Conservation is 'key to curbing climate change'

New York, 18 October: Energy efficiency is crucial to fighting climate change, since controlling greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from electricity generation is more difficult and expensive than limiting other pollutants, said a panel of industry experts.

With GHGs, “the best solutions are not at the smokestacks”, said Richard Cowart, director of the Maine-based Regulatory Assistance Project, a NGO specialising in electricity regulation.

“Nor in the fuel supply [because] we don’t have low-carbon coal,” added the former Vermont regulatory commissioner during a 17 October teleconference on efficiency, presented by the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE).

For those reasons, the US should not attempt to duplicate the success of its Acid Rain Program, in which utilities have dramatically reduced sulphur dioxide by adding scrubbers or burning low-sulphur coal, Cowart said.

He also warned that cap-and-trade programmes or carbon taxes can raise prices to consumers without significantly promoting the operation of cleaner power plants. Since utilities pass costs along, “they will just take home more money”, Cowart said.

But the higher prices will not compel consumers to use much less electricity, as some economists argue, he added. Efficiency programmes can deliver five- to 10-times as many energy savings as high prices alone and these could be funded by auctioning allowances.

Also needed are tradable securities representing the GHG-reducing qualities of conservation, said Mel Jones, CEO of Sterling Planet. The Norcross, Georgia, company already markets ‘green tags’, embodying renewable energy, and ‘white tags’, representing efficiency savings, which are used to meet states’ clean energy mandates.

Kathleen Hogan, director of climate protection partnerships at the US Environmental Protection Agency, said: “We must regard [efficiency] as an energy resource… that we need to procure”, just as we procure gas or coal. She sees progress in state ‘decoupling’ efforts, which stop rewarding utilities financially for the amount of energy they sell and instead reward them for the energy they help to save.