Years ago, I exchanged a series of emails with uber-blogger Steven Den Beste about energy usage in the United States. He had done a very detailed analysis of the various alternative energy schemes and made a number of very good points. He's a real engineer, so his points were fact-based rather than wish-based and very interesting. They're probably still around on his blog archives, if you want to search for them (he doesn't blog any more, for personal, medical reasons).
Back then, most of my points were based on very limited data. I had some strong suspicions, but not very much data about electricity usage in the US. As fate would have it, however, I ended up in a job working for an energy management company, and this has brought me into contact with lots of first-hand energy data. It turns out, my suspicions were not only on target, but I had understated most of my conclusions.
My premise is that we in the United States waste a huge amount of the energy we generate and that much of it can be recovered with only minor expense — minor, that is, compared to switching over to ethanol or paving two percent of the US over with solar panels (note: it's just as bad, probably worse, in most other countries, but I'm sticking to what I know). The waste is in all sectors of the economy, but I'm going to stick to the particular aspect I've come to know about: the commercial building. This isn't much of a limitation. According to California energy executives, about a third of their power is consumed by commercial buildings and I imagine that this percentage is about the same for all but the most rural states.
How is this energy wasted? Well, stupidly, for the most part. Badly maintained, installed or configured equipment is the biggest waste, but we also encounter incredibly poorly designed buildings, intentional waste, waste due to ignorance and waste due to poor technology. Let's take them one by one.
From my own experience, I would estimate that roughly twenty percent of all installed air handling units (rooftop HVAC units, mainly) are not operating efficiently for one reason or another. Even worse, I would guess that about five percent of them are simply blowing outside air; which causes a double waste since you not only use energy to blow the outside air, but the other HVAC units have to work extra to make up for it. The reason for much of this is that it's hard to tell if an HVAC unit is working in a large space. Next time you're in a "big box" store, look up and see where all of the air conditioning is coming from. Imagine that one of the units is just blowing outside air, what will happen down where you are? The answer is "nothing". Those high ceilings allow the air to mix and the other HVACs can compensate for the one that is down. I've seen lots of places where HVACs have been down for months, wasting hundreds or thousands of dollars' worth of electricity, and no one has known about it.
Even worse are instances where the HVACs are improperly installed or controlled. I've seen a place where the HVAC on the roof was improperly specified by the architect to be a much more powerful unit than was needed. It would switch on and the volume it cooled would be cooled so fast that it would overshoot and get downright cold. The HVAC would then shut off, wait a few minutes, then kick in to heat the space it had just cooled. Up and down, all day long, wasting countless kilowatt hours. In another case, the headquarters of a national chain had HVACs that were improperly controlled. When it was warm outside, some of the units would kick in and cool the space while others would heat the space. On average, the temperature was OK (except for a few conference rooms that were freezing and a couple of offices that were hot all of the time). The occupants had no idea that their HVACs were wasting energy at a furious rate (their facilities people should have known, but they were clueless).
Architects should be retired from practice if a building they design uses more than 50% more electricity per square foot than the median for buildings of that type. I've seen a restaurant designed with a west-facing wall of glass that allowed sunlight to fall on dark floor tile. The design was so bad, with no bushes or trees to block the sun, that the HVAC units had to cool that part of the restaurant when the outside air temperature was only 50 degrees. I've seen retail spaces that use far more power than they need to because the designer didn't know that florescent bulbs can be ordered in "warm" colors just like incandescent lights. Instead of efficient florescent bulbs (which not only produce light for much less power than incandescent, but also don't heat up the space and put a higher load on the HVACs), the designer specified all incandescent bulbs, just so the "product" would be lit with a "warm" light and therefore sell better. Ignorance or intentional waste? Take your pick.
Intentional waste is really bad. I've seen a convenience store/gas station where outside lighting used 45 kilowatts of power. That's enough power for about a dozen fairly large homes, just to say "here we are, buy some gas!". How often have you driven by a business at late at night and seen their parking lot lights on full blast, even though everyone had gone home? Drive around any commercial or industrial area and you will see buildings with all of their lights on a four in the morning. Parking lots and offices empty, lights blazing. Sometimes you will even see decorative features, such as fountains or message signs, going full speed even when everyone is asleep. I've seen regular-sized, stand-alone retail outlet (think of a big shoe store) that used 20 kilowatts of power at night when the place was dark and everyone had gone home. The people that worked there just left all of their equipment and gear running all night. Another store of the same size from the same chain used only 4 kilowatts of power at night (multiply that out: 16 KW times eight hours per night time 365 days per year and you get about 47,000 kilowatt hours, three or four thousand dollars worth of electricity wasted for no reason at all —and that's just one store out of hundreds in the chain).
Looking over the data for a restaurant in Hawaii once, I noticed that the HVAC units in one part of the place never seemed to catch up. They were running all of the time, even though the outside air wasn't all that hot, just mid 80's or so. A few inquiries cleared up the mystery: the building was designed with one area that had two walls of windows that could be retracted, opening that room of the restaurant to the outside. The HVACs were air-conditioning the whole outdoors, no wonder they couldn't catch up. That single (although fairly large) restaurant uses about 250 kilowatts of power during the day — enough for a small subdivision. The food is good and they charge good money and it's just worth it to them to give the customers that feeling of dining outside without the discomfort of being hot.
