Efficiency: The Global Warming Solution Hiding in Plain Sight
- Frances Beinecke
- President of NRDC, New York City
- Blog | About
- Posted May 16, 2008 in Green Enterprise , Living Sustainably , Solving Global Warming
When we talk about opportunities to cut global warming emissions, most of us think about wind turbines, solar panels, and hybrid cars. But according to a study done by the financial analysts at McKinsey & Company, the fastest, cheapest, and easiest way to reduce global warming pollution is energy savings.
Investing in energy efficiency is our best defense against global warming. A recent study commissioned by NRDC found that it could bring us almost 20 percent of the emissions cuts required by Lieberman-Warner.
But America hasn’t had enough incentive to pick this low-hanging fruit. (See my colleague Dave Hawkins’ take on what incentives work in a Forbes piece on CNN.com.) If we enact firm limits on global warming pollution--through the Lieberman-Warner Act--we will create an enormous and profitable market for energy efficiency. And the energy savings will be sweeping.
How Small Efficiency Improvements Save Billions of DollarsConsider the humble computer monitor. There are more than 100 million monitors in use in U.S. homes and businesses, and together, they consume almost 1 percent of our nation’s electricity use. A few years ago, NRDC asked monitor manufacturers to set a more stringent performance standard for the popular flat panel LCD monitors. Thanks to these changes, the EPA estimates that by 2010, the nation will save approximately 5 million tons of carbon dioxide--the equivalent of taking 3 million cars off the road. It will also save consumers billions of dollars in lower electricity bills.
Computer monitors are just the beginning. Flat-screen TVs, cable boxes, dish washers, home furnaces, office heating systems, big-box-store air conditioning; all of these can become more energy efficient.
Efficiency Fuels Economic GrowthMaking products and buildings more efficient can generate high-paying jobs on American soil not only for engineers and software designers, but also “green collar” jobs that provide a pathway out of poverty for people who become trained as lighting and insulation installers and weatherizing specialists. Department of Energy studies show that energy efficiency measures can create up to four times as many jobs as constructing and operating large central power stations.
When businesses and consumers save money on their utility bills, they have more money to invest in other parts of the economy--a development that has been shown to generate jobs.
Efficiency & Economic Growth Go Together: The California Example
Over the past two decades, NRDC has helped California enact a suite of energy efficiency standards for appliances and buildings. Now the average California resident uses 40 percent less electricity than the typical American. And still California’s gross state product more than doubled since the efficiency programs were created.
At a time when the nation’s economy appears to be in recession, it is especially critical that we seize the low-hanging fruit of energy efficiency--and all the economic and environmental benefits that come with it.
I am proud to say that NRDC leads the pack on this issue. NRDC has been a leader for 35 years in crafting the strongest efficiency standards. We recently concentrated our expertise in our newly opened Center for Energy Efficiency Standards.
But we can’t win this fight alone. While NRDC works on the policy side, I encourage you to bring the simplicity and greatness of the energy efficiency solution to your own homes and offices.
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Comments
Earl Killian — May 17 2008 01:56 AM
To get an idea of what implementing California's efficiency policies, incentives, and regulations at the Federal level could do, consider that it took 30 years for the US to bloat to using 80% more capita than California, so it might take 30 years for the US to return to California's level (which has been steady at about 7,000 kWh per capita), so we're talking about 2040. Amazingly simply adopting already proven efficiency measures more than cancels out the growth in the US population to 392 million in 2040. We could reduce our electricity generation by 25% despite the new people, and without building any net new generation. Indeed we could shut down some.
LT — May 18 2008 08:06 PM
Huge efficiency improvements can also be made generating power. Old coal fired power plants may have an efficiency of 25%. (These are generally the dirty power plants grandfathered in under the 77 Clean Air Act that do not have pollution controls, the ones at the center of the New Source Review debate.) New coal plants--especially integrated gas combined cycle plants, can have efficiencies approaching 50%--about equal to natural gas plants. Though not as clean, even modern pulverized coal technology is a huge improvement. These plants, especially IGCC, are be much cleaner and could potentially generate almost twice the electricity from the same amount of coal, cutting global warming emissions in half and cutting conventional smog emissions by much more.
