CMI: Efficient Vehicles part 1

Article 8 in a series that looks Princeton's Carbon Mitigation Initiative, which has proposed 15 carbon reduction strategies, in 4 broad categories, each of which could be scaled up to provide 1/7th the CO2 reduction necessary to stabilize the atmosphere.

Category 1: Efficiency and Conservation

Efficient Vehicles

One full wedge could be achieved if by 2054 we increase the fuel economy for 2 billion cars (four times the number currently on the road) from 30 to 60 mpg, with the fuel type and average miles driven (10,000/year) unchanged.

CMI: Efficient Buildings

Article 7 in a series that looks at Princeton's Carbon Mitigation Initiative, which has outlined 15 carbon reduction strategies, in 4 broad categories, each of which could be scaled up to provide 1/7th the CO2 reduction necessary to stabilize the atmosphere.

Carbon Mitigation Initiative:
Category 1: Efficiency and Conservation


Efficient Buildings:
Programs promoting or mandating efficient buildings in the U.S. are still in their infancy. Two voluntary programs deserve special mention.

ENERGY STAR
A section of Energy Star is devoted to promoting efficiency in new and retrofitted homes. Their program focuses on reducing the energy needed for heating and cooling:

Insulation
Sealed Ducts and Leaks
Efficient Windows
Efficient HVAC, Lighting and Appliances

About 200,000 new Energy Star qualified homes were built last year, about 12% of the total, and another 12,000 were overhauled to improve efficiency, bringing the total to 725,000 and 26,000 respectively. Energy Star homes are between 15 and 20% more efficient than those built to "code." Energy Star is currently partnering with about 3,500 builders.

LEED
The organization that has been getting the most media attention is LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. Created by the U.S. Green Building Council, LEED is system that rates buildings for sustainability. According to their web site:

"Based on well-founded scientific standards, LEED emphasizes state of the art strategies for sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection and indoor environmental quality. LEED promotes expertise in green building through a comprehensive system offering project certification, professional accreditation, training and practical resources."

While I have had difficulty finding numbers that give an estimate of the impact of LEED, their roster lists something in the neighborhood of 6000 registered projects, representing many million square feet. Given that the certification process only began in the late 1990s, and that in 2002 there were only 12 registered projects, growth in this area has been remarkable. More significantly, thousands of architects and building professionals have become LEED "certified," holding out the promise that these key professionals will make sustainable building the norm.

Certainly, LEED is associated with cutting-edge design, which will hopefully increase its influence, especially with young professionals. One risk, however, which is evident throughout the Green products arena, is that instead of becoming the norm for new buildings, LEED will become more influential as a prestige label. In New York City, certainly, it is best known for a hand-full of ultra-luxury, high-profile "starchitect" projects rather than for more mundane commercial and residential building.

While these voluntary programs have shown impressive growth, again mandatory standards are clearly needed to make sure our building stock is as efficient as possible.

Judging from a paper published on their web site, the National Association of Home Builders is as opposed to mandatory standards as the electricity or auto industries. They draw the following conclusions about emissions tied to residential housing:

• More than half of the energy consumption and CO2 emissions attributable to the residential sector is the result of energy “lost” in the generation and transmission of electricity.

• New homes (those built in the last ten years) account for about 12 percent of residential energy consumption.

• Per square foot, new homes consume less than two-thirds the energy of older homes for the core HVAC uses controllable by builders.

• Behavior of the occupants has a larger impact on non-HVAC energy consumption than those items under the control of the builder.

• More stringent energy conservation requirements for new homes can have a reverse effect of retarding filtering and keeping people in older, less energy-efficient homes.

In other words: the new houses we build are not the problem, old houses are; it's the owners not us; it's the electric companies not us; if you mandate efficient building, people will decide not to move or renovate.

Given the difficulty of educating and motivating 3oo million people, Green Factoids would argue that the least effective and efficient way to control home energy use is by focusing on individual decisions. Is it even helpful for the average person to become knowledgeable about duct-work and high-efficiency windows? It seems clear that if we are going to achieve anything close to one wedge of reductions from efficient buildings, builders should be pressured and ultimately required to maximize efficiency in those areas directly under their control, whether or not homeowners know enough to ask for these measures or not.

CMI: U.S. Programs for Appliance Efficiency Part 3; In Honor of Blog Action Day



Green Factoids would like to recognize BLOG ACTION DAY and thank its organizers. Not only will this effort help us to reach a wide and potentially receptive audience, but the incredible diversity of the blogs represented should also yield lessons on how to tailor the message of sustainability for different audiences.


