Our buildings are our best bet for saving energy
January 30th, 2009The DOE has released a series of reports on the future of the US electric grid. The overall evaluation is that the government needs to make a significant intervention in the power market; it has completely failed to do so for the past eight years (and longer); and conservation needs to be part of anything we do.
Gail “the Actuary” Tverberg at The Oil Drum has a “letter to Obama” post pointing out that our buildings are the first place we should look to cut our energy consumption. The “why?” is obvious from this graph:
That’s right – running our buildings takes almost half of all the energy we use. And our buildings are terribly inefficient.
We know how to build really efficient buildings. It’s already being done in Britain.
And then there’s the Passive House architectural movement that originated in Germany.
The biggest new energy source available is saving energy in our buildings by retrofitting existing buildings and ensuring that all new buildings approach zero net energy use. Tverberg has a list of specific recommendations for getting there that deserve a look.
The DOE’s FINAL Report on Electricity Supply Adequacy says that energy availability, climate, and other problems could be lessened by “demand-side resources” – that is, efficiency measures that reduce the generating and transmission needs – but “current energy efficiency and demand response / load management programs are barely scratching the surface of what is achievable.”
And that’s without reducing demand by increasing building efficiency, which was beyond the scope of the DOE’s studies.