Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
As a result, energy use has taken off again, slowly and pretty much in line
with economic growth.Yet we are still wasting $300 billion a year worth of
energy. We have barely scratched the surface of how much efficiency is
available and worth buying, and that waste, that low-hanging fruit that is
mushing up around our ankles, actually keeps accumulating, because we
have learned new tricks about saving energy faster than we are using up the
cheapest opportunity. This is not a technologically static field; quite the
contrary.There are also stunning advances on the supply side. Oil is getting
ever cheaper, even though we are using up more of it faster, but the cost of
finding and lifting it is going down even faster.
In the electricity business, plants kept getting bigger until about 1970.
Since then, the big power plant business has fallen off a cliff.The ordering
rate of fossil-fueled steam power plants at the end of the twentieth century
was back to Victorian levels. We returned to the size distribution of new
plants that we had in the 1940s, and were very rapidly heading for the size
distribution we had in the 1920s.
So history takes plenty of twists and turns along the way as technology
changes, and that has enormous implications. I think the biggest surprise
amidst all of the dramatic transitions of the past 20-odd years is not in eco-
nomics, although there were certainly a lot of bad surprises in that sphere.
We had a little bulge in investment among investor-run utilities in the
1970s and the 1980s, almost all of which was the nuclear experiment. By
the late 1990s that nuclear experiment was delivering somewhat less energy
than wood, but it cost about a trillion dollars and was at best a near-death
experience for quite a lot of utilities that violated Miss Piggy's fourth law:
Never eat more than you can lift.The biggest change is not in economics;
it is in technology.
I think the biggest change of all is in design mentality rather than in a
specific invention; in new ways to think about how we use technology to
get, in this case, big energy savings that cost less than small energy savings.
That is the big surprise, because we are all conditioned by neo-classical eco-
nomics, and by a lot of everyday experience, to think that the more energy
you save, the more and more steeply the cost of saving the next unit rises
through diminishing returns until you hit the limit of cost effectiveness, and
you have to stop.That is often true, up to a point. But there is often another
part of the curve that the economic theorists don't tell you about and don't
know about. It is something that you only discover from engineering prac-
tice.That is, if you go on further, and save even more, you can often make
