Energy Efficiency is a Strategy not a Virtue

According to Chevron’s CEO, David O’Reilly, energy efficiency is the cheapest form of new energy we currently have.( “Chevron’s CEO: The Price of Oil,” Fortune, November 28, 2007). The Prius is a great example of the types of energy efficiency options that are available to us and the people who are trying to bring them to us. But you might not think about the Prius when you think about energy efficiency because there is a lot of confusion about what energy efficiency is. Most people have that Dick Cheney view of it as energy conservation, usually typified by the image of Jimmy Carter shivering in a cardigan back in the late 1970s. Energy conservation is any behavior that results in the use of less energy—turning off the lights, turning down the heat, driving less, walking more, eating less—all of them positive activities; but if you don’t want to do them, they are seen as being uncomfortable. Energy conservation is widely viewed as being a step backward in our technological and societal progress, and that’s why proponents work hard to differentiate energy conservation from energy efficiency. I personally advocate both but am also very disinclined to do anything that creates personal discomfort.

It is not the goal of energy efficiency to cause discomfort. If anything, energy efficiency creates a higher degree of comfort and well-being because it requires more productivity from the energy we use via smarter technologies. Above all else, energy efficiency represents progress—technological, social, environmental, and cultural progress. And progress is what America is all about. The introduction and rapid adoption of energy in America, particularly electricity, was fueled by society’s perception that using it was a step forward into a future in which we controlled nature and disease and our children lived happily ever after. In the twentieth century, energy use drove the American dream in the form of cars, the modernization of the home, and information, communication, and entertainment technology. In the twenty-first century, energy efficiency will be fundamental to continuing that American dream in a cleaner and more secure national environment.

In a nutshell, energy efficiency is the use of technology that requires less energy to perform the same function. A better way to think of it is that energy conservation is a virtue and energy efficiency is a strategy. In my experience, it is far easier to be strategic than virtuous, which is why I am an advocate of energy efficiency. Energy efficiency means doing more, and often better, with less energy—the opposite of simply doing less or worse or without. To me, the iPod is the perfect example of this. If you consider the history of the ability to listen to music whenever you wanted in the absence of a live performance, it started with Edison’s invention of the phonograph. Back in the day, this music-playing device, known as a gramophone or Victrola, was a big wooden box with a hand crank. Here is a photograph of one I downloaded from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph):

Here is another photograph of a phonograph, from Wikipedia:

This is actually a phonograph cabinet built in 1912 out of Portland cement. The speaker, or amplifying horn, is behind the human figure.

The music listening device evolved to (also from Wikipedia), a portable record player in the 1930s. It played records that were flat round disks the player rotated on a table. The hand crank used a mechanical device to store energy so that the player did not need to be connected to an electrical source. A record could hold several songs on it, depending on the length of the songs. Music lovers accumulated large libraries of records, which had to be well-protected to maintain the quality of the sound. Over time, technology continued to evolve and people grew to like listening to their personal selection of music wherever they went, whether in their car or at the beach or in the gym. With that desire came the invention of the eight-track tape player and tape, the popularity of which grew rapidly when in 1965 Ford introduced dealer-installed eight-track players for their cars, and RCA Victor introduced fifty Stereo-8 Cartridges of prerecorded music from their label of artists. The players and tapes became very popular and home players and portable players—“boom boxes”—were created to enable the use of the tapes wherever people went. However, with the introduction of the compact cassette in the early 1970s, the eight-track quickly lost ground, because its size compared to the compact cassette made it unwieldy. The compact cassette required a cassette player. So most of us threw out our eight-tracks and players and bought cassettes and cassette players.

Then in 1982 the compact disk was introduced and once again how we listened to music on the go was transformed. Standard CDs have a diameter of 120mm and can hold up to eighty minutes of audio. The CD and its extensions have been extremely successful: in 2004, worldwide sales of CD audio, CD-ROM, and CD-R reached about thirty billion discs. By 2007, about 200 billion CDs had been sold worldwide.( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc) Portable CD players were introduced in the 1980s and took off in the 1990s when the technology improved. With the choice of cassette tapes and CDs, music listeners had the option of purchasing and maintaining two media for their libraries. Many of us maintained both because each had its advantages and disadvantages. Part of the choice for many depended on what kind of player you had in your car.

In the late 1990s, the digital audio player device was introduced, which most of us think of as the MP3 player. I have owned several of these over the years. The very first ones offered sixteen MB of storage, which is meager. But over the last few years, several companies have competed to improve the capabilities. Today, an Apple iPod the size of a very large postage stamp is the most popular MP3 in history, not that there is much MP3 history. The Nano sold its first million units in only seventeen days. Today’s Nano can hold up to eight GB of digital media, including music and video like movies and television shows you can rent or download from Apple’s iTunes Web site. Eight GB can hold up to 2,000 songs or 7,000 photos or eight hours of videos. They are powered by small lithium ion batteries that are rechargeable. MP3 player batteries typically need three to five watts to charge, which means it costs between about thirty-six cents and sixty cents every time you charge your iPod for an hour. If you are like me and leave it plugged in endlessly, it costs a lot more.

Here is an iPod with a hand cranked charger:

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2005/03/hand_powered_ip.html

The iPod, as one example, represents the type of technological design and engineering of which our society is capable when we are fueled with the desire to make something happen. This ability to carry the performances of all of Beethoven’s greatest symphonies in one’s pocket to listen to whenever one wanted was beyond belief 100 years ago when people had trouble envisioning the need for telephones.