Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Re: [Phys-l] Energy use (was CFLs)



At 10:54 -0400 04/09/2009, Rick Tarara wrote:

Please read my previous posts on the use of per-capita energy consumption.
It is a VERY poor way to compare nations.

So we can't use per capita figures, and we can't use total energy use since that doesn't take into account the obvious effects of population differences (China now uses a bit more energy than we do, but their population is 4 times ours, so that's kind of meaningless). Can we use energy per GDP? There are problems with that, too, although some graphs I've seen that plot energy per GDP vs. energy per capita that are pretty instructive. How about your take on how we can compare energy use on a global basis?

I'd like to see someone DO THE NUMBERS for a 50% energy reduction.

Lester Brown has done it world-wide in his "Plan B" series of books, and Arjun Makhijani has done it for the US in "Carbon-Free and Nuclear Free: A Roadmap for US Policy." A colleague of mine, John Blackburn, has done it for North Carolina, but that study hasn't been published yet.

California's 2/3 energy use doesn't impress me. If the population centers
(San Diego to San Francisco) had to suffer through sub zero winters and
triple digit summers, the energy use would be somewhat different. ;-)

Of course in 1973, California used about the same per capita energy as the rest of the country to run its very temperate climate, and since then, the nation has increased its energy use by about 50% and California has stayed close to steady. Has California's climate improved that much? Is this a benefit for them from global warming? Oh, and while California was holding steady on its energy use, many of the programs that they instituted to improve energy efficiency were adopted nationwide (efficient refrigerators, for example), and yet the nations energy use has continued upward. Has the rest of the nation been suffering from global cooling during that period?

My project groups struggle every year (between efficiency and conservation)
to come up with a 25% savings--and we DO the numbers. Once you double (even triple) small vehicle mileage and put in as many heat pumps as possible you are a long way short of 25%.

Obviously they are not doing enough. Just installing heat pumps isn't all that much (In fact, heat pumps may not be a good way to go in climates where it gets really cold). How about better insulation, better thermal design, using solar thermal water heating, thermal windows with IR coating, reflective roofs, geothermal heating systems, wrapping and sealing ductwork, placing windows to take maximum advantage of daylight without allowing the sun to strike them directly, sealing the house to eliminate excessive exchange of air between inside and outside (with controlled exchange that adjusts how it is exchanged so that the air removed is that closest to the existing outside temperature), to name just a few (and omitting the obvious CFL or LED use). It is possible to build new houses that use 50% and less than the average existing house in an area without adding to the cost of the house (imagine a house that is well enough insulated to not need a heating system, thus no ducting--that will pay for the extra insulation). I think your students need to look a bit harder at some of the web sites by the builders who are rapidly learning how to build energy efficient buildings.

Get cars off the road by creating bus-only lanes on highways instead of building new lanes. And quit subsidizing private cars by building road for them wherever they want to go and not charging enough gas tax to fix the roads from damage, especially from large trucks.

You can't do much with big trucks or rail traffic, and despite the inefficiency, air travel is not that big of the total.

Trucks are a bit of a problem, but rail is already pretty efficient, so getting the semi-trailers onto the railroad (as was pretty common 50 years ago, until we started to give the truckers huge subsidies that made it cheaper to drive themselves rather than using the "piggy-back" rail freight method) should help some there.

I agree that air travel isn't a big enough segment to have an effect on overall efficiency, but what CO2 they emit they deliver directly to where its needed and so it is more effective as a GHG than CO2 emitted at the earth's surface. Cutting back on short-haul air travel would certainly help that, even if it wouldn't help the energy efficiency that much. But high speed rail for passenger travel to replace short-haul air would be a help.

You have less than 1% of the total energy use to be saved with CFLs.
Industrial numbers are hard to come by, but since energy efficiency is part
of the 'bottom line' we can be pretty sure that newer facilities are pretty
energy efficient.

Some are, and some aren't. In fact that is part of the reason that industrial data is hard to come by. Those who are efficient don't want to give away their secrets and those who aren't don't want to admit it.

Certainly most commercial/institutional lighting has been
fluorescent for some time now. When you get into conservation, you again
find the biggest savings would be something like massive car-pooling, but
you've already cut
passenger use by maybe 2/3 so the energy savings are much smaller than
anticipated. When you do the overall numbers for appliances and maybe get
rid of all energy using recreational vehicles (say goodbye to the small city
in which I live--in the news lately--Elkhart Indiana) you find that is a
small percentage as well. We can ship all the heavy manufacturing overseas
(Oh, sorry, we are doing that!), sell more Sri Lankan sweaters and mandate
thermostats be set just slightly above freezing, hope the recession becomes
a depression--no one working means no one commuting, foreclose the remaining
single-family homes and move everyone into boxy apartments, vacate all the
states (including California) West of the Mississippi, or some other
draconian measures like these, but otherwise I really don't see the 50% as a
reasonable, achievable goal.

Moving our industry overseas doesn't help much. It just moves relatively inefficient processes into areas where they are more likely to become very inefficient, as well a further exacerbating our employment problems, so we have to figure out how to make it attractive for businesses to stay here, short of giving them the store in tax breaks or impoverishing the domestic work force.

Japan seems to be the 'poster child' here for efficiency--approximately the
50% less energy usage per (person, GDP, etc), but there are tremendous
differences. Japan has 10 times the population density of the U.S. and only
a fraction of the land area. Most of their raw materials are imported (but
whose balance sheet gets charged for the energy to mine and ship these?),
the culture is much different (largely due to the high population density)
but also for historical reasons.

Japan's lack of domestic natural resources is really an advantage, since they are forced to make an effort to minimize the amount of raw materials that they import by using what they get as efficiently as possible, and due to their population density, they have grown accustomed to living in cramped spaces and a lack of privacy. But the energy budget for imports and exports should be relatively simple--although it seems not to be used as much as it should--and that is charging half the cost to the sending nation and half to the receiving nation. Of course if you can get away with it, charging is all to the other end of the line makes you look much better by comparison.


So...I think we can struggle to a 25% savings--but I find 50% far fetched.

Check out the work of Brown and Makhijani, and you might also start looking at some of the stuff the Rocky Mountain Institute is doing. Amory Lovins is making a pretty good living showing businesses how to operate more efficiently, and teaching them how to make money by saving energy.

The programs I am familiar with all work at the efficiency bit incrementally, like 1-2% a year. I think it would be hard to do it a whole lot faster than that--maybe 3% per year but that would be pushing the limit of reasonable possibility. A steady 2% for 35 years would get us to 50% by about 2045.

Hugh

--
Hugh Haskell
mailto:hugh@ieer.org
mailto:hhaskell@mindspring,.com

So-called "global warming" is just a secret ploy by wacko tree-huggers to make America energy independent, clean our air and water, improve the fuel efficiency of our vehicles, kick-start 21st-century industries, and make our cities safer. Don't let them get away with it!!

Chip Giller, Founder, Grist.org