Utility companies have long faced a dilemma. On one hand, in order to grow profits, they must sell more electricity. On the other hand, they must support conservation as a means of keeping their customers’ costs down.  This dilemma contributes to an ever-expanding demand for electricity.

According to the US Energy Information Administration, demand for electricity will grow about 1% a year through 2030. On a base of 3.9 billion kilowatt hours, that is not an insignificant percentage. The EIA estimates that 46,000 megawatts of new generation capacity will come in the form of coal-fired plants.

That’s traditionally the way the majority of new demand for electricity is met in the US: with coal-fired power plants. But there may be a better way.

What if, instead of building more generation capacity, the US emphasized using the capacity we have more efficiently? How much less new capacity would the country need?

As it turns out, the answer could be, “Quite a lot.” By some calculations, for every 100 units of energy in a given amount of coal, as much as 70% of the energy is wasted as heat going out the stack. At the other end of the chain, as much as 80% of the electrical energy entering a typical residence is wasted. Recovering these wasted units of energy is what energy efficiency is all about.

Interestingly, the technology exists to capture waste heat at the point of electricity generation. In many European countries, the waste heat is captured and used either to create more steam to spin the turbines or to heat water which is then piped to customers. These combined heat and power plants generate about 55% of Denmark’s electricity, about 40% in the Netherlands, and about 35% in Germany. Many of the plants use natural gas as the primary fuel, but the principles are the same.

On the consumer side, there has been some headway made in the nomenclature battle. ‘Energy efficiency’ is slowly replacing ‘energy conservation’ as the preferred term. Conservation implies sacrifice and suffering (well, at least some), while efficiency implies thoughtfulness and wise use of resources. Compact fluorescent lighting, for example, is dubbed an efficient technology even though it requires much less energy (conservation) than incandescent lighting.  Efficiency means getting what consumers are used to getting for less money.

Whether the European experience with efficient electricity generation can be duplicated in the US will reveal itself in the years to come. But if the US really wants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly, it could do no better than to reduce the amount of coal the country burns to make electricity.

Damning coal as dirty won’t change US dependence on the fuel for the next 20-30 years. The coal industry and its utilities customers would also do well to tone down the ‘clean coal’ drumbeat. While the concept is attractive and may be viable, it will have no substantial effect on carbon emissions for years. Burning less coal is more efficient from both a generation and an environmental standpoint.

Paul Ausick
February 16, 2009

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