Ralph Cavanagh, Energy Program Co-Director, San Francisco, CA
Some
people are surprised to learn that our electric and natural gas
utilities spend billions of dollars a year to help customers need and
use less energy.
But helping people get more work out of less
electricity and natural gas has long been a winning strategy for many of
America’s hometown utilities – and a report released this week shows that their energy efficiency budgets reached an all-time high of $7 billion last year.
In
fact, these programs ranging from weatherization to high-efficiency
appliance rebates saved a whopping 126 terawatt-hours (TWh) of
electricity in 2012, enough to power more than 12.2 million U.S. homes
for one year, and avoided the generation of 89 million metric tons of
carbon dioxide. That’s why the latest annual review by the Consortium for Energy Efficiency (CEE) on the "State of the Efficiency Program Industry" is a welcome reminder of progress already made and benefits still to come.
The
headline for the March 2014 edition is the continuation of a five-year
trend in steadily increasing expenditures by U.S. electric and natural
gas utilities on all aspects of “demand-side management,” which involve
low-cost ways to reduce customers’ energy needs and avoid the need tap
more costly resources. These programs range from equipment and building
upgrades to measures that shift energy consumption away from peak
periods when distribution systems are under maximum stress.
80 percent increase in program investment
The
investment increase in energy efficiency programs from 2008–2012 was a
robust 80 percent (from $4 billion to $7.2 billion). Electric utilities
dominated that total, recording $6.1 billion in 2012, but rates of
growth were similar for both electric and natural gas utilities, and the
sustained increases over the past five years are a welcome change from
an earlier roller-coaster pattern, which had frustrated creation of a
durable energy efficiency infrastructure by creating corrosive
uncertainty about whether and where funding would be available.
The
very existence of the Consortium for Energy Efficiency demonstratesthe
importance of that infrastructure; the group representing energy
efficiency program administrators in the United States and Canada serves
as an invaluable “best practices” advisor and assistant to literally
hundreds of utilities across North America, making sure that all learn
quickly from both successes and failures everywhere on the continent.
Preliminary
data for 2013 suggest that utilities’ efficiency programs will
continue to grow, although at a more modest pace. Canada shows similar
trends, and the healthy annual climate dividend from U.S. and Canadian
utility efforts combined is the equivalent of more than 20 million tons a
year (the emissions from at least 4 million cars).
The best guarantor of additional cost-effective savings is to reward the utilities that achieve those savings and at minimum to ensure that their financial health is no longer tied to increases in their sales of
electricity and natural gas. Doing so provides them more of an
incentive to keep investing in efficiency programs that cut our energy
waste, which also reduces the need for dirty fossil fuels to generate
our electricity and emit pollution that warms our planet and harms our
health.
Good return on those program investments
The
investments in energy efficiency that CEE tracks are only a small
fraction of our annual payments to the utilities that provide our heat
and lights (our total electricity bill alone exceeds $360 billion), but
they have yielded a remarkable return in lower costs to both customers
and the environment.
The latest evidence is a brand new study from
the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which looks at the average
cost of saved energy from utility programs throughout the country and
pegs it at about 2 cents per kilowatt-hour, a small fraction of what
comparable energy production from new facilities would have cost.
Energy
efficiency remains our largest, cheapest and cleanest energy
“resource.” This means that if we use less electricity, utilities don’t
need to generate or buy as much power – or build huge new power plants
to serve the needs of residential, business and industrial customers –
which helps keeps bills low for everyone.
Indeed, a recent NRDC report shows
that energy efficiency has outperformed all other energy resources
COMBINED (including coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear power plants) in
meeting the needs of a growing U.S. economy over the past four
decades. Our utilities have been important partners in that very good
cause, and the latest CEE findings are a reminder that much more can be
done.
http://theenergycollective.com/nrdcswitchboard/359156/energy-efficiency-progress-americas-utilities-update
No comments:
Post a Comment