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

Chapter Fifteen: End-Use Efficiency: Most Resilience Per Dollar 243average residential electricity price. An added benefit of many passive solardesigns is a “sunspace”—extended living space that is bright and comfortableeven on cloudy winter days, and in which fresh food can be grown yearroundeven in severe climates. So many technologies are now available forboth superinsulation and passive solar design that the optimal economic balancebetween them is quite broad, depending on local climate, constructionpractice, and architectural taste. But the esthetic and psychological benefits ofquiet, warm, sunny spaces may outweigh purely economic considerations.The same measures which reduce heating loads also reduce air-conditioningloads by not letting the house overheat in the first place. Additional coolingmethods include window shades and overhangs and coatings, trees, roof ponds,and earth-pipe cooling (a cheap, effective form of passive air-conditioning). 22Energy savings in buildings are not confined to space heating and cooling.A combination of water-efficient appliances and recovery of waste heat fromoutgoing “graywater” (from dishwashing, washing machines, showers, etc.,but not including sewage) can generally cut the water-heating load in half. 23Most if not all of these measures are cost-effective at the present world oilprice; and all are cost-effective at present electrical or future synfuel prices. Ina large-scale New England experiment, as simple a device as a showerheadflow restrictor—a small piece of plastic which turns a shower from a flood intoan effective spray—saved large amounts of energy at almost no cost. 24Energy-using devices within buildings can also be replaced by more efficientmodels. Intelligent design of new household appliances would reducetheir average use of electricity by at least three-quarters. 25 The technicalimprovements needed would not change performance or convenience. At thepresent average price of electricity to U.S. households, the costliest incrementsof efficiency would pay back in an average of six years.Refrigerators—the biggest part of the electric bill in most households that donot use electric space or water heating—provide a good example of recent technicaladvances. In 1975, the average U.S. refrigerator of fourteen to sixteencubic foot capacity, with top freezer and automatic or semiautomatic defrost,used about eighteen hundred kilowatt-hours a year. In 1981, the best U.S. modelsused nine hundred to eleven hundred, while the best equivalent Japanesemodel used five hundred fifty. 26 A California engineer built in 1979 a somewhatunconventional prototype using under three hundred kilowatt-hours per year,and by 1982 he was completing a better, more conventional prototype expectedto use only seventy-two—less than a twentieth of the current average. 27Moreover, in colder climates, even as far south as (for example) New Jersey, itis feasible to substitute a seasonal-storage icebox using no electricity.The efficiency improvements that can be made in space heating and cool-