See on Scoop.it – Green Energy Technologies & Development

Introduction

“My 1976 article entitled “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” which appeared in Foreign Affairs, suggested two ways in which the energy system could probably evolve over the next fifty years or so, using the United States as an example. If you divided by something like a factor of nine or ten, you would get Canada.”…

“If the U.S. spent only enough on efficiency to keep up with growth and demand for electric services, plus the net retirement of generating capacity, we would have almost enough capital left in surplus to double our rate of investment in durable manufacturing industries.”

The Importance of Electrical Efficiency

“Why do I concentrate on electricity? First, because it is by far the costliest form of energy. Each cent per kilowatt-hour is equivalent in heat content to oil at $17 dollars a barrel, roughly the world oil price. So the electricity we buy, even in Canada where it is quite cheap, is equivalent to heat at many times the world oil price. Therefore saving electricity is more financially rewarding than saving direct fuels. In addition, electricity has enormous capital leverage because central electric systems — the whole systems — are about 100 times as capital intensive as the traditional direct fuel systems (you know, Texas and Louisiana and Alberta oil and gas — the sorts of things on which our economies were built). In fact a quarter of all the development capital in the world goes to electrification.

“Also electricity has huge environmental leverage. Power plants burn a third of the fuel in the world. They account for a third of the CO2, therefore, released from the burning of fossil fuel. In my own country they release two thirds of the sulphur oxides and a third of the nitrogen oxides. What’s more, every unit of electricity you save at the point of use saves typically three or four units of fuel, namely coal at the power plant. And in socialist or developing countries that ratio is more like five or six to one.

So you get the most environmental benefit from saving electricity, as well as the most financial benefit.”

See on www.ccnr.org