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

Chapter Fifteen: End-Use Efficiency: Most Resilience Per Dollar 245payback times of a few years. 34 Alternatively, interior insulated walls can becheaply inserted.Retrofitting a building requires that most or all of the holes in it be pluggedup even before insulation is installed. 35 (In a typical house, such holes, largeenough to leak air, total more than a square yard.) Special techniques, includingpressure-testing buildings, can identify even invisible holes, which oftenaccount for two-thirds of the total air leakage. In programs that use such techniques,retrofits of U.S. houses or commercial buildings have saved at leasttwo-thirds of the initial space-conditioning energy at a cost of about a dollarper square foot of floorspace—equivalent to saving oil at a price of about fifteencents per gallon (six or seven dollars per barrel). 36 Even suboptimal programs—suchas those which plug only the readily visible leaks, or which usestorm windows rather than insulating shades and other cost-effective windowtreatments—generally cost about forty cents per gallon saved (nineteen dollarsper barrel). 37 That is half the price of imported oil at dockside, a third to afourth of the likely retail price of synthetic oil, 38 and less than a fifth of theprice of the heat content of electricity from a newly ordered power plant.In institutional buildings such as schools, hospitals, and churches, where therehas been little profit incentive to control operating costs, the savings are often stillcheaper, showed savings exceeding twenty percent available at under twenty-fivecents per square foot—a payback time of a year or less. More than one hundredof the nearly nine hundred recommended measures had zero capital cost: theymerely required better management of existing equipment. 39 And even in supposedlywell-managed buildings, the division of responsibilities and profitsbetween tenants and landlords often lets major inefficiencies go unchecked. Themere installation of a modern control system in a Pennsylvania office buildingimmediately cut power bills in half—prompting the incredulous utility to checkwhether the meter was working properly. 40 In a California office building, a utilityaudit and a forty-five-hundred-dollar investment in 1980 saved over a millionkilowatt-hours, worth over seventy thousand dollars, in the first ten months. 41Transportation Two-thirds of America’s transportation energy, and over halfof all U.S. oil use, goes to cars. In 1981 the cars averaged about sixteen milesper U.S. gallon (mpg). Light trucks, about a fifth as numerous, averaged nearertwelve. The state of the art, however, is at least five times better than that.The average imported car is already more than twice as fuel-efficient as thepresent American fleet. A Volkswagen diesel Rabbit already averages overforty mpg on the road; average 1982-model Japanese cars do slightly betterthan that. But these are far from the best experimental cars already made. Forexample, VW has prototyped a turbocharged diesel Rabbit which has a