Article 6 in a series that looks Princeton's Carbon Mitigation Initiative, which has proposed 15 carbon reduction strategies, in 4 broad categories, each of which could be scaled up to provide 1/7th the CO2 reduction necessary to stabilize the atmosphere.

Category 1: Efficiency and Conservation
Efficient Buildings


Discussion of U.S. Programs:
Despite some impressive accomplishments, it is hard not to have regrets about our failings in this area, especially that of efficiency standards. The Department of Energy, which has responsibility over standards, has truly fiddled while Rome burned, slowing down the process so much that they are more than 15 years behind schedule setting standards on many items. According to a report issued this January by the GAO:

DOE has missed all 34 congressional deadlines for setting energy efficient standards for the 20 product categories with statutory deadlines that have passed. DOE's delays ranged from less than a year to 15 years. Rulemakings were completed for only (1) refrigerators, refrigerator-freezers and freezers; (2) small furnaces; and (3) clothes washers. The DOE has yet to finish 17 categories of such consumer products as kitchen ranges and ovens, dishwashers and water heaters and such industrial equipment as distribution transformers. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates that delays in setting standards for the four consumer product categories that consume the most energy - refrigerators and freezers, central air conditioners and heat pumps, water heaters and clothes washers - will cost at least $28B in forgone energy savings by 2030.

According to some analyses, DOE has been so late that the final standards were largely meaningless, offering no efficiency gains over the current performance of the product. In the meantime states have been blocked from setting their own standards. In comparison, Energy Star has been a model of efficiency, expanding its program to cover some 44,000 separate products.


While regrets here are inevitable, they are also pretty much useless, and do not help us devise any plan for reducing emissions from appliances. Green Factoids will restrict itself to a few observations about this complex topic.

The flip side of the DOE’s failure to enact mandatory standards is that we have barely begun to achieve the savings possible in this area.

CMI's numbers on efficiency vindicate the "little steps" approach; in fact, household and building efficiency could provide one seventh the reduction needed to stabilize carbon levels.

The challenge is that this category represents dozens of different products and appliances, and consequently billions of purchasing decisions by virtually every consumer in this country.

From a policy standpoint, mandatory standards are much more effective than voluntary ones. Despite all of the outreach, only a small percentage of all purchases are Energy Star. For example, according to recent estimates, last year CFLs still only represented 6% of all bulbs in the U.S.

Of all of the different areas explored by CMI, efficiency is the only one where any initial expenses are consistently dwarfed by money saved on energy costs. Many mitigation proposals require enormous investments and are far more expensive than more polluting alternatives.

This wedge cannot be achieved without either consumer awareness and action or much more aggressive government regulatory action. Given the current highly polarized political climate, and the anti-regulatory dogmas of influential segments of the political and economic community, we cannot be certain that the government will move to adopt the necessary standards.

In the absence of effective government leadership, it becomes doubly important that Green activists, bloggers, marketers, and concerned citizens push Energy Star every chance we get and are religious about choosing its products for our own purchases.

Perception of public opinion is important—the government is much more likely to adopt regulations that are demanded by voters, or that already represent the bulk of all purchases. Manufacturers will stop trying to block regulations if consumers already strongly favor efficient and “green” models. We should not forget that after millions of consumers moved away from aerosols out of concern for the ozone layer, it became much easier to ban fluorocarbons in consumer products.

In recent years, corporations have proven more receptive to change or susceptible to public pressure than our elected officials, especially at the federal level. Likewise, the government as it currently constituted is much more likely to adopt changes if they are demanded by the business community.

Major Point: Efficiency represents the single biggest source of emissions reduction that is under control of the average consumer. Indeed, of CMI's four categories, efficiency is the only one that is directly affected by our actual behavior and purchases, rather than just our opinions: our appliances, windows, insulation, and water heaters determine the energy use and thus greenhouse emissions of our homes, often for a decade or more.

CMI: U.S. Programs for Appliance Efficiency Part 2

Article 5 in a series that looks Princeton's Carbon Mitigation Initiative, which has proposed 15 carbon reduction strategies, in 4 broad categories, each of which could be scaled up to provide 1/7th the CO2 reduction necessary to stabilize the atmosphere.


Category 1: Efficiency and Conservation
Efficient Buildings

Appliance Efficiency Standards:

Efficiency standards, which are overseen by the Department of Energy, set mandatory baselines for appliance energy use. In a policy development that has strong echoes to today’s battles over carbon emissions, appliance manufacturers initially opposed any standards but eventually came to support federal standards as it became clear that the alternative would be a patchwork of state standards.

