Efficiency Drive Could Cut Energy Use 23% by 2020, Study Finds

The biggest opportunity to improve the nation’s energy situation is a major investment program to make homes and businesses more efficient, according to a study released Wednesday by the consulting firm McKinsey. An investment of $520 billion in improvements like sealing ducts and replacing inefficient appliances could produce $1.2 trillion in savings on energy bills through 2020, the study found.

The report said such a program, if carried out over the next decade, could cut the country’s projected energy use in 2020 by about 23 percent, a savings that would be “greater than the total of energy consumption of Canada,” Ken Ostrowski, a senior partner in McKinsey’s Atlanta office, said at a forum in Washington on Wednesday. It would also more than offset the growth in energy use that would be expected otherwise.

“The scale is vast if we can put together the means to pursue it,” Mr. Ostrowski said.

Homes account for about 35 percent of the potential efficiency gains, according to McKinsey, while the industrial sector accounts for 40 percent and the commercial sector 25 percent. The report included only efficiency improvements whose long-term savings would outweigh the initial costs. It did not consider the potential environmental benefits of cutting energy use.

The report acknowledged substantial barriers to achieving the savings, foremost among them the initial costs. The $52 billion annual investment envisioned by McKinsey is four or five times more than the nation currently spends on energy efficiency, and would have to be maintained over a decade. The economic stimulus package passed in February barely makes a dent; by McKinsey’s estimate, it contains $10 billion to $15 billion in spending on energy efficiency.

Some home or business owners may not have the money to finance efficiency improvements, even if they would pay off in the long run. Other barriers include inertia (a homeowner may simply not feel like replacing an old air-conditioner); and poorly aligned incentives (a landlord who does not pay the electric bill has no economic reason to replace the old air-conditioner).

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White Roofs Catch on as Energy Cost Cutters

Returning to their ranch-style house in Sacramento after a long summer workday, Jon and Kim Waldrep were routinely met by a wall of heat.

“We’d come home in the summer, and the house would be 115 degrees, stifling,” said Mr. Waldrep, a regional manager for a national company.

He or his wife would race to the thermostat and turn on the air-conditioning as their four small children, just picked up from day care, awaited relief.

All that changed last month. “Now we come home on days when it’s over 100 degrees outside, and the house is at 80 degrees,” Mr. Waldrep said.

Their solution was a new roof: a shiny plasticized white covering that experts say is not only an energy saver but also a way to help cool the planet.

Relying on the centuries-old principle that white objects absorb less heat than dark ones, homeowners like the Waldreps are in the vanguard of a movement embracing “cool roofs” as one of the most affordable weapons against climate change.

Studies show that white roofs reduce air-conditioning costs by 20 percent or more in hot, sunny weather. Lower energy consumption also means fewer of the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming.

What is more, a white roof can cost as little as 15 percent more than its dark counterpart, depending on the materials used, while slashing electricity bills.

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Buying A Sustainable Economy

Almost daily, new funding press releases roll out from the Obama Administration—$2.4 billion for the “next generation” of electric vehicles, $3.9 billion for “smart grid” technologies, $467 million for geothermal and solar projects, $3.2 billion in local energy efficiency projects, and on and on. This stands in stark contrast to a year ago, when announcements were magnitudes lower in dollars and months apart in time.


The difference: President Barack Obama is trying to combat a recession and job losses with a huge ramp-up in green-energy spending. His goal is to generate new jobs while simultaneously transforming the energy marketplace, heading off global warming, and building a U.S. clean-energy economy and industry.


His energy spending marks a sharp departure from the past 25 years, both in quantity and focus. Indeed, the most similar jump in federal energy spending was a short-lived burst during the energy crisis of the 1970s, when then-president Jimmy Carter tried to develop an infrastructure to replace the supply of imported oil that was shut off by the Arab oil embargo.


Carter was motivated by high oil and gas prices, but when prices fell in the 1980s, then-president Ronald Reagan declared the Carter policies a failure and killed the projects. Reagan also cut federal energy funding and limited it to support for basic energy research and development, which has pretty much been the case ever since. Obama, however, is changing that.


In mid-February, when Obama signed the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act, the Department of Energy found itself with some $38.7 billion in new funds and as much as $60 billion in potential loan authority to support new clean-energy investments. Although the $38.7 billion is but a small part of the overall $787 billion stimulus package, it is a big deal to DOE.


