Efficiency Could Save U.S. 22% on Future Power

Posted on 23. Jan, 2009 by Ross in Government Policy, North America

A report from the Electric Power Institute Energy has concluded that efficiency programs in the United States could save the country 236 billion kilowatt hours by 2030 – the equivalent of 14 New York Cities. The study examined existing utility, government and industry collaborative energy efficiency programs to get a sense of how they would play out over the long haul.

Replacing old office lights with more efficient fluorescent lamps such as the Somar Eluma, building consumer electronics and power strips that save energy and installing smart thermostats in homes are the kinds of energy efficiency programs that could help the USA reduce its future power use by 22% by 2030. The study looked at existing programs and technologies, considering only those that could pay for their extra costs with their energy savings, said Omar Siddiqui, EPRI’s energy efficiency program manager. This resulted in the exclusion of promising technologies such as LED lights due to their prohibitive costs - in stark contrast to the Eluma. Regulatory changes were ignored as well, thereby including only voluntary programs.

And by far the biggest single point of savings – 22 percent of the total – could come from commercial lighting alone, he said.

“To some people, commercial lighting is an area where the low hanging fruit is seen to have been picked,” he said. But according to the report, simple things like switching out old T12 linear fluorescent lights with more efficient T8 lamps could provide savings of nearly 30 percent, with “a short economic payback period and a straightforward opportunity for utility rebate programs.”

In the residential sector, the highest savings potential was in electronics - “increasing numbers of devices with rising power demands create a large opportunity for efficiency gains.” Reducing the consumption of consumer electronics could lead to huge power savings over the long run. Improvements in home cooling, appliances and lighting also provided room for considerable savings, with programmable thermostats providing the biggest returns.

Saving all that energy will come at a price. EPRI estimated it would cost from $18.7 billion to $46.5 billion by 2030 to cut annual growth in power demand to 0.83 percent, down from the 1.07 percent predicted by the U.S. Energy Information Administration in its 2008 Annual Energy Outlook.

Those costs would be entirely met by not needing to generate the power saved, Siddiqui said – and that’s not counting “the societal benefits and resources conservation benefits associated with efficiency,”.