Note that a small industrial wind turbine of the type that environmentalists are so enamored of produces about 500 kilowatts of power. That's enough to power a whopping two of these restaurants — as long as the wind is blowing strongly.
I could go on and on telling war stories, but you get the gist. My guess, based on all of the data I've seen, is that at least ten percent of all power used by commercial buildings in the US is wasted and wasted in ways that would be fairly easy to fix. There's no reason at all to think that the other 70% of power users are any more efficient. Ten percent doesn't sound like much, but it translates to hundreds of power plants that are running but don't need to be. It's that much more oil to import and that much more carbon into the atmosphere. It's billions of dollars of money wasted on electricity that doesn't do us any good. Or think of it this way: US energy needs are growing at about 1.4 percent per year. Cutting out ten percent of waste, over seven years, would mean we wouldn't have to add any new capacity for that whole time. Or how about this: all of the wind turbines installed all over the country only produce about 0.3 percent of the electricity we use (solar cells produce even less) and is only forecast to reach 6 percent by 2020.
So, get those HVACs serviced. Monitor your building's energy use and HVAC performance so you know when things aren't working. Install efficient lighting and use daylight harvesting to cut down on your lighting needs during the day. Hire architects who are interested in energy efficiency as much as aesthetics. And most of all, don't stupidly waste electricity to air condition or illuminate the great outdoors when you don't need to.
My estimate of ten percent is just the tip of the iceberg, too. We could be building much, much more efficient buildings and homes that use a fraction of the power that current ones use. There are all sorts of high-tech ways to not only reduce demand, but much more importantly, reduce peak demand (the amount of power you're using at your peak, usually about four in the afternoon). Better telecommuting policies alone could probably cut US total US energy use by a percent or more.
We don't have to go all Al Gore to make this work. We can contribute more to lowering energy usage by being efficient consumers than by all of the wind and solar power we expect to install for the next twenty years — and at a fraction of the cost.
The bottom line is this: "green" and renewable energy production still has environmental costs. The equipment takes energy and resources to make and it takes up space on the planet that will unquestionably produce some environmental impact (such as dead birds around wind turbines and gallium arsenide in solar cells). Better efficiency, on the other hand, takes very little energy and has almost no environmental impact.
Update: Someone asked me, "if this is true, wouldn't these companies be fixing these things so that they could save the money? Won't the market fix this?" My answer: no, not yet. The problem is that most companies don't have a person in charge of this sort of thing and it's not the sort of thing that has a lot of prestige to it. Also, the savings are long-term, but the cost (of fixing things) is immediate. When you're worried about this quarter's revenue numbers, it's hard to justify spending a few hundred dollars per HVAC to fix a couple hundred poorly performing ones. Sure, it would pay off in the long run, but this is this quarter and we've got to make our numbers or the stock price will take a hit. Since there's no "Chief Maintenance Officer" or "Chief Energy Efficiency Officer", none of this waste falls on anyone's head. I think this will change as people's perceptions on the issue changes. In a few years, I wouldn't be surprised if companies advertised how green they were and I think it would be a good idea to extend the Energy Star program to include entire companies. A company would undergo an audit and, if they passed, they would be considered an "Energy Star Compliant" company and they could put the logo in their advertising. Hey, it works for lots of products, from computer monitors to dishwashers, why not whole companies?
I remember when we all suddenly got religion about recycling. In Austin, this happened around the late 1980's. Suddenly, everyone was recycling aluminum, then glass, then plastic. Now, it's just habbit. The same thing can happen with energy efficiency.
Update: Evidently there are others that think as I do:
The United States could shave as much as 28 percent off the amount of greenhouse gases it emits at fairly modest cost and with only small technology innovations, according to a new report.
A large share of the reductions could come from steps that would more than pay for themselves in lower energy bills for industries and individual consumers, the report said, adding that people should take those steps out of good sense regardless of how worried they might be about climate change. But that is unlikely to happen under present circumstances, said the authors, who are energy experts at McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm.
The report said the country was brimming with “negative cost opportunities” — potential changes in the lighting, heating and cooling of buildings, for example, that would reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels even as they save money. “These types of savings have been around for 20 years,” said Jack Stephenson, a director of the study. But he said they still face tremendous barriers.
"Brimming with negative cost opportunities." Well, OK, but remember you read it here more than a year earlier.
Here's a link to the report which concludes:
Energy efficiency offers a vast, low-cost energy resource for the U.S. economy – but only if the nation can craft a comprehensive and innovative approach to unlock it. Significant and persistent barriers will need to be addressed at multiple levels to stimulate demand for energy efficiency and manage its delivery across more than 100 million buildings and literally billions of devices. If executed at scale, a holistic approach would yield gross energy savings worth more than $1.2 trillion, well above the $520 billion needed through 2020 for upfront investment in efficiency measures (not including program costs). Such a program is estimated to reduce end-use energy consumption in 2020 by 9.1 quadrillion BTUs, roughly 23 percent of projected demand, potentially abating up to 1.1 gigatons of greenhouse gases annually.
It doesn't get an plainer than that: the solution to most of our energy problems is in efficiency, not "renewable" energy or "energy independence" or any of the other sexy buzzwords. We just need to do the boring thing: go out and fix all of our broken, inefficient equipment and practices.