The recovery act money comes on top of DOE’s regular budget of about $26 billion per year, but some $16 billion of that goes to nonenergy programs—care and maintenance of nuclear weapons and cleanup of former weapons facilities. Hence the recovery act dollars are more than three times higher than DOE’s energy-related budget, and the dollars must enter the economy with great haste—the act requires that they be entirely allocated, if not spent, by Sept. 30, 2010.


“This is not just an energy act,” says Skila Harris, one of eight DOE recovery team members in the energy secretary’s office. DOE has 200 to 300 staff working on recovery act issues.


“The act is designed to stimulate the economy and specifically to encourage employment with two powerful strains. One is to get the economy going by hiring people, and, two, we want to create a legacy infrastructure of projects that will last and add value to this economy and society for years to come. This is not like energy legislation of the past,” Harris says.


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The Challenge for Green Energy: How To Store Excess Electricity

“Why are we ignoring things we know? We know that the sun doesn’t always shine and that the wind doesn’t always blow.” So wrote former U.S. Energy Secretary James Schlesinger and Robert L. Hirsch last spring in the Washington Post, suggesting that because these key renewables produce power only intermittently, “solar and wind will probably only provide a modest percentage of future U.S. power.”

Never mind that Schlesinger failed to disclose that he sits on the board of directors of Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private-sector coal company — a business with much to lose if a solar- and wind-powered future arrives. But at least he and his co-author got it partly right. The benefits from wind and solar are mostly intermittent — so far. But the pair somehow missed the fact that a furious search for practical, affordable electricity storage to beat that intermittence problem is well underway.

For decades, “grid parity” has been the Holy Grail for alternative energy. The rap from critics was that technologies like wind and solar could not compete, dollar-for-dollar, with conventional electricity sources, such as coal and nuclear, without large government tax breaks or direct subsidies. But suddenly, with rapid technological advances and growing economies of manufacturing scale, wind power is now nearly at grid parity — meaning it costs roughly the same to generate electricity from wind as it does from coal. And the days when solar power attains grid parity may be only a half-decade away.

So with grid parity now looming, finding ways to store millions of watts of excess electricity for times when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine is the new Holy Grail. And there are signs that this goal — the day when large-scale energy storage becomes practical and cost-effective — might be within reach, as well. Some technologies that can store sizeable amounts of intermittent power are already deployed. Others, including at least a few with great promise, lie somewhere over the technological horizon.

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Reflective roof paint repels the heat

On bright days, the rooftop of the Anaheim Hilton is so blindingly white that it looks like a mirror positioned directly at the sun. That dazzling glare might just be the greenest thing to happen to the top of a building since solar panels.

The white coating deflects nearly 85% of the heat that hits it, reducing the surface temperature by as much as 50 degrees. That means less energy is needed to cool the hotel's interior, cutting air-conditioning costs and carbon emissions.

This is no ordinary coat of paint. Designed by an 82-year-old former military scientist from the Inland Empire, the tinted topcoat is filled with tiny hollow glass balls that deflect heat, layered over a waterproof undercoat made of recycled rubber.

The Hilton spent more than $150,000 on the project, which was completed in March. That's $300,000 less than the cost of a conventional repair to the old, leaky roof, said Jerome Annaloro, director of property operations at the hotel. If the reflective material cuts utility costs this summer the way management anticipates it will, Annaloro said, he will recommend white roofs for the entire Hilton chain.

"I was skeptical at first . . . but the product spoke for itself," he said. "It's a win-win."

Americans spend about $40 billion a year to cool buildings, according to U.S. government figures. So-called cool roofs are being touted as a simple, inexpensive way of lowering surface temperatures on the tops of structures by as much as 100 degrees, cutting operating costs and slowing climate change.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, recently called for all roofs to be painted white to promote saving energy. Some scientists suggest that covering dark tar roofs with light-colored coatings could help mitigate the "urban heat island" effect. Development has raised temperatures markedly in many cities, leading to more energy use and smog as well as greater numbers of deaths during heat waves, experts said.

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A Warning About Disaster Housing

U.S. authorities remain unable to provide emergency housing after large-scale catastrophes and must do more to prepare survivors of such disasters for permanent relocation, the Department of Homeland Security inspector general is expected to tell a House panel today.

Nearly four years after Hurricane Katrina destroyed or damaged 300,000 homes on the Gulf Coast and led to billions of dollars of waste in the diaspora that followed, federal homeland security officials could face a repeat scenario if another storm struck a major coastal city or a high-magnitude earthquake hit population centers in California or the Midwest, according to prepared testimony by Inspector General Richard L. Skinner.

