By Elisa Wood
July 27, 2012
John Lennon
wrote that life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other
plans. Apparently, the same is
true of energy efficiency. Energy savings happen when we’re busy doing other
things – Internet-based things specifically.
We use email, bank
online and download music not to save energy, but to make life easier and more
interesting. Energy efficiency is
a happy byproduct.
What online pursuits
serve up the most energy savings in day-to-day life?
The Global
e-Sustainability Initiative, or GeSI, recently commissioned the American
Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) and the Yankee Group to answer
this question. The study, “Measuring the Energy Reduction Impact
of Selected Broadband-Enabled Activities within Households.” looked at eight broadband-related activities
in the US, UK, Spain, Italy, Germany and France: telecommuting, Internet news, online banking, e-commerce,
music and video downloads or streaming, e-education, digital photography, and
e-mail.
Telecommuting provides
the greatest energy savings among the activities (83 to 86 percent). From an
energy efficiency perspective, it’s better to log-on to the office than drive
there. Reading the news online and participating in e-education offered the
least energy savings. Consumers tend
to undertake these activities to complement, not replace, the old-fashion way
of doing things. They still read the newspaper and travel to classes, so offset
the savings gained by the online activity.
As telecommuting
expands, and more of our daily routine takes place online, these eight activities
could cut energy use by about two percent or the equivalent of 500 million
barrels of oil annually. Not bad, but still small compared with the savings
offered by a series of ‘scale’ activities: smart grid, manufacturing and
building upgrades, electric cars, combined heat and power.
So while it’s
nice that we inadvertently save energy, say by banking online, it won’t
revolutionize our energy picture. But
another recent report by the ACEEE shows what might: Intelligent efficiency.
Think systems or
cities instead of light bulbs or refrigerators. That’s intelligent efficiency. The
US could reduce its energy use by as much as 22 percent by focusing more on
system rather than gadget efficiency, says the report “A Defining Framework for
Intelligent Efficiency.”
“This is not your father’s device-driven
approach to energy efficiency,” said R. Neal Elliott, ACEEE associate director
for research. “A large portion of
our past efficiency gains came from improvements in individual products,
appliances, and equipment, such as light bulbs, electric motors, or cars and
trucks. And while device-level technology improvements will continue to play an
important role, looking ahead we must take a systems-based approach to
dramatically scale up energy efficiency to meet our future energy challenges.
Through intelligent efficiency, utility systems, interconnected cities,
transportation systems, and communications networks can become the new normal
across the United States and will undergird national and regional economies
that, even in the face of increasingly scarce resources, grow and thrive.”
ACEEE cites
several examples of intelligent efficiency already in the works. Among them is
Envision Charlotte, an attempt to reduce energy use in city buildings through a
partnership of Duke Energy, Cisco, and Verizon. Interactive video monitors in
the lobbies of downtown office buildings display the collective energy used, in
near real time, by buildings in the core of the North Carolina city. People
pass by the monitors and see the easily readable data, learn energy efficiency
ideas, and hear about success stories. They become more conscious of energy
through this repeated exposure and their behavior changes – that’s the theory. Duke
Energy expects the project to reduce electricity usage 20 percent by 2016 in
uptown Charlotte’s business community.
One important
point here. None of this – our online household activities or intelligent
efficiency – excludes a tried-and-true approach to save energy: utility
sponsored programs. A third recent study by ACEEE (Yes, this is a productive
organization.) finds that utilities increased energy efficiency budgets four
fold in a decade, from $1.1 billion in 2000 to $4.6 billion in 2010. Often when utilities save energy
rather than buy it, it turns out to be the cheapest approach.
“The concept of
energy efficiency as a utility resource is really very simple,” said Marty
Kushler, ACEEE senior fellow and co-author of the report, ‘Three Decades and
Counting: A Historical Review and Current Assessment of Electric Utility Energy
Efficiency Activity in the States.’ “To keep an electric system in balance, you
can either add supply resources or reduce customer demand. Utilities, regulators, and policymakers
have increasingly come to realize that it is far cheaper to reduce demand
through energy efficiency programs than it is to construct, fuel, and operate
additional electric generating plants.”
The report found
that energy efficiency remains the lowest cost energy resource available to
utilities by a wide margin. Saving electricity through efficiency is about
one-third the cost of generating it from a power plant.
It’s not
surprising, therefore, that states have set aggressive energy efficiency goals;
no states are scaling back. Instead, “the momentum is toward growth across the
map,” says the utility report.
Sometimes we
save energy inadvertently, and sometimes by design. Whichever, it is clear that
our digital economy, combined with our increasing understanding of the programs
and behaviors that lead to energy savings, create a clear
path for growth in energy efficiency.
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