Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
You can't beat an oil shock for energy saving
It didn't seem like it at the time - with long queues at petrol stations on both
sides of the Atlantic and a rota system for road-use according to whether the
vehicle licence plate ended in an odd or even number. But the quadrupling of
the oil price between October 1973 and 1974, and the subsequent price surge
in 1979-80 was a tremendous help to energy conservation.
All the big improvements in energy efficiency came in the aftermath of 1973.
It is a salutary fact that the 1970s oil-price shocks did more to cut energy use
and carbon emissions than all the policy changes of the 1990s and 2000s have
produced.
The industrialized oil-consuming countries that belong to the International
Energy Agency improved their energy efficiency by 2 percent a year from 1973
to 1990, but by only 0.9 percent a year from 1990 to 2004. Some governments
took the 1970s oil-price shock seriously enough to embark on radical policy
action: France went for nuclear power; Japan redoubled its energy-efficiency
efforts; and Denmark focused on saving energy and on developing a new
alternative source with wind power. (Almost twenty percent of Denmark's
electricity was produced by wind power in 2007.) Other governments simply
let the market mechanism of higher oil prices do the conservation for them.
The post-1973 efficiency improvements produced a lasting gain. In a study
of eleven of its larger member countries, the IEA concluded that “without
the energy efficiency improvements achieved since 1973, energy use for the
eleven IEA countries would have been 56 percent higher than it actually was
…this makes energy savings the most important “fuel” for the IEA-11 in this
time period.”
The amount of energy saved in 2004 was slightly more than the oil that these
eleven countries consumed. This concept of the quantity of energy
not
used
being considered the most valuable fuel of all is interesting, and logical,
because it involves building nothing and emitting nothing. This non-energy
is sometimes referred to as “negajoules” or “negawatts” - words that look like
typos but are plays on the energy measurements of megajoules or megawatts.
As time wore on and the shocks wore off, most countries grew lax about energy
conservation. The same laxness occurred in energy research and development.
When the oil price came down in the mid-1980s (and stayed down thereafter
for more than fifteen years), so did energy research and development. It has
only recently picked up.
If, for instance, the 1980 peak in energy research had been sustained, the
European Union and its member states would be collectively spending €7-8bn
a year on energy, instead of around €2.5bn a year. Fifteen years of fairly low oil
prices, from 1986 to the turn of this century, left the EU as a whole, in the words
of the European Commission, “with accumulated under-investment [in energy
R&D] due to cheap oil”.
