Bill Gates argues in a new blog that to meet long-term climate goals, we need innovation, “not insulation.” NRDC agrees that we need innovation. But the idea that we should chose between insulation and innovation is a mistake. Insulation and other energy efficiency technologies can achieve far deeper emission reductions than people realize. Mr. Gates is right that we need to keep the long-term goal of 80 percent reductions by 2050 in view when deciding what to do over the near-term, but interim goals are critical to making sure we stay on the path toward meeting our long-term goal.
The single best thing our country can do to meet our 80 percent by 2050 goal is adopt federal interim and long-term carbon pollution limits. Efficiency will play a key role in meeting these limits.
Compared to the 1970s, manufacturers now produce products with more insulating power than before. New and existing insulation companies have introduced more types of insulation as well. In addition, installers have developed ways to make better use of the products that are already on the market, saving more energy than they would have 30 years ago with the same products by significantly reducing air and moisture flows. If we promote insulation over the next five years, we can expect continuing innovation and improvement in its performance. This improvement will be reflected in a combination of greater cost savings to the consumer -- both in the form of lower construction costs for the retrofit and greater energy savings, reduced fuel usage that will result in lower fuel prices for everyone, and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. These reductions come on top of the reductions we would have had with the older technologies and methods.
Retrofitting a house today can produce an energy savings of some 25 to 50 percent of the original output. Furthermore, if we try to retrofit all the homes in the nation over the next 15 years, as U.S. Department of Energy proposes, and we do it in a market-based way that fosters competition between better insulation, more efficient furnaces and water heaters, better lighting and appliances, etc., we can expect that new technologies and construction methods will evolve even more quickly. With continuous improvement, this 25 to 50 percent savings will grow over time and accumulate to more than an 80 percent reduction compared to where we are today. It would be as foolish to bet against this as to bet that software in 2025 will be substantially the same as it is today. Similar arguments about continuous improvements in efficiency apply across all major energy consuming sectors.
But markets for insulation don't work well enough to support the needed levels of innovation. Even though insulation and other home retrofit techniques save far more money than they cost (and also increase comfort and safety), very few people take advantage of them. Most homeowners and virtually all renters have no idea about how to get a thorough home retrofit: how much insulation a house needs, how efficient it can become and how much lower the utility bills will be, and who is a reliable contractor. The challenge is to adopt policies that strengthen the market forces that will enable faster innovation in home retrofits and other energy efficiency technologies.
Mr. Gates achieved monumental financial success through innovation. But he did not establish the market structure that allowed his company to prosper. Quite the contrary, he succeeded by noting conditions in the market that would allow the innovative approach that Microsoft would use to work, and exploited that niche. Innovation proceeded for decades because software market conditions supported it.
Through government policies, we need to create the same market conditions for insulation and other clean energy technologies as we have for software and computers, where companies that innovate profit from those innovations and grow. When companies profit from innovation, they will do more of it.
Mr. Gates states that, "you can never insulate your way to anything close to zero." Both theory and practice; however, show that, even with 1980s technology, we can build houses that use near-zero energy. Germany’s Passivhaus project cuts heating by at least 90%, and according to Wikipedia there are at least 15,000 such homes today. This is only one of many near-zero energy projects for both homes and commercial buildings.
Mr. Gates also says that the way to meet a 2050 climate goal is to focus on long term innovation rather than short term implementation. No one makes decisions today for meeting 2050 goals in the business world. I'm confident that Microsoft is not paying people today to design 2050-vintage software.
No, innovation proceeds by designing something today that is just a little better than 2010 technology and trying to introduce it in 2011 or 2012, or maybe even as late as 2015. Current high tech products such as smart phones were realized by incremental innovations on a time scale less than five years, not by having planned in 1970 to sell a smart phone in 2010. Long term results are achieved by repeated innovations on one, three or five-year time scales.
The only entities that make decisions today that affect 2050 technologies are governments. Governments can make long term commitments to provide infrastructure and fund research projects whose goal is long term technology innovation. Climate stabilization will require changes in these types of decisions.
