http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20060210/who_needs_more_coal.phpCoal-fired power plants generate half of U.S. electricity. Yet mountaintop removal, smokestack pollution, and global warming aren't inevitable; they're artifacts of using electricity in ways that waste money. Most of the electricity used today, whether in the U.S. or in even more coal-intensive countries like China, can be saved by using it far more efficiently.
Fifteen years ago, the utility industry's Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and a team of researchers at Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), the resource efficiency center I cofounded, came to essentially the same conclusion. In a joint Scientific American article, EPRI found that it would be cheaper to save 39 to 59 percent of all the electricity used in the United States than pay to run coal-fired (or nuclear) power plants and deliver that same power to customers; RMI concluded the number was at least 75 percent. Either way (the differences are largely methodological), running coal-fired power plants, let alone building more, is uneconomic when compared to other widely available, but officially disfavored, ways to do the same tasks. Recent drops of 2 percent per year in the electricity that's used to make a dollar of U.S. gross domestic product barely scratch the surface of what's possible—and electricity-saving techniques are getting better and cheaper faster than we're using resources up.
These dramatic savings come not from privation or discomfort, but from smarter technologies that wring more work from each kilowatt-hour. They deliver the same comfort, light, hot showers, cold beer, and other services with the same or better quality and reliability but use less energy and less money. For example, my refrigerator keeps a power plant from burning enough coal to fill the refrigerator every year, because it uses 92 percent less electricity than most—and newer technologies could raise that to at least 97 percent. The refrigerator costs more up front because it's made by a small firm, but in mass production it would probably cost less than a normal unit.
Saving electricity is extremely lucrative, but the United States has long been slow to do it. Why? For starters, electricity is the most heavily subsidized form of energy, is often used in devices chosen by a different person than the bill-payer (for example, a landlord and a tenant, respectively), and is usually priced at the average of cheap old supplies and costly new ones, hiding the true cost of using more. But some states have striven to overcome these obstacles. California's policies have held per-capita use of electricity flat for about thirty years even as per-capita income rose by two-thirds. New England has lately followed suit; Vermont is reducing household electricity use. Yet most states use ever more electricity: all but Oregon and California reward distribution utilities for selling you more and penalize them for cutting your bill. If that sounds as dumb as a possum... well, it is. State utility regulators nationwide unanimously agreed in 1989 to fix this perverse incentive, and about nine states did, but then restructuring derailed reform. Some other states are reconsidering, but it's not on the federal agenda.
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