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

Chapter Fifteen: End-Use Efficiency: Most Resilience Per Dollar 261technology which is not already in operation in the United States. Yet itshowed how total primary energy use could decrease to a level thirteen to eighteenpercent below the 1980 level. Furthermore, through economically worthwhileinvestment in currently available renewable sources, the use of nonrenewablefuels would drop by nearly half. At that level, not only would oilimports and most frontier oil and gas become unnecessary, but a good deal ofconventional oil and gas in the contiguous forty-eight states could also be shutin as a dispersed “strategic reserve” bearing no extra storage costs.Total demand for electricity, too, would probably decline. With cost-effectiveefficiency improvements and onsite solar heating systems, electricaldemand would grow during 1978–2000 at an average rate of only a fifth ofone percent per year—about a ninth as fast as the utility industry expects.With cost-effective investments in windpower, industrial cogeneration, andonsite solar cells, the “growth” rate would become zero to minus one and twofifthspercent per year. Under the former assumption (no wind, cogeneration,or solar cells), national electric supply would be ample even if no new centralpower plants were commissioned after 1985 and if all oil-fired, gas-fired, andold power plants had been retired by 2000. Under the latter assumption (allcost-effective renewable and cogeneration investments), supply would exceeddemand by about a third—more than a sufficient margin to phase out allnuclear plants as well, if desired, and still have national capacity to spare.Thus the U.S. could enter the twenty-first century with• a greatly expanded economy;• zero use of oil, gas, and uranium in power plants;total consumption of fossil fuels reduced from about seventy quadrillionBTUs per year in 1980 to only forty or fifty quadrillion BTUs in 2000—asaving of several trillion dollars’ worth of fuels that would stay in theground rather than in the air;• zero oil and gas imports; and• ample domestic oil and gas in conventional, accessible sites to last for somefurther decades of transition to sustainable sources.What is more remarkable, all this—more than doubling national energy efficiencyand making energy supplies at least one-third renewable over the next twentyyears—could be done simply by pursuing the policy of using energy in a waythat saves money. Indeed, it is easy to calculate that the total investment requiredfor the whole SERI program—of the order of eight hundred billion dollars, orabout ten years of the present rate of investment in the energy sector—wouldmore than finance itself through the cash flow generated by its fuel and power