yeah, baby. thanks, treehugger.

You are dead on here! Efficiency is absolutely key and it should always be exhausted before you move to new production. I can't imagine the number of home owners who bought solar panels (or didn't buy them because of the cost) to cut down on their electricity bill when they could have saved just as much if not more through efficiency renovations at a fraction of the price (props to any of you who did both!). This applies on an industrial scale of course too. The total potential of efficiency measures is enormous and we should make every effort to tap these resources BEFORE building new generation.

This being said, there are a couple of obstacles to efficiency measures:

1) While high capital costs are generally offset and reimbursed healthily by the savings and low/no maintanence and fuel costs, they still create a "sticker shock" that drives many away. Compact flourescent lightbulbs, one of the simplest and most efficient conservation methods everyone can employ, are a perfect example. Despite the fact that they last for 3+ years, save you $20 (after recouping initial costs!) or more each during their lifetime and use only a quarter of the electricity of incandescent bulbs, people go to stores and see a pack of 4 incans for $2.00 and a pack of 3 CFBs for $15.00 and they get 'sticker shock.' They buy the incans even though it is really losing them money. Even more needs to be done to educate people about the, well, the efficiecny of efficiency: i.e. how much money it's really going to save them. Money talks! Lets get it talking on our side!

2) There is little incentive for for-profit energy providers to promote conservation methods. It basically loses them business. They would much rather develop new generation because that makes them money. Conservation for for-profit utilities is like McDonalds paying you to NOT buy their value meal and just buy the single cheese burger instead. Doesn't make a lot of business sense. That is why we need a concerted effort from governments, non-profits and public utility districts to promote conservation. Its something we can't leave entirely up to the market because in this case, big market players (utilities) have little vested interest in seeing efficiency measures succeed. (On a side note, PUDs, which are not-for-profit utilities are EXCELLENT for this reason. My local PUD has done wonderful in promoting both efficiency and solar adoption).

3) Finally, we need to stop calling it "conservation" and call it "efficiency" instead (as Ive made a point of doing in this comment). Conservation implies doing without, holding back, showing self-restraint. Efficiency implies doing something the best way possible, eliminating waste, saving money. Conservation is something Treehuggers can get behind. Efficiency is something everyone - businessmen, homeowners, car owners, average Joes - can get behind. Efficiency just makes sense.

Cheers...

Jesse, I agree with both the original post, and your comments - with one small exception.

You say "Efficiency is absolutely key and it should always be exhausted before you move to new production".

I'm not sure I agree entirely with that statement. Surely we should be looking to do both in parallel. I.e. encourage the development of windfarms to replace natural gas/diesel fired generators for electricity while ALSO making our homes more energy efficient.

This would be (to my mind) a good example of becoming more efficient AND changing the means of production concurrently, not sequentially. I think that sometimes the environmental cost of leaving a dinofuel generator running is to great to be ignored.

Cheers
Jo

I hope not to spam the comment area with stock picks, but this is a great company with effeciency in mind:


Excerpt from Aug 01, 2005 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Beacon Power Corporation (NASDAQ: BCON):

"One of the most challenging aspects of today's electricity grid is that the amount of power generated and the amount consumed must be in exact balance at all times. When imbalances occur, the frequency of electricity (60 hertz in the U.S.) that end users require will not be maintained, which adversely affects grid stability. The constant balancing of power demand and production to maintain a stable frequency is called frequency regulation. Beacon's Smart Energy Matrix is a flywheel-based energy storage system that is intended to be a long-life, environmentally friendly solution for frequency regulation, with no fuel consumed and no emissions generated. More details, along with an informative animated presentation, are available at www.beaconpower.com "

"3) Finally, we need to stop calling it "conservation" and call it "efficiency" instead (as Ive made a point of doing in this comment). Conservation implies doing without, holding back, showing self-restraint. Efficiency implies doing something the best way possible, eliminating waste, saving money. Conservation is something Treehuggers can get behind. Efficiency is something everyone - businessmen, homeowners, car owners, average Joes - can get behind. Efficiency just makes sense."

I don't quite agree with this, and here's why:

From a PR/marketing point of view, I agree that "efficiency" is much more sexy. We could even call it "elegant design" or whatever.