Although opposed by anti-regulatory zealots, efficiency standards offer a solution to the problem that the market seems unable to solve by itself: contrary to what we might assume, the market does not offer clear or effective incentives for energy efficient products—to either manufacturers or consumers. Here are a few reasons from the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, some of which may sound familiar to readers:

* Third-party decision makers (e.g., landlords and builders) who purchase appliances but do not pay the operating costs of the products they purchase;

* Panic purchases that leave little time for consumers to become educated (how many of us have done this?)

* Inadequate and misleading information about the relative energy performance of products; and

* High first costs for efficient equipment due to small production quantities and the fact that manufacturers frequently combine efficiency features with extra non-energy features in expensive "trade-up" models.

Arguably the most effective standard has been for refrigerators, which represent the largest single energy user in many households. Refrigerators in 1972 averaged 1,986 kWh/year; in 1985, they averaged 1077 kWh/year. Power used by the average new refrigerator has continued to drop, falling 49%, from 974 to 500 kWh/year between 1987-2004, even as the units got larger.


Benefits of efficiency standards
Again, from ACEEE:

# In 2000, according to analyses by the U.S. Department of Energy and ACEEE, standards reduced U.S. electricity use by approximately 88 billion kWh and reduced U.S. total energy use by approximately 1,200 trillion Btus. These savings are 2.5% and 1.3% of U.S. electricity and energy use in 2000, respectively.

# In 2000, standards reduced peak generating needs by approximately 21,000 MW — equivalent to displacing seventy 300 MW power plants. Without these savings, current electricity shortages would be significantly worse.

# Over the 1990–2000 period, standards have reduced consumer energy bills by approximately $50 billion. Under standards, equipment prices have risen modestly, but estimates by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and ACEEE indicate that the benefits are more than 3 times the costs on a net present value basis.

# As old appliances and equipment wear out and are replaced, savings from existing standards will steadily grow. By 2010, savings will total more than 250 billion kWh (6.5% of projected electricity use) and reduce peak demand by approximately 66,000 MW (a 7.6% reduction). Over 1990–2030, consumers and businesses are projected to save approximately $186 billion (1997 dollars) from standards already adopted.

CMI: U.S. Programs for Appliance Efficiency Part 1

Article 4 in a series that looks Princeton's Carbon Mitigation Initiative, which has proposed 15 carbon reduction strategies, in 4 broad categories, each of which could be scaled up to provide 1/7th the CO2 reduction necessary to stabilize the atmosphere.


Category 1: Efficiency and Conservation
Efficient Buildings

In the U.S. two government programs emphasize appliance efficiency. One is appliance efficiency standards, overseen by the Department of Energy, and the other is Energy Star, overseen by the EPA in conjunction with the DOE.

Energy Star:

In the U.S. the most well-known program focused on energy efficient appliances is Energy Star. Products that are labeled Energy Star are more efficient than their non-Energy Star counterparts, using between 10 to 75% less energy. According to the EPA's own numbers, during 2006, use of ENERGY STAR products helped Americans prevent about 37 million metric tons of emissions and save about 170 billion kWh, or about 5% of the total 2006 power demand.

In the past 5 years, the total number of Energy Star products sold has doubled, to about 2 billion; the carbon savings associated with Energy Star products has also doubled since 2000, and grew by 10% over the last year. There are now 50 product categories eligible for the Energy Star label, up from only 35 in 2002. About 200,000 new Energy Star qualified homes were built last year, and another 26,000 were completely overhauled to improve efficiency.

Next Post: Appliance Standards

CMI: Building and Appliance Efficiency

Continuing our segment on the Carbon Mitigation Initiative, Green Factoids will consider in more detail the areas which might be capable of providing a whole or partial wedge. In several papers, lead scientists Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow outline 15 options, each of which could produce one wedge if fully deployed. Seven wedges are needed in order to stabilize the atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Each wedge represents the reduction of 25 billion tons CO2 over the next 50 years, or 1 billion tons per year by 2054.

Category one: ENERGY EFFICIENCY AND CONSERVATION


Energy Efficient Buildings:

Roughly one wedge could be achieved if we install the most efficient lighting, appliances, space heating and cooling, and water heating, and improve insulation in every new and existing building by 2054. Doing so would reduce CO2 emissions by buildings by about one quarter.

One half of these savings are in buildings in developing countries.

They estimate that approximately one quarter of a wedge could be achieved just by switching all incandescent bulbs to CFL's.

Next Post: U.S. Government Efficiency Programs