Chapter 2 Alternative Energies and Energy Conservation
“The most important environmental issue is one that is rarely mentioned, and that is the lack of a conservation ethic in our culture.” Gaylord Nelson
Recently, I started to read more about all the alternative energy means that are currently being investigated. There is an astonishing array of these, and is a good indication of how many clever and resourceful people there are on the planet. Wind farms, algae energy, biomass energy, solar are but a few examples.
Most of these face economic constraints. The capital and the infrastructure required represent formidable obstacles, although the price point for the alternative energies seems to be coming down quite a bit. I’m following all these technologies enthusiastically. There is even one company that is making exercise equipment so that the energy from it can be fed back to the grid. Who would have thought? .
I’m certain that in the long run quite a few of these ideas will succeed in powering our nation. In the meantime, however, I am wondering if there is anything that we can do in the short term that does not require any massive investments or changes. Ideally, we would just provide incentive for people to use energy more efficiently, and that would probably save us a huge amount in energy use. This is the conservation side of the equation. It’s the difficult side, because in most advanced industrial nations, including the United States, we consume enormous amounts of energy per capita. And it becomes a habit, so it’s a hard habit to break.
This leads me to believe that we need to tackle the conservation side of the energy equation in a completely different way than the alternative energy side. Basically, the alternative energy side does not address the profligate energy habits of citizens of the industrialized and emerging nations. It just tries to accommodate the ever burgeoning demand side with increased supplies. Most calculations I have seen indicate that this is a losing battle. At some point we have to address consumption issues and try to minimize the consumption.
How do we do this? You cannot force people to do it in a democratic society. Even if you could, it would probably be counterproductive. Most policies that are just forced on people end up being either ignored disrespected or accepted grudgingly. It’s not a good way to try and change things.
My idea is to use our tax system as an incentive for people to reset their thermostats. It’s fairly easy to monitor the average temperature of a house using existing technology. In my first idea, the utility company would have knowledge of the average temperature use in your dwelling on a daily basis. Then you would get a tax credit based of $100 per degree (Fahrenheit) that you are above 70 degrees (in the summer months) and below 70 degrees in the winter months.
Suppose, for example, you can tolerate setting your AC to 85 degrees in the summer. My wife and I have experimented with this and found we can set it around this range. That would qualify us for a tax deduction of $1500 per month for the summer months. The government would not rely on our word for what we set it as, as there would be a record at the utility company attesting to our average temperature maintenance. Similarly, in the winter, say we could tolerate setting the thermostat at 60 degrees. That would give us a credit of $1000 per month for the winter months.
I bet this sort of scheme would do a lot more to encourage people to turn to conservation than all the educational efforts of the environmental movement. I applaud their efforts and strongly believe they should continue, but most people respond to economic incentives more readily. If the tax credits turn out to be too large, you can adjust the $100 per degree number accordingly. Try say $50 per degree.
Everyone would do it to the extent that they are motivated to save in this plan. Someone who likes the temperature at 70 degrees all the time would just leave it that way. Others who need the break would experiment and figure out their tolerance. Some, like me and my wife, believe that conservation is good in principle and would gain a reward for their existing behavior. People who need the temperature set high, like the very old and very young among us, would not change their behavior. Young people who are more adaptable would avail themselves of the credit.
This idea is somewhat similar to the smart energy idea being used in some states, but without any coercion or technology trying to force any power savings. The only thing the technology would measure is what you keep your house at – I don’t think that’s difficult to do these days. There’s no technical intervention trying to automatically meter your power usage- technology that has had some backlash.
I don’t have a good way of calculating how much energy this would save, but it seems to me intuitively that there’s scope for huge gains here. There is also the enormous long term advantage that you would change the behavior of quite a few people, perhaps an entire generation. Quite a few folks would see this as a fairly quick way to pocket a substantial amount of cash and adjust their behavior accordingly. I think this would accomplish more than a lot of the existing incentive programs that are more difficult to take advantage of. This would in the short term reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. I think that is better for the planet, as well as the security of the United States. One good benchmark I can tell you is that my wife and I have reduced our gas bills to a very small amount by exercising discipline in the summer and keeping the temperature high. We use a negligible amount of energy in the summer, despite some hot Maryland summers. We have not yet mastered this art for the winter, but I’m sure a tax incentive would entice us to do so. The average of our natural gas bill is now 37 dollars per month, which a rather good value is considering the number of cold and hot months we have in Maryland. Our natural gas bill actually shows 0 cccf (100 cubic feet of natural gas) usage for summer, which means it’s so low it registers as zero to the accuracy of the bill computation.
Discuss and enjoy!
Notes to the 3rd Edition for Chapter 2
An excellent discussion of the savings involved in turning down thermostats is available at this web site: http://www.energysavers.gov/your_home/space_heating_cooling/index.cfm/mytopic=12720.