The CEO of one of the major coal burning utilities, Duke Energy, has said that “Energy efficiency is the ‘fifth fuel’ — after coal, gas, renewables and nuclear.  Today, it is the lowest-cost alternative and is emissions-free. It should be our first choice in meeting our growing demand for electricity, as well as in solving the climate challenge.”  We couldn’t agree more.  [Despite this assertion, Duke is now constructing an old style coal plant and is in the permitting process to build a nuclear facility and an additional coal fired plant.]
 
The cheapest, cleanest, and fastest way to generate additional electric capacity is to reduce the amount of electricity we currently waste by using it more efficiently.  And buildings account for 76% of all the electrical energy produced at coal plants.  Efficiency measures include: improving building codes to reduce consumption; retrofitting older buildings with improved insulation, HVAC, appliances and lighting;   installing power generators that recapture waste heat for  air conditioning and other purposes – called Combined Heating and Power (CHP); and automatically decreasing consumption during peak hours so demand is decreased when the electric grid is the most stressed – called Demand Side Management (DSM). 

For more on designing efficiency standards into construction, visit Architecture 2030 .  2030’s goal is to achieve a dramatic reduction in the global-warming-causing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of the Building Sector by changing the way buildings and developments are planned, designed and constructed.

Look at the numbers.  Roughly $1Billion goes to a new coal plant in loans and subsidies.  If that were lent to building and home owners for efficiency measures, there would be significantly more electricity available in the grid, without an ounce of CO2 or newly mined coal.   To accomplish this will take imagination and old-fashioned work.  Regulators will need to work with utilities to establish compensation methods for sponsoring efficiency measures among their customers; methods must be devised to protect the home-owner from debt exposure should they sell a home before recouping the benefits of efficiency-based capital improvements.  These are all solvable problems and are being worked on already through organizations like Architecture 2030.

Efficiency measures can meet electricity demand for the next decade without new coal plants.  This will buy time for the renewable sector, now less than 3% of generation capacity, to grow large enough to meet demand over the long run.  Again, this is without the toxic pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, or environmental devastation that comes with coal fired generation.

• Efficiency is cheaper: a graph of cost benefits of existing efficiency program in Vermont vs. buying power off the grid.
• Efficiency can reverse demand growth in New England at 3.1¢ per kWh. Here.
• Study of efficiency impacts on bottom line of one Apartment building
• Energy Requirement per capita World-wide.  Energy consumption by the average American dwarfs that of any other country, twice the rate of even Western Europe.  Chart.
• A compelling chart showing the actual effect of California’s efficiency policies implemented in the mid 70’s – flat electricity demand while the “Gross State Product” (like U.S. GDP), grew 79%. 
• A New Energy Future: The Benefits of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy for Cutting America’s Use of Fossil Fuels.  “In 2025, for example, the United States could save 1.7 billion megawatt-hours of electricity per year, 30 percent more than was used in all the households in America in 2005.”
• DOE National Efficiency Action Plan Vision for 2025
• State-level benefits of energy efficiency – DOE report 2007
• Excellent study of efficiency as an alternative to proposed coal plant on tribal lands in Arizona.  It includes a discussion of the negative health and environmental impacts of the plant, along with better alternatives.
• Compare changing one light bulb to making 700 gal of ethanol – same CO2 reduction, CO2 reduction from ethanol costs $450 more.  Government spends 3 times as much on ethanol vs. efficiency. Here.
• History of long term efficiency in California reduces per capita and total natural gas consumption while population increases.  Graph.