energy efficiency

Short-term high gas prices (hopefully) mitigate long-term environmental disasters

I have been reading Sean Casten's post on the economics of carbon pricing with interest. After some thought, here's my take. A carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system will, without question, raise the price of energy, at least in the short term. In the long-term, it may well be that technological developments lead us to new energy sources that turn out to be cheaper than anything we have today. But that's pure speculation.

But in the short term, the costs of a carbon tax or the costs of permits in a cap-and-trade system will follow the energy through the system and eventually raise prices at the consumer level. So prices will increase.

But that fact is a distraction. The real issues are, first, how much will prices rise, and second, what will happen if we do nothing?

The case for fuel-agnostic efficiency

Those of us who care about energy and environmental policy have a bad habit: the lazy but rhetorically convenient tendency to refer to energy issues as if they were fuel issues. From solar to coal to uranium, we have developed a shorthand that uses these words to describe a whole fuel-chain, from raw fuel extraction/recovery to end-use consumption. But the language is dangerous. What matters is efficiency -- true, fuel-agnostic efficiency, applied equally to every possible fuel-chain we know. Not because efficiency is an alternative to any given fuel, but because any other energy policy is ultimately unsustainable, in every sense of the word.

Cool housing for oldsters

People who think about how we're going to adapt to lower-energy living arrangements often miss that the U.S. continues to gray rapidly. Given that we've had almost sixty years of radical suburbanization and cross-country relocation, sundering the extended family networks that once provided child and elder care, we're in a pickle when it comes to figuring out how to care for elders.

Here's an encouraging story about a new facility that really seems to get it. My question is why we aren't thinking about these for just-getting-starteds and young adults ... we could call it co-housing ...

The latest sorties in the war over nuclear power

There have been several good entries in the never-ending nuclear debate lately. I’m pulling several together into one post, so all the vicious arguing can center in one comment thread. Fun! In a long, detailed, and devastating cover story in The Nation, Christian Parenti asks, “What Nuclear Renaissance?” Peeling away the hype and PR, he […]

Castens implement Phase II of global domination plan

On my morning commute, I always listen to music. Maybe two or three times in the last couple of years, I’ve listened to NPR instead, but it’s rare. This morning, though, on a whim, I flipped over to hear if there was any primary news. And what is literally the very first thing I hear? […]

ACEEE on the carbon-free energy source no one talks about

What if there were a source of carbon-free energy that in a single year in the U.S. drew $300 billion in private investment, supported 1.6 million jobs, and generated 1.7 quads of energy, roughly equivalent to the total energy required to run 40 mid-sized coal plants? We would drill anywhere, dig up anything, go to […]

We can’t wait for new nukes, so what do we do now?

Suppose the leaders of this country were wise enough to put a moratorium on traditional coal (the most urgent climate policy needed, as discussed here)? How will we meet our steadily growing demand for carbon-free power over the next decade? And to get on the 450 ppm path, we don't just need to stop U.S. emissions from rising -- we should return to 1990 levels (or lower) by 2020.

Nuclear

Nuclear is an obvious possibility, beloved of conservative Francophiles like McCain and Gingrich, but energy realists understand that it is very unlikely new nuclear plants could deliver many kilowatt-hours of electricity by 2018, let alone affordable kwh. Indeed, back in August, Tulsa World reported:

American Electric Power Co. isn't planning to build any new nuclear power plants because delays will push operational starts to 2020, CEO Michael Morris said Tuesday ...

Builders would also have to queue for certain parts and face "realistic" costs of about $4,000 a kilowatt, he said ...

"I'm not convinced we'll see a new nuclear station before probably the 2020 timeline," Morris said.

And that in spite of the amazing subsidies and huge loan guarantees for nuclear power in the 2005 energy bill (see here).

Emission prices don’t reduce consumption sufficiently

Recently, I pointed out that emission prices do in fact get passed along to consumers. However, it's important to add that making low carbon alternatives cheaper won't by itself ensure that they are adopted.

My online book Cooling It! No Hair Shirt Solutions to Global Warming documents numerous profitable-but-overlooked energy-saving alternatives. Numerous other people have pointed out the same thing. The Rocky Mountain Institute produces megabytes of examples. Economists refer to the fact that profitable opportunities to save energy tend to be overlooked as "low demand elasticity." You can find out more about why this tends to occur in an annotated bibliography I put together, currently posted as a Word doc at the Carbon Tax center website.

Just to correct some ambiguities, this is not to say that an emissions price won't accomplish anything or is not needed - simply that it is not sufficient. That if we want the problem solved without absurdly high carbon prices, we need to use other policy tools, and not limit ourselves to putting a price on emission.

Output-based carbon regulations ignore critical types of efficiency

"Output-based standards" are getting credit around here as a politically impractical but sensible proposal. David described them as "relentlessly efficient."

I'm sure relentless efficiency was the intent, but in fact it is very much a way of picking winners, of rewarding one particular type of efficiency at expense of others. The idea is that within industries, a standard will be set for maximum emissions per useful BTU delivered. So if you are heating tomatoes as part of making tomato paste, the standard would apply to your emissions per BTU used to raise the temperature of a tomato. The problem is that while this rewards delivering those BTUs more efficiently, it does not reward heating the tomatoes less, perhaps by substituting a filtering process for some of the heating.

When I brought this up in comments, Sean argued that the second method still rewards by lowering fuel bills. But then, so does the first. If delivering BTUs more efficiently needs an incentive over and above fuel saving, then so does finding a way to use fewer BTUs in the first place.