In the remarks, released by the House Homeland Security Committee, Skinner says the Federal Emergency Management Agency can manage the response to typical disasters -- for example, handing out $326 million in housing and other aid after Hurricane Ike struck Galveston in September 2008.

But FEMA's reliance on costly programs to provide trailers and mobile homes to survivors, and the government's inability to swiftly and cheaply repair damaged housing, especially rental units, mean the agency is not up to handling a Katrina-scale event, Skinner is expected to say.

"FEMA does not have sufficient tools, operational procedures, and legislative authorities to aggressively promote the cost-effective repair of housing stocks," Skinner will say, according to the testimony. "All other housing decisions and programs hinge on this single variable."

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Rise of the Bugs

The most important question not raised during the swine-flu panic could have been asked by a 6-year-old: where do viruses come from? The answer, it turns out, is simple, and scary: viruses come from a giant wellspring of diseases—also known as the environment—that grown-ups should be very careful not to disturb. Pathogens—viruses, bacteria and a wide variety of other parasites—appear in nature as unpredictable, minimalist terrors equipped with little genetic material of their own but the ability to make things up as they go. A bird-flu virus can rest coolly in pigs, then flare up in humans, scrambling genes from all three species in ways impossible to fully anticipate with vaccines. The SARS virus bided its time among palm civets (a kind of mongoose) and horseshoe bats before killing humans in 2002. And possibly the most diminutive of all, the retrovirus HIV emerged from the blood of wild monkeys to become the most efficient destroyer of the human immune system. With strong enough poison and infinitely transmutable genes, a single pathogen could lay deadly siege to the rest of the living world.

The reason this has yet to happen in our lifetimes is that, brilliant as nature is at devising ways to kill, it has also come up with countless ways to cope and survive. Put all the living species together and you have an impressive array of mechanisms to fend off pathogens or contain them in particular ecosystems that have defenses built in. This arrangement, however, is now under serious threat: humans, moving ever deeper into the wild to level forests, extract minerals and plant crops, are changing the balance of ecosystems the world over and taking these defenses apart. These warped ecologies become ground zero for new and deadly infectious diseases, which emerge and spread at an ever-greater rate. This amounts to "Armageddon in slow motion," says Eric Chivian, head of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School. Chivian, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for alerting the public to the dangers of nuclear proliferation, now says the danger to human health posed by a degraded planet is "no less devastating than a nuclear war … the ultimate impact might be just as catastrophic."

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Street Farmer

Will Allen, a farmer of Bunyonesque proportions, ascended a berm of wood chips and brewer’s mash and gently probed it with a pitchfork. “Look at this,” he said, pleased with the treasure he unearthed. A writhing mass of red worms dangled from his tines. He bent over, raked another section with his fingers and palmed a few beauties.

It was one of those April days in Wisconsin when the weather shifts abruptly from hot to cold, and Allen, dressed in a sleeveless hoodie — his daily uniform down to 20 degrees, below which he adds another sweatshirt — was exactly where he wanted to be. Show Allen a pile of soil, fully composted or still slimy with banana peels, and he’s compelled to scoop some into his melon-size hands. “Creating soil from waste is what I enjoy most,” he said. “Anyone can grow food.”

Like others in the so-called good-food movement, Allen, who is 60, asserts that our industrial food system is depleting soil, poisoning water, gobbling fossil fuels and stuffing us with bad calories. Like others, he advocates eating locally grown food. But to Allen, local doesn’t mean a rolling pasture or even a suburban garden: it means 14 greenhouses crammed onto two acres in a working-class neighborhood on Milwaukee’s northwest side, less than half a mile from the city’s largest public-housing project.

And this is why Allen is so fond of his worms. When you’re producing a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of food in such a small space, soil fertility is everything. Without microbe- and nutrient-rich worm castings (poop, that is), Allen’s Growing Power farm couldn’t provide healthful food to 10,000 urbanites — through his on-farm retail store, in schools and restaurants, at farmers’ markets and in low-cost market baskets delivered to neighborhood pickup points. He couldn’t employ scores of people, some from the nearby housing project; continually train farmers in intensive polyculture; or convert millions of pounds of food waste into a version of black gold.

