DesertBlog

Energy Efficiency and Global Warming

Engineer Bill Powers sent us this slide that shows what would happen to California’s energy demand, if we fully implement energy efficiency requirements enacted in 2007:

The black line is the California Energy Commission’s projected demand without the additional energy efficiency efforts. The purple line shows what would happen if these requirements were fully implemented. Note that these are only the cost-effective energy efficiency requirements, not the really expensive ones.

Surprised to see a graph showing declining overall consumption? That’s because the graph that’s usually trotted out in energy discussions in California are ones like this one from Joseph Romm’s ClimateProgress blog:

or this one from the California Energy Commission:

The CEC and the Renewable Energy Transmission Initiative are basing their projections of total demand, and therefore of the total amount of renewable energy required to meet the 33% RPS goal, on those upward trending lines. As Bill points out, they should be taking these new efficiency requirements into account, thereby making the renewable energy goal much easier to achieve, potentially with building-integrated photovoltaic power alone.

The point is, we need to start focusing at least as heavily on energy efficiency as we do on increasing supply, renewable or otherwise. And to do that, government agencies need to hold the utilities accountable for reaching energy efficiency goals, rather than letting them off the hook. It would also help if those agencies would stop taking bribes from the utilities they’re supposed to hold accountable.

We have to wonder why anyone still believes these same companies and government agencies when they say they know how to solve the climate crisis — by building a vast network of transmission lines connecting to remote renewable power plants.