But there's a difference between efficiency and conservation, and we need both. If I have a 80 mpg car but I drive 20,000 miles per year, I have an efficient car but I might use as much oil as someone with a less efficient car but that drives less. Is all of my driving necessary or is much of it just "luxury" driving?

That's the danger of efficiency; we make things more efficient, and people use them more, almost nullifying the efficiency gains (I don't remember the name of that paradox -- something knows?).

So conservation and restraint are important. As un-sexy as it sounds, we can't keep encourage growth forever. An exponentional growth of even 1% a year isn't sustainable because the earth isn't growing at 1% a year.

Conservation doesn't mean having no fun. It means making choices of what's really important (there's some much mickey mouse crap in our society that we could do without and our quality of life wouldn't be affected one iota).

Nice information. In the western world this is definately the way to go. But with China gobbling up more and more energy there needs to be a way to increase production capacity worldwide in environmentaly safe ways that makes it easy for china and others to use in their modernization.

I agree completely with the message here. I don't know why, but efficiency and conservation (whatever you choose to call it) are way sexy for me. There's just something inherently neat in getting more output for the same input.



I'm always surprised by the community that is looking for the one solution to the problem (not that I've heard it in this thread). There's a frustratingly large group that doesn't want to do anything until this one solution is found. In my mind, progress has never worked like that. We don't make giant leaps forward all at once, we take incremental steps and learn from our experiences. The problems we face will be solved by utilizing a host of tools and techniques in a variety of ways that we won't be able to sort out straight away in the beginning. I'm obviously departing from the topic a bit here, but only because I feel efficiency and conservation are the areas most ripe for effecting real change now, yet they get frequently get the least attention. Thanks for reminding us. You obviously have some sympathizers.

In areas that have less energy available, or higher energy costs (such as Europe, and asia), people are already embracing efficiency... by choice or regulation. Here in the United States we are still caught up in celebrity lifestyle, and it may soon catch up with us. I felt that the post was geared more toward us Westerners (though I may be mistaken). As far as I know, people haven't harnessed tidal power to a great extent; there's a lot of potential there for China and other burgeoning countries... and doesn't do the environmental damage of damming a river.

"Surely we should be looking to do both in parallel. I.e. encourage the development of windfarms to replace natural gas/diesel fired generators for electricity while ALSO making our homes more energy efficient."

Jo, on a larger scale, I agree. There is certainly no reason why we shouldnt build wind power to replace fossil fuel generation while working on the home front to promote conservation. My point is simply that we ought to first do whatever is most effective at offseting fossil fuel consumption (efficiency, conservation and renewables all do this). Most often, the cheapest and most effective way to do this is through efficiency measures. This is especially true for home/small business owners where the kinds of economies of scale available to industrial scale renewable generation are not available. To make this more concrete, say you only have $10,000 to spend to make your home more energy efficient and/or put up solar/micro wind. If you, like most people, have yet to do anything to retrofit your house to make it more energy efficient, I'm positive that that would be the most effective use of your money. So that's what you should do first. If you have enough money to do both - efficiency AND solar - go ahead and do it but don't get caught up in the allure of solar power and miss out the frequently lost opportunities of energy efficiency.

"But there's a difference between efficiency and conservation, and we need both.

MGR, you are right, they ARE different and that is kinda my point initially. We often use conservation when we really mean efficiency. I think it is important to use "efficiency" when we mean 'same output, less input' - i.e. same refrigeration, less electricity consumption etc. - and use "conservation" when we mean 'less output (use), less input'. Like you said, an 80 mpg car is efficient; driving only 5,000 miles a year is conservation. Both ARE important but I think we are missing out on the marketing potential and appeal of efficiency by not distinguishing it from conservation. Conservation is a much harder sell - a sell we are still going to have to make every effort to pitch - than efficiency. And NO conservation DOES NOT MEAN HAVING LESS FUN! I totally agree and that is why I practice as much conservation as I can in my own lifestyle. It is simply harder to convince other people of that (I do my best whenever I can).

Thanks for your comments, Jesse. Glad to have you on Treehugger!

When someone installs a solar system the first thinbg they are advised to do is increase their current insulation..