Bill Decker, SR highly recommends these excerpts from:
Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2008
Time Magazine - Wasting Our Watts
By Michael Grunwald
The U.S. has an energy resource that is perfectly clean, remarkably cheap, surprisingly abundant and immediately available. It has astounding potential to reduce the carbon emissions that threaten our planet, lesson our dependence on foreign oil that threatens our security and the energy costs that threaten our wallets, and we don't need to import it.
This miracle is energy efficiency, and it's often ignored and it's a simple concept: wasting less energy. Or more precisely, consuming less energy to get the same amount of heat for your shower, light for your office and power for your factory. It turns out to be much less expensive, destructive and time-intensive to reduce demand through efficiency than to increase supply through new drilling or new power plants.
There are two basic ways to save energy without deprivation or daily effort. We can use more efficient machinery, like fuel-efficient cars that guzzle less gas, or those pigtailed compact fluorescent lightbulbs that use 75% less power than traditional bulbs, or state-of-the-art refrigerators that are three times as efficient as 1973 models. We can conserve energy. It is as simple as caulking doors and windows and otherwise weatherizing our homes to avoid heating our attics and the outdoors. And since buildings devour two-thirds of our power, we are talking about tremendous opportunity to save vast amounts of energy.
If the experts consider it such a win-win no-brainer, why don't we already do more of it? Part of the answer involves marketing; even superefficient motors, boilers, routers and compressors lack a wow factor, and politicians don't get to cut ribbons for efficiency tweaks. But most of the answer involves money. We complain about the cost of our energy, but we still waste a lot of it. Most efficiency investments pay for themselves within three years, but all require at least some up-front costs. Even home and business owners who do reap the benefits of efficiency are often reluctant to shell out for top-of-the-line furnaces, energy efficient windows. Those $3 twisty bulbs are a classic example: they last eight times as long as regular bulbs, and their payback period is a few months. Companies like DuPont, Dow, Cisco and Wal-Mart have all saved big bucks by greening buildings, vehicles and operations, and a burgeoning industry of high-tech energy-services companies is helping businesses reduce their energy bills in exchange for a slice of the verifiable savings. At Honeywell, a $36.6 billion company, half its portfolio is now related to efficiency. And even utilities that lack incentives to reduce overall demand are trying to reduce peak demand so that they don't have to turn on costly plants or buy expensive power on the open market." Efficiency is the best cost-effective energy source that addresses global warming, energy dependence and volatile prices.
Followers
