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April 22nd is Earth Day and you might be wondering what should we do? After all, the problem of global warming is huge and we have an administration that is worse than an ostrich in facing the problem. Yet, there are so many things we can do, that the question becomes where do we start? When the OPEC oil embargo hit in October 1973, Rosenfeld did a little math. He discovered that if Americans used energy as efficiently as the Europeans or Japanese, the United States could have been exporting oil in 1973, rather than sitting in rationing lines at gas stations. The solution, he realized, was not to bend the Arab oil regimes to America's will but to end America's thralldom to them by wasting less energy. This discovery, that energy usage had a strong demand side component, put him on the road to a life long journey in looking at how we use energy. And it led to the invention of some simple, yet powerful technologies which we are still employing today.
Realizing that the answer to many of our energy problems was using what energy we already had more wisely, Rosenfeld help create the energy efficiency standards such as California's Title 24 which we all live by now. He did this by working on the problem like how do you build houses that need less airconditioning where its hot and less heating where its cold. And the result? These standards are used in 15% - 20% of all new buildings in the United States. They have also been adopted by countries throughout the world as they look at how to reduce their energy use. Rosenfeld went on to help define energy efficiency standards for many of the appliances we use in our homes. As a result, our refrigerators use approximately 50 kwh per year rather than the 250 kwh per year (or more) that they ate in 1974. This focus on looking at using energy more wisely had been tremendously effective and provides us enormous savings. California embraced energy efficiency with alacrity. And while much of the rest of the country increased their energy use per capita, California's energy use per person has been largely flat. (See chart) But then came the energy deregulation craze, and California utilities no longer were regulated to keep working on efficiency. After all, the mantra went, the market would do a better job than a regulatory body in figuring out what to do. Yet, energy, like a number of other things in life, doesn't fit the free market model very well. Because the goal of the energy market is to maximize profit and profit comes from selling more watts. As the NRDC article says,
What the market, based solely on maximizing the profits of the energy producers, created was a perfect racket leading to the energy crisis of 2000-2001. It was then that ole supply-side himself, Dick Cheney *, opined that California had not been building sufficient capacity and that the state relied too much on conservation.
So what should we do first? Let's follow California's sensible lead.
One complaint I've seen is how expensive electricity is in California and that this results in companies wanting to do business elsewhere. Yet, each kwh of energy used in California goes farther than a kwh in another state (see chart). In fact, when the Chinese investigated adopting some of California's standards and calculated the costs, they concluded that they could invest a quarter of what it would cost to generate 1 MW into technology that could save 1 MW. California's approach to charging more to save more is cheaper in the long run.
htttp://www.theleftcoaster.com Mary Ratcliff is a senior writer and editor at The Left Coaster and Pacific Views.
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