by Steve Clark Founder of Citizens for Clean Energy 1989 (changed to the singular “Citizen” when no one seemed to care during the ’90s), now affiliated with Clean Energy Action
I was at an "information session" about energy programs recently, put on by the manager of a city program intended to help the city's residents reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The primary GHG, as everyone finally knows, is CO2 - mostly caused by the burning of fossil fuel for energy services. In the utility business CO2 is produced by burning coal. Here in the U.S. we get 80% of our electricity from coal-fired power plants.
The utility representative was describing the Demand Side Management (DSM) programs that would help their customers use less of their product (those of you in marketing will question the wisdom of this). One aspect of this was rebates for installing more efficient lighting.
Because I have been looking at the energy-environment-economy conundrum for a long time I was surprised that I had never thought about this in quite the way that it struck me at this moment. I have been questioning the assumptions we make about energy use that have led to US energy consumption being twice that of other developed countries. But now I saw the problem in a whole new light. The utility company rep said there were no rebates for outdoor lighting because they were on at night. Wait just a second. The utility will help reduce energy use from lighting during the day but not at night? We are trying to reduce GHGs right? And yet it is somehow ok to burn coal at night but not in the daytime?
I do understand why the utility would want this. There is something called the demand curve. It's the graph of electricity usage by humans over a twenty-four hour period. While it differs in overall quantity, society to society the curve remains the same: it goes up during the day to a peak in the afternoon and goes down to off peak at night. The utility wants to reduce peak use but wants off peak use to remain because their big central coal-fired machine cannot be turned on and off easily. We humans have managed to keep using energy at a rate that sometimes exceeds the utility's ability to meet peak use. When that happens they have to build new power plants. But isn't the goal of reducing GHG equally important at night as in the daytime?
Hmmm... We have built a machine that we cannot turn off and now we spend some of our money and a lot of energy in the form of CO2 emitting coal just to keep the machine going. It looks like we have become slaves to the machine. Maybe we have built a system that is fundamentally flawed. Should we keep the machine running just to spew GHGs all night? Maybe we need a different model, one in which we can turn off the lights at night and the machine won't care.
It is interesting that solar power very nearly matches the demand curve on the daytime or peak side. All the utilities complain about renewable energy because it is intermittent. It doesn't provide base load power. It is not 'dispatchable' (more of the jargon that keeps the common man in the dark). I personally don't want the whole world lit up just because the machine cannot be shut off. Recently we saw the view from space that shows the whole of North America awash in lights. Is this a good thing? I would just as soon see them turned off. There are other things in our lives that we have come to need base load power for but we certainly don't need to light up the whole country coast to coast just because we can't turn the machine off. So, lets take a good hard look at whether or not what we are doing with energy makes any sense and quit being slaves to the GHG machine.
Editor's Addition: In the context of Steve's thoughts above, the following clip on 'Community Choice Energy' should be of interest. Once again it's clear that re-localising and decentralising the way we run everything equates to increased efficiency, decreased dependence (i.e. vulnerability), and an increase in civic pride and individual responsibility.
Duration: 18 minutes
Further Watching:
