June 1, 2007--What Works Week: Efficiency Is the Steak

So says Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. While “renewables are the sizzle.” Those of you who do no remember the famous advertising tag line from the 1980s in which Burger King, implied that McDonalds was just about the sizzle while they delivered the steak, can still figure out that this new application about energy suggests that while considering how best to become more energy efficient and less polluting much of the attention has been focused on how to produce energy in more self-sustaining ways, using agricultural products to make biofuels or expanding the generation of energy from the sun and wind, according to some, this is just the sizzle. The steak, how to really do things better, involves reducing energy use—the steak in the equation.

A number of states are attempting to come up with ways to make energy conservation more attractive to individuals and companies. They need to do this because, according to a report in the NY Times (article linked below), encouragements and subsidies from governments are necessary since when polled, people worldwide said that if they were to incur the expense to use devices that were more energy efficient, to justify the additional cost that this would require, they saw the need to recover that investment in two years or less. And fully a quarter said that even though they would recover the extra costs, in spite of that, they would never spend any money to improve energy efficiency. Thus, in order to get people to think about the steak of efficiency there have to be ways to motivate them. And they have to be shown that taking a long-range view is good for all the bottom lines. In other words, there need to be energy carrots and sticks.

One stick is to charge for energy at rates that vary by the level of consumption. Since the cost per megawatt for the last megawatts of power from new generators and power lines is more expensive than electricity from existing plants, states such as California have structured utility rates so as to make customers’ last few kilowatts of power extremely expensive. It also doesn’t hurt out there to have periodic blackouts which are dramatic reminders that conservation is important.

But then there are opportunities for individuals and companies that draw upon approaches and technologies that already exist—in other words, tackle this up-to-now seemingly intractable problem by not just spending more money on research but rather by looking around for things already known that work and encouraging their wide-scale application.

One small but generalizable example is something that Green Mountain Coffee Roasters did to cut energy use. They have 40 lasers that are used to carve dates and batch numbers into the millions of containers they produce each year. By investing only $150 to $200 per laser, using existing technology, they can make them much more energy efficient and recover the cost of their investment quickly since the Vermont Energy Investment Commission, which searches the state for thousands of these kinds of opportunities, is helping to offset the costs.

And here I am feeling virtuous when I recently replaced all our incandescent bulbs with more efficient fluorescents. We are even liking the bluer light.