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

240National Energy Securityenergy service: for example, how many BTUs it takes to make a pound ofcement or to move a ton of freight for a mile.In the past few years, a large international literature has assessed, for a widerange of countries and conditions, what those coefficients currently are and whatit is economically worthwhile changing them to. Such data can be transferredfrom one place to another if careful attention is paid to differences of climates, ofpreferences in the size and performance of cars, in the different kinds of ore fedinto steel mills, and so forth. The technical literature on practically achievableefficiency gains is so vast and so fast-moving that a study of this length could noteven summarize even all the main results. This has been done elsewhere, mostrecently in a study originally commissioned by the West German governmentand incorporating the latest results from a dozen countries. 7 Two authoritativeanalyses based almost entirely on the U.S. literature have reached similar conclusionsin comparable or greater detail. 8 For present purposes, however, it is sufficientto survey typical developments in just a few key sectors. Those not treatedhere in detail show similar scope for improved efficiency.Buildings The eighty million dwellings in the United States account for morethan a third of all U.S. primary energy demand. The new buildings addedeach year, on average, have increased that demand by one percent. If thatincremental demand were met half by new power plants and half by synfuelplants, the extra demand would entail the addition of a six-hundred-megawattpower station every thirty days and a large synfuel plant (producing, say, aquarter-billion cubic feet of gas per day) every ninety days 9 —without evencounting the need to replace old energy plants, which last only about half aslong as the buildings which use their energy.The present stock of buildings was built mainly before 1970, when real energyprices were low and falling lower. The builders therefore had no incentive tobuild efficiently. During the 1970s, incentives changed. Air-conditioning billssometimes came to exceed mortgage payments. Annual household energy costsin New England trebled from three hundred eighty-six dollars in 1970 to thirteenhundred twenty-five dollars in 1980. 10 With this impetus, the average thermal efficiencyof all American houses, old and new, improved by twenty to twenty-fivepercent. 11 In 1970, heating a square foot of floorspace in an average Americanhouse through one Fahrenheit degree-day of outdoor coldness required about sixteenBTUs of energy. By 1978, this had dropped to thirteen BTUs. 12 But technologicaladvances meanwhile were making it possible to build cost-effective newhouses ten to a hundred times more energy-efficient than that: 13 houses with aspace-heating intensity of not thirteen but one and a third BTUs per square footdegreeday, and in some cases much less—even as little as zero.