The way to meet our climate goals for 2050 is first to set a carbon pollution limit for 2020, as the energy and climate legislation pending in Congress does. We will also need complementary clean energy policies such as more stringent building codes, appliance efficiency standards, renewable energy standards for utilities, and major investments in Research and Development, as well as clean energy deployment incentives. All of these policies are designed to foster innovation, and where they have been applied in the past, they have done so. A number of these policies are in the climate and energy legislation Congress is considering.
Protecting our climate, and our economic health, will require more attention to pursuing efficiency and other clean energy options at the same time. Both will benefit from market-based policies that encourage innovation. Experts agree that energy efficiency is the largest, fastest, cheapest and cleanest way to meet our climate goals, and recharge our economy. The efficiency savings make us wealthier, and the policies that get us the efficiency will enable more, not less, investment in innovation for the shorter as well as the longer term.
David Goldstein is co-director at the Natural Resources Defense Council's energy program. He is also the recipient of the MacArthur fellowship and Szilard Prize for physics in the public interest. The issues discussed in this blog are developed in depth in his forthcoming book, Invisible Energy, which will be available in early February through Bay Tree Publishing.
This post originally appeared on NRDC's Switchboard blog.
http://climateprogress.org/2010/01/26/bill-gates-energy-efficiency-insulation-renewables-and-global-climate-action-bjorn-lomborg/
but that is the point
coal wants to burn MORE COAL!
more money
all the care about, coal/oil
is money.
screw the earth and humanity
who cares if coal and oil makes the very air, ground, and water toxic and unsafe.
Thinking that I had been living efficiently, I endured considerable consternation when I finally found the time to evaluate my home's performance in a weather neutral way -- BTU's /heating degree day /square foot -- that allowed me to compare to various studies. I continue to monitor in this way. A number of small projects have dropped our annual consumption by 30%, bringing our 1950 house in line with one built to 1994 codes. Electricity has dropped in sync, by 50%. We're not nearly done yet. Though technically these projects qualify as insulation, we are only now planning a major upgrade of attic insulation, from which we anticipate another leap in performance.
Absolutely, our undertaking has been an innovative thrill, a combination of analysis, design, engineering, and meshing of aesthetics with function. I am resentful that my utilities allowed me to think that affordability means efficiency. I resent Bill Gates' implication that my efforts are not innovative or valuable. It would be so easy to deliver the same wake-up call to all concerned individuals and communities, challenging them to innovate in reducing the significant contribution of buildings to wasteful energy consumption of this country. Perhaps fading American ingenuity would be reawakened in the process.
Re: a) Albedo - as arctic sea ice diminishes, sunlight reflecting back to space diminishes, since open seas are several times darker than ice. b) Methane release - thawing arctic peat bogs will eventually release millions of tons of methane, which is 20 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2. Cows already produce enormous amounts of methane.
There are other tipping points in the offing, such as dieback of the Amazon and boreal forests (our main CO2 sinks), and eventual loss of the Greenland ice sheet. More controversial are possible disruption of the Indian monsoon and shunting of the thermohaline circulation that feeds the Gulf current which keeps Europe habitable.
So don't be fooled by people with limited foresight. Fluorescent bulbs, power strips, weather-stripping, insulation, bundled shopping days, car pooling, consuming less beef and cow milk, etc., are all significant.
In the late 1970's the building science team at LBL built four small test homes in SASKATCHEWAN with triple-pane windows (none on the north face) and INSULATED floors, roofs, and walls to R-50. They also used air filtered heat pumps and had small vestibules behind the front doors.
After 2 years monitoring, they found the heat pumps were rarely needed. Cooking, appliances, and body heat kept people warm enough 95% of the time.
This was 30 years ago. The best available residential insulation now, even after degradation, yields ~R-7 per inch, i.e., total in-wall of ~R-40, which doubles standard R-19 building code specs. Heat gains/losses through quad glaze, low-E coated windows are typically less than half that of duo-pane. So, average-looking stick homes can be built in colder climates to cut energy use by more than 2/3rds. Similar homes with white roofs can show similar savings in hot sunny climates.
Eliminate leaks and insulate A/C-Heating duct work
Eliminate air leaks from climate controlled areas to outside
Instl double or triple glass windows
Use energy efficient appliances BEFORE investing in solar technology.
http://www.fsec.ucf.edu/en/