Does energy efficiency matter?

Just days on the job, Britain’s new Energy and Climate Change Secretary Edward Davey sent the message that he is serious about the government’s “Green Deal” by creating a new division in his department: the Energy Efficiency Deployment Office, or EEDO.

“I’m hugely enthusiastic about energy efficiency,” said Edward Davey in his first speech since replacing Chris Huhne, who resigned in the wake of questions regarding speeding charges against him. “It’s the cheapest way of cutting carbon — and cutting bills for consumers. It has to be right at the heart of what we do.”

The concept of energy efficiency is a fairly simple one. Basically, the more closely energy into something (a car, a data center, an air conditioner, an Xbox, etc.) matches that something’s useful energy output (“useful” meaning you don’t include losses from heat, friction, and so on), the more energy efficient it is. Achieving optimal energy efficiency, on the other hand, isn’t always so easy.

Energy efficiency is sometimes called “the fifth fuel” because of its large potential for contributing to stable energy supplies. (The first four fuels are oil, coal, nuclear and renewables.) Efficiency was one of the key strategies identified by Princeton researchers Robert Socolow and Steve Pacala when they developed their climate stabilization wedge game in 2004. Physicist Arthur Rosenfeld, a long-time influential member of the California Energy Commission, made energy efficiency a lifetime quest … to the point a unit of energy savings (the “Rosenfeld”) has been named after him.

So how big an impact could efficiency really have on our global energy appetite?

• At the grid level, a really big one. In the US, less-than-perfect powerline insulation leads to an average 7 percent loss in electricity from starting point to ending point. (“It’s like going to the market and buying a full container of milk and then arriving at home to see a glassful has disappeared,” says IBM researcher Philip Shemella.) Add in the inefficiencies in power generation, and those losses go even higher: “In 2010, 24 per cent of UK primary energy demand was lost through energy generation, transformation and distribution losses,” notes the British government’s brief on the importance of energy efficiency.
• At the other end of the scale — our homes — efficiency can also make a significant dent. The drain of standby power for all those devices we leave plugged in 24/7, even when they’re not in use, amounts to up to 10 percent of total residential energy demand, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). And this problem, writes Cambridge’s David MacKay (author of the brilliant book, “Sustainable energy — without the hot air”) can be boiled down to a different inefficiency: penny-wise, pound-foolish manufacturing. “It’s perfectly possible to make standby systems that draw less than 0.01 W; but manufacturers, saving themselves a penny in the manufacturing costs, are saddling the consumer with an annual cost of pounds,” MacKay states.
• And in terms of global greenhouse gas emissions, the impact of energy efficiency could be nothing short of huge, leading to reductions of 25 to 40 percent.

Efficiency has already put us in a better place than we could be. Without better insulation and home heating improvements, British homes today would be consuming twice as much energy as they did in 1970, according to the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). But clearly we could do a lot better. Why haven’t we yet?

Society’s endless pursuit of growth.

In its 2004 report, “Growth isn’t Possible,” the new economics foundation compared the endless pursuit of growth to an “impossible hamster.” A newborn hamster, the report explains, might grow rapidly in its first weeks, doubling its weight every week until it hits puberty. If it kept growing at that rate, though, the rodent would weigh nine billion tons by its first birthday.

The quest for continued economic growth includes not just more stuff, but endlessly bigger and better stuff. That’s why cars, electronic devices, households and more stay energy-hungry despite all the individual efficiency improvements that have been made to them. It’s human nature, it seems, to keep wanting more … and it doesn’t help when that tendency joins up with conspiracy theories about green energy and smart technology.

Can we efficiency our way out of that? There’s the question.