Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

224National Energy SecurityThe United States was not alone in this progress. In the European EconomicCommunity during 1973–78, energy savings supplied more than ten times asmuch new energy capacity as increased nuclear power. The ratio of energy savingsto all expansions of energy supply was nineteen to one. 14 Even the mostambitious nuclear program in the world, that of France, was outpaced three toone by a halfhearted efficiency program with a tiny fraction of the nuclear program’sbudget and official support. 15 Japan has averaged about four percentannual growth in Gross National Product since 1974, yet at the same time hashad almost no growth in total energy use. One source reports that in 1980,Japan increased its inflation-corrected industrial production by four and a halfpercent and its total economic activity by nearly five percent, while decreasingenergy use by ten percent nationally, and by more than twenty percent in industry—allin a single year. 16 Denmark decreased its total direct fuel use by twentypercent just in the two years 1979–80, largely through better thermal insulationof buildings (whose efficiency has improved by thirty percent in about threeyears). 17 Insulation programs were largely responsible for cutting WestGermany’s use of heating oil by more than seventeen percent during just thefirst eight months of 1981 compared to the same period in 1980. 18This trend is accelerating in the United States as it is elsewhere. Far fromhaving nearly exhausted the readily available savings, efforts so far have barelyscratched the surface (as Chapter Fifteen will show). Investments in savingenergy generally repay their investment in less than a year—compared todecades for investments in centralized energy supply. The sums being investedin saving energy are substantial: Americans spent nearly nine billion dollarson small energy-saving devices in 1980, comparable to the total value ofimported Japanese cars, and by the mid-1980s this investment is expected toreach tens of billions of dollars per year. 19 Yet far greater investments in higherenergy productivity would be worthwhile: energy-savings investments ofone hundred billion dollars per year would still be cheaper than new energysupplies. 20 One measure of this advantage is that the nearly nine billion dollarsinvested just in 1980 to save energy produced immediately a continuingsaving equivalent to the output of a synfuel industry that would, on officialestimates, take two decades and cost more than fifty billion dollars to build.The speed of these small technologies has stunned the energy supplyindustries. Utilities and oil companies had supposed that they, after all, werethe experts; nobody could do things faster than they could; and anything theybuild would take them ten years. They were wrong. The efficiency boomcaught them badly off-balance, committed to far more supply capacity thanpeople are willing to buy. Many utilities and oil companies are now sufferingfinancial hardship as their sales unexpectedly decline. There are some silver