Here's a snippet, first dealing with what efficiency means:
Time
...{Energy efficiency} is a simple concept: wasting less energy. Or more precisely, consuming less energy to get the same amount of heat for your shower, light for your office and power for your factory. It turns out to be much less expensive, destructive and time-intensive to reduce demand through efficiency than to increase supply through new drilling or new power plants....
Now this may sound like Jimmy Carter's 30-year-old plea for us to turn down the heat and put on sweaters or like an eco-lecture nagging us to turn off lights, drive less and otherwise change our behavior to save energy. It would be nice if we did, but that's conservation, not efficiency. We don't have to sacrifice comfort or change routines to get efficient. Doing less with less may be admirable, but efficiency is about doing the same or more with less....
...In fact, we've already started; the Alliance to Save Energy calculates that without the efficiency gains we've made since the last energy crisis, in 1973, our economy would use nearly 50% more energy today. That's more than we get from oil, twice what we get from coal or natural gas and six times what we get from nuclear plants.
But we could save much more. A McKinsey study found that a global effort to boost efficiency with existing technologies could have "spectacular results," eliminating more than 20% of world energy demand by 2020. Efficiency guru Amory Lovins argues that today's best techniques could save the U.S. half our oil and gas and three-fourths of our electricity. That would mean no more imports from the Middle East, lower utility bills for everyone and a big step off our path toward a hotter planet.
So how do we achieve this efficiency?
Time
There are two basic ways to save energy without deprivation or daily effort. We can use more efficient machinery, like fuel-efficient cars that guzzle less gas, or those pigtailed compact fluorescent lightbulbs that use 75% less power than traditional bulbs, or state-of-the-art refrigerators that are three times as efficient as 1973 models. We can also use machinery more productively. That can be as simple as insulating pipes and ducts, caulking doors and windows and otherwise weatherizing our homes to avoid heating our attics and the outdoors. Or installing motion sensors and programmable thermostats that turn out lights and air conditioners when no one's in the room.
and here's the portion that made me think of our previous conversation about "drill, baby, drill" versus other methods of addressing our energy needs:
Time
...So while everyone pays lip service to efficiency, the political world has focused on expanding drilling for oil and gas, relaxing pollution rules for coal and showering subsidies on nuclear and biofuels as well as less controversial renewables like wind and solar. The Washington consensus has been that we need to do all of the above to solve all our problems — and increase efficiency too — because there's no silver bullet.
But as we enter a new age of economic and environmental limits, not all solutions are created equal. Coal and oil are too dirty. Nuclear and solar are too costly. Wind is our fastest-growing source of new energy, but it's still only some 1% of our supply. Efficiency is the only cost-effective energy source that addresses global warming, energy dependence and volatile prices. It may not be a silver bullet, but it's the best bullet we've got; we shouldn't spend billions on evidently inferior bullets until we've really given this one a shot....
So I just wanted to let people know about this article in case they were interested in learning more. And I imagine we're going to be hearing much more about this in the next few years.