Keep in mind, this only works if we REPLACE existing dirty, inefficient plants. It doesn't work if we just add new plants to the existing fleet, no matter how clean.
Earl Killian — May 20 2008 01:20 PM
LT, the problem with replacing old coal plants with new ones is that we will have to close down those new ones before their design lifetime is over, or it will have to be built from day one with carbon capture and sequestration. Either way that makes the power produced very expensive. CCS also causes 25% more coal to be burned, which means 25% more mountops removed.
I've also never heard of a coal plant achieving better than 44% efficiency (and those are in Japan).
Remember that we are now increasing CO2 at over 2ppm per year with our existing set of power plants. If we never built another fossil power plant, we would reach 450 ppm in only 31-33 years at this rate.
LT — May 20 2008 08:43 PM
Earl,
Your comments are very good. I was a bit sloppy with my figures.
According to Environmental Defense's "California Coal Shadow", p 31, natural gas combined cycle efficiencies are 47.2%. IGCC Coal (integrated gasified combined cycle or gasified coal) efficiencies, like all coal technologies, are highly dependent on the type of coal burned. If the coal is bituminous from Appalachia, efficiencies can be 44.9%. (You were right.) If it is sub-bituminous Wyoming coal, the efficiency drops to 40.2%, perhaps less.
Surprisingly, some of the pulverized coal technologies aren't that much behind IGCC in efficiency. Data for the more efficient technologies in the above report vary from 37.1% to 42.9%. I'm a lay person, not an expert, but I believe that pulverized coal plants cost 20% less to build than IGCC plants. No doubt why the coal folks almost always choose pulverized technology. (The US only has 2 IGCC facilities.) The kicker is that the conventional pollution from pulverized coal is many times that of IGCC. This is the pollution that is killing thousands of Americans annually, sending tens of thousands more to emergency rooms, destroying crops, acidifying forests . . . And of course, if carbon sequestration ever proves realistic, IGCC may be the only technology that works.
I argue that the plants that were grandfathered in by the 77 Clean Air Act have exceeded their life expectancy. Some of these plants date to the Korean War. (Does anyone out there know off-hand how many of these grandfathered coal plants there are?) The idea behind New Source Review was that these plants would be replaced with modern, efficient plants using BACT pollution controls within a few decades. But the utilities have preferred to keep the old plants running. They are often very profitable, in spite of upkeep costs and low efficiencies, because the capital investments were paid off decades ago. It's a crime. But just because they still run is no reason to keep them running. If it makes sense to change a light bulb before the incandescent burns out, replacing those old plants makes even more.
Exchange one of those old plants with an IGCC unit and you get 80% more energy from the same amount of coal and huge reductions in conventional pollution. Eighty percent more energy from the same amount of coal means 80% less CO2. Multiply that by 100 plants and--for roughly the price of the war in Iraq this year--you've made some significant headway towards reducing total CO2 emissions.
You are right, carbon capture takes huge amounts of energy. No one talks about this. If sequestration consumes 25% of an average plant's energy, we would have to increase the total number of coal plants by 1/3 just to make the additional power needed to sequester the carbon. But with IGCC plants, the problem is somewhat easier. IGCC efficiency with sequestration drops to 37%, but your still using 50% less coal to generate the same amount of power that the older plant, operating at 25%, generated. (By the way, I understand the 25% number is typical of plants being built in China right now at the rate of one or two a week.)
Coal is difficult because it is so nasty in so many ways. My main point is that we shouldn't just concentrate on consuming energy more efficiently. We can also make huge gains generating energy more efficiently. I believe that Emory Lovins said we typically use only 3% of the energy in the coal when we burn it to turn on a light (inefficient coal plant, inefficient bulb).
Tearing down a mountain for the coal is a viscous crime. Tearing it down for 3% of the energy and letting the rest go to waste makes it a senseless crime as well.