
Energy Use Can Be Cut by Efficiency, Survey Says
In other news, the Sun rose in the east this morning.
Snark aside, there is an important point in the article: the efficiency savings they’re talking about can be realized now, with technology we already have, and not at some indeterminate point in the future when more efficient technologies are invented.
The energy savings, the report said, can be achieved with current technology and would save money for consumers and companies. The McKinsey report offers a long list of suggested steps, including the adoption of compact fluorescent light bulbs, improved insulation on new buildings, reduced standby power requirements, an accelerated push for appliance-efficiency standards and the use of solar water heaters.
Those moves, among others, could reduce the yearly growth rate in worldwide energy demand through 2020 to six-tenths of a percent, from a forecast annual rate of 2.2 percent, the report concluded.
“The opportunities are huge and yet they are being left on the table,” said Diana Farrell, director of the McKinsey Global Institute, a research arm of the McKinsey consulting firm. “Standard economics would say that energy prices would work their way through everything. But that’s not really the case, particularly in the consumer market.”
A slowing in the rate of growth isn’t the same as a cut, of course, and this doesn’t remove the obligation to work on more energy-efficient technologies now, but it’s worth noting that there are steps to be taken now that would help. And, for the most part, those steps are pretty painless.
One key point is that these things aren’t going to happen by themselves. Why not have some government support for these things? If the government can force us to use inferior toilets in order to “conserve water” (while still irrigating gigantic golf courses in the middle of deserts), surely some regulation could help with energy conservation.
But if people can still buy old-fashioned light bulbs for 1/5 the price of “energy-saver” versions, they’ll keep doing it.
I wish it were otherwise, but fluorescent bulbs really bug me. The color still isn’t right, and the flicker gives me headaches. I can deal with low-flow toilets and showers more easily than poor quality of light.
I try to compensate by using lower-wattage bulbs and keeping most lights turned off, but that’s only a partial solution.
I hate fluorescent bulbs with a passion. You can have my incandescent bulbs after I’ve beaten you senseless.
They wash out color, they flicker, and they hum. The fucking things should be banned.
The one thing that drives me nuts about the compact fluorescents is that they need to “warm up” a bit– when you first turn them on, they’re weirdly dim, and it takes five minutes or so to reach full brightness.
I’d also like to have a compact fluorescent version of the three-way incandescent bulbs, which I haven’t seen. I suppose I could simulate it by just turning the light off and back on perdiodically, but that’s not very satisfying.
Isn’t that a little like saying, “You know, if everything cost less, I’d spend less money?” It sounds obviously true on casual inspection, but isn’t it equally true that “If everything cost less, I’d buy more stuff?”
I get sadly amused by news pieces (and I see this even in popular science type magazines) that imply that cutting energy use by one half in all applications (to keep the math absurdly simple) would result in cutting energy use across the board in the economy by one half. I really doubt that it would– it would cut energy use, certainly, and make the economy more energy efficient, but because it woudl free up energy for other uses, the overall reduction in energy use won’t be that dramatic.
Hopefully the original study isn’t making that claim, but that level of subtlety rarely makes it into the newspapers.
(Don’t get me wrong– I’m all for energy efficiency, for environmental and economic reasons. I just don’t think it’s as obvious as pieces like that make it sound. They rarely address the energy costs of constructing the energy efficient infrastructure, either.)
I don’t know where you buy your compact fluorescents, but it’s obviously not the right place. That sort of problems were solved many years ago.
The whole discussion about flourescent bulbs shows part of the problem. Many times an early effort frankly sucks. People then assume all of the technology is like that, and never move away. I hate the standard industrial flourescent bulbs with a passion. They give me headaches from the flicker, they interfere weirdly with the monitors at work, etc.
But, I read every night by a compact flourescent at home. It was not until I saw how much they were that I realized not all flourescent bulbs suck.
My low flow toilets are fine, but the first and second generation ones suck, or rather don’t suck well enough.
So, the reason why many of these easy efficiency gains are not realized is that people think that the replacement technology is inferior when, in many cases, it is a fine replacement.
CF bulbs still have the dimness problem:
http://wordmunger.com/?p=662
I don’t have those problems with my CF bulbs, but the next wave of LED bulbs – about five to ten years away, max – will have solved those problems, just about the time your CF bulbs are ready to be replaced.
One less tractable problem here is cases in which the people paying the power bill and the people who own the power-using equipment are not the same. In the house I rent, the refrigerator uses about twice as much energy as a new one would, the insulation is poor to nonexistent in places, not only are the windows in the living room single pane, but the frames have sagged to the point that there is a quarter inch gap along the top.
New appliances would probably hit energy breakeven (at current prices) in four years and save money after that, but I’m not going to be here that long, and the landlord probably wouldn’t be able to extract the savings in increased rent, so no one does anything.
Since at times the marginal rate per kWh is 20 cents (!), we have CF bulbs on things that aren’t on dimmers, and I turn down the things that are.