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A Fast Path to Greener Energy
by Lawrence Roulston, GreenTech Opportunities | November 13, 2009
Much of the effort in the green energy sector is focused on methods of producing energy in more sustainable ways. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being directed to constructing facilities that generate electricity from wind, solar, geothermal and other renewable sources. Over the coming years, as those facilities come into production, they will lessen dependence on carbon fuels.
Few people seem to realize that reducing energy consumption is vastly cheaper than producing more of it. Furthermore, saving energy has an immediate benefit. Switching to a more efficient light bulb, for example, saves money and reduces carbon from the moment the bulb is screwed in. Building a wind farm can take years to permit, finance and construct.
Few households have the skills or take the time to work out the payback period or the internal rate of return that could be earned by investing in energy efficiency. For those individuals who make the efforts, they can find paybacks ranging from months to a few years and rates of return that can be many times higher than the returns on the average investment portfolio.
Conservation efforts are largely dictated by offers of free money from governments to subsidize investments in energy efficiency. While somewhat useful in certaincases, most programs involving governments are anything but efficient.
Corporations around the world are routinely conducting energy audits. Teams of engineers and analysts are formally quantifying the savings that can be realized by investing to save energy. It has now become fashionable for annual reports to carry accounts of how investments to save energy have favorably impacted the bottom line. Those accounts are intended more to secure social benefits points, but certainly speak to the enormous investment potential and the immediate returns available to conservation measures.
Multi-billion dollar corporations are finding meaningful earnings improvements by employing existing technologies to cut energy consumption. The savings in hard dollars provide a compelling motivation to invest to save energy. The growing pressure from customers and shareholders of big corporations to become green provides an added impetus that will propel corporations to seek greater savings.
Much of the energy savings can be achieved with little effort: better insulation for example. Most inhabitants of cold regions are conscientious about insulation to keep the heat in. But, people in warm climates often ignore the enormous waste of energy as they crank up the air conditioning in a poorly insulated home , store , or warehouse.
Energy has been so cheap and so abundant that little or no effort was devoted to energy efficiency over the past century. The incandescent light bulb, for example, is fundamentally the same as the design that Edison developed 130 years ago. Incandescent light bulbs waste 95% of the energy supplied to them. Yet, incandescent bulbs still account for a high proportion of lights. Switching to fluorescent bulbs can result in big savings, and a good return on investment. Yet, even fluorescent technology is pathetically inefficient, as those lights still waste 80% of the energy they draw.
The waste heat that is thrown off by light bulbs provides some benefit in winter in cold climates. However, in many cases, the waste heat from lights increases the amount of energy required for air conditioning.
Light emitting diodes (LEDs) are far more efficient. Those little blue lights on virtually every electronic device made in the past few years throw off light using only tiny amounts of electricity. Screw-in LED bulbs that are 90% efficient are commercially available. However at $50 each, they are not about to fly off the shelves, no matter how much guilt is imposed on consumers by the green movement. Surprisingly, even at $50 each, an LED bulb in a high use area would represent a good investment to a consumer, especially to those living in places with a high energy cost.
The interesting point is that we already have technology that will convert 90% of electricity to light (19-times more efficient than incandescent!). With further research and development, that technology will be implemented in a way that dramatically reduces electricity consumption. Clearly, more work is required to take the early stage LED bulbs to a state where they can be mass produced at a more favourable cost.
Yet, instead of fostering the development of LED bulbs, governments are actively promoting and subsidizing the use of a technology that is only one fifth as efficient.
Fridges, air conditioners, furnaces, pumps and virtually all devices that use energy are pathetically inefficient. Over time, innovations will enhance the efficiencies of all of those devices.
Energy savings at the user level are far more important than it might appear on the surface. Since coal is the biggest producer of electricity, let’s look at a coal-fired facility feeding into a power grid to understand the whole power cycle.
A typical coal-fired power plant converts about 30% of the energy contained in the coal to electricity. The balance of the energy available in the coal is lost to inefficiencies in the combustion chamber, the boilers, the turbines, the generators and to energy used by the facility itself. That 30% efficiency level has come after a century of fine-tuning every part of the system to improve efficiencies. Of course, those tweaks have been applied to a fundamental design hasn’t changed in a century. Coal has been so cheap and so abundant that a 30% efficiency level has never been a concern.
The transmission and distribution system consume, on average, 9% of the energy fed into the electric grid. Therefore, if a volume of coal has an energy content of 100 units, only 30 units is converted to electricity and makes it into the transmission line. Only 27 units of energy of the 100 units initially available are delivered to the user.
Then, if the user turns on an incandescent light bulb, those 27 units of energy produce 1.4 units of light energy. Looked at from the view of the whole system, the 100 units of energy available in the coal are converted to a mere 1.4 units of light. Overall, 98.6% of the energy released in burning the coal is simply released to the atmosphere, having contributed nothing of value.
Looked at another way, to get a certain amount of light from an incandescent bulb, it requires burning coal with 73 times as much energy content as the amount of light produced. That is an obscene waste of energy.
Admittedly, the incandescent light bulb is an extreme example. Few other products are 95% inefficient. Compact fluorescent bulbs are only 80% inefficient. Typically, appliances and industrial machines convert in the order of 30% of input to useable power, as in the example of the power plant.
Several important points emerge from this analysis. First, consumers and business owners around the globe stand to achieve enormous savings by investing and taking other steps to reduce energy consumption. A simple way to achieve that is to retrofit existing equipment with power saving devices. We will look at one such device later in this issue and others in later issues.
A second important consideration is the impact of conservation to the whole energy system, recognizing the inefficiencies in the generation and distribution systems. Following the above analysis, for every unit of energy used, 3.7-times as much energy must be burned. Conversely, by not consuming a unit of energy, 3.7-times that amount will not have to be burned.
Policy makers have clearly not fully factored in that multiplier effect on conservation. Over time, we are likely to see a growing awareness of the importance of conservation in public policy toward green energy. One can only hope that the government efforts will be aimed at fostering innovation, as opposed to efforts mandating particular applications.
By far, the most effective way to get people to change their behaviour is providing a clear monetary benefit. There is a growing wave of awareness of energy efficiency. Consumers and corporations alike are now seeking alternatives that will allow them to save energy (be green) and save money. Companies that develop energy saving products will be selling into a rapidly growing level of acceptance.
We are looking at several small companies that have developed, or are developing devices that can generate immediate energy savings and provide attractive paybacks for consumer and corporate customers. The first of these companies is introduced in this issue.
The Biggest Waste of ENergy
One of the biggest uses of energy is in transportation: cars, trucks, buses, trains, and all the other mobile equipment. With probably the worst score in energy efficiency, transportation easily ranks as the biggest overall waste of energy.
Shockingly, automobiles have not improved their
"A Fast Path to Greener Energy" by Lawrence Roulston, FSU Editorial 11/13/2009
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