With seeds planted at quadruple density and nearly every inch of space maximized to generate exceptional bounty, Growing Power is an agricultural Mumbai, a supercity of upward-thrusting tendrils and duct-taped infrastructure. Allen pointed to five tiers of planters brimming with salad greens. “We’re growing in 25,000 pots,” he said. Ducking his 6-foot-7 frame under one of them, he pussyfooted down a leaf-crammed aisle. “We grow a thousand trays of sprouts a week; every square foot brings in $30.” He headed toward the in-ground fish tanks stocked with tens of thousands of tilapia and perch. Pumps send the dirty fish water up into beds of watercress, which filter pollutants and trickle the cleaner water back down to the fish — a symbiotic system called aquaponics. The watercress sells for $16 a pound; the fish fetch $6 apiece.

Onward through the hoop houses: rows of beets and chard. Out back: chickens, ducks, heritage turkeys, goats, beehives. While Allen narrated, I nibbled the scenery — spinach, arugula, cilantro.

If inside the greenhouse was Eden, outdoors was, as Allen explained on a drive through the neighborhood, “a food desert.” Scanning the liquor stores in the strip malls, he noted: “From the housing project, it’s more than three miles to the Pick’n Save. That’s a long way to go for groceries if you don’t have a car or can’t carry stuff. And the quality of the produce can be poor.” Fast-food joints and convenience stores selling highly processed, high-calorie foods, on the other hand, were locally abundant. “It’s a form of redlining,” Allen said. “We’ve got to change the system so everyone has safe, equitable access to healthy food.”

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In S.F., thou shalt compost: It's the law

San Francisco, renowned for its civic will to save the planet, is now ordering residents and businesses to compost food scraps and biodegradables, or risk fines for not properly sorting their garbage.

That's welcome news for Jepson Prairie Organics, a Dixon-based composting firm that already accepts delivery of 400 tons a day in plate scrapings, greasy cardboard and other sweet-stinking waste from San Francisco eateries and homes.

It's also uplifting for Kathleen Inman, who uses the finished product to cultivate her pinot noir vines at Inman Family Wines in Sonoma County's Russian River Valley.

For some 200 Northern California vineyards that use it, there is something about San Francisco compost and its unique, urban blend of crab shells from Fisherman's Wharf, pasta from North Beach, pupusas from the Mission District and dim sum from Chinatown that nourishes the soil like little else.

Yet the question for San Francisco is whether the new city composting law signed by Mayor Gavin Newsom last month will nourish the city's ecological soul or merely irritate the populace.

The new law gives the city authority to fine residents and small businesses $100 – and impose penalties up to $1,000 on big firms and apartment owners – if they refuse to segregate leftover fish bones, watermelon rinds and watercress salad into compost bins.

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Sea level rise: It's worse than we thought

FOR a few minutes David Holland forgets about his work and screams like a kid on a roller coaster. The small helicopter he's riding in is slaloming between towering cliffs of ice - the sheer sides of gigantic icebergs that had calved off Greenland's Jakobshavn glacier. "It was like in a James Bond movie," Holland says afterwards. "It's the most exciting thing I have ever done."

Jakobshavn has doubled its speed in the past 15 years, draining increasing amounts of ice from the Greenland ice sheet into the ocean, and Holland, an oceanographer at New York University, has been trying to find out why. Scientists like him are more than a little astonished at the rate at which our planet's frozen frontiers seem to be responding to global warming. The crucial question, though, is what will happen over the next few decades and centuries.

That's because the fate of the planet's ice, from relatively small ice caps in places like the Canadian Arctic, the Andes and the Himalayas, to the immense ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, will largely determine the speed and extent of sea level rise. At stake are the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people, not to mention millions of square kilometres of cities and coastal land, and trillions of dollars in economic terms.

In its 2007 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast a sea level rise of between 19 and 59 centimetres by 2100, but this excluded "future rapid dynamical changes in ice flow". Crudely speaking, these estimates assume ice sheets are a bit like vast ice cubes sitting on a flat surface, which will stay in place as they slowly melt. But what if some ice sheets are more like ice cubes sitting on an upside-down bowl, which could suddenly slide off into the sea as conditions get slippery? "Larger rises cannot be excluded but understanding of these effects is too limited to assess their likelihood," the IPCC report stated.

Even before it was released, the report was outdated. Researchers now know far more. And while we still don't understand the dynamics of ice sheets and glaciers well enough to make precise predictions, we are narrowing down the possibilities. The good news is that some of the scarier scenarios, such as a sudden collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, now appear less likely. The bad news is that there is a growing consensus that the IPCC estimates are wildly optimistic.

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