Let me take as my text for a moment your refrigerator b_ecaus7 it is a nice graphic example. Around the end of World War II your refrigerator motor was probably 80- or 90-odd percent efficient and it sat on top. Nowadays the motor is maybe 50 or 60 percent efficient, probably because the price of electricity to your house has dropped severalfold since then, and the motor sits underneath so its heat goes up into the box. Therefor_e·, your refrigerator probably spends about half of its effort taking away the heat of its own motor! Then the manufacturers have skimped on_insulationit's gotten thinner and thinner because they've tried to make the inside pretty big compared to the outside. (I guess if you gave them a little longer, the inside would get bigger than the outside.) Because of that, and because it is designed so that when you op.en the door all the cold air falls out, it frosts up. So your refrigerator probably has in it .a lot of electric space heaters which go on now and then to defrost it. And it prob- , ably has electric heaters around the door to keep the gasket from sticking because they cannot be bothered to use a Teflon coating. Then the heat gets pumped out the back into a kind of radiator which is usually press_ed right int'o that • thin insulation to help the heat get back inside as fast as possible. And then the refrigerator is probably installed next to your stove or dishwasher, so when they go on, it goes on. It really is hard to think of a better way to waste energy, Now if you design the thing properly, it will keep the same amount of food just as cold, and conveniently, using only a sixth as much electricity as now. (I just had a report from an engineering undergraduate in Santa Barbara who made a refrigerator just for fun that was four times as efficient as the best on the market-then he listed all the nifty things he could have done to make it even better. ) There is an extra capital cost for this factor of six, but you get ·it back in about three years from your electricity savings. Highly cost effe.ctive! These are the kinds of measures I am talking about, throughout the economy-not j-µst in the household, and they add up to a very large saving indeed. You should n0te that I am not assuming here any significant changes in how we live, where we live, or how to organize our society. I am assuming traditional industrial growth for people who think that is a good idea. If you happen to think that today's values or institutions are imperfect, as I am told some people do, • then of course you are welcome to assume some mixture of technical and social change would make this all easier. But I have not done that. I have tried to keep my personal preferences separate from my analytic assumptions. I suspect that I have underestimated the scope for purely technical savings in energy. In fact, to nail that down, I thought it would be fun to make up a little sociological matrix, showing how much total energy various people throughout this country would need in·the year 2000 (Table 1). It is measured in crazy units called "quads" (one quadrillion BTV, per year. We now use about 78 quads per year in the _United States. I have classified these forecasts according to when they were made and according to who made them. One of the Huxleys once said that all knowledge is~fated to start as heresy and end as superstitionso I have used those categories wjth "conventional wisdom" in between. Then there_is a pre-heretical phase called "beyond • the pale," which means nobody even reads it. EVOLUTION OF APPROXIMATE FORECASTS OF U.S. PRIMARY ENERGY DEMAND IN THE YEAR 200Q (in Quads/Year= 1015 BTU/Year) (1972-8 Rate: Ca. 75 Q/Y) SOURCE OF FORECAST YEAR ConvenOF Beyond tional FORE- The Pale Heresy Wisdom Superstition CAST 125 140 160 190 1972 Lovins Sierra Club ·AEC BuMines, FPC 100 124 140 160 1974 EPP (ZEG) EPP (TF) ERDA EEi, EPRI 75 89-95 124 140 1976 Lovins von Hippel Lovins ERDA EEi Williams_ For. Aff. 33 63-77 96-101 124 1978 Steinhart CONAES CONAES Lapp (for 2050) Cons. & (III) Dem. Panel IEA (for 2010) (Weinberg) (I) (II) Table 1. Back in 1972, before the embargo, people like me were talking about 125 quads as being ample in the year 2000. The Sierra Club was heretically suggesting 140, but that was unheard of because the old Atomic Energy Commission was secure in the conventional wisdom of 160. Other federal agencies were up around 190. I think Exxon was around 230. It's all pretty ambitious compared to the present 7 5 or so:· Those were in the days when energy planning was done by an army of chimpanzees armed with semi-log paper and ·rulers. Then in 1974 we had the embargo, of course, and the Ford Energy Policy Project, whose 100-quad scenario was not taken very seriously, but whose 124 technical fix was because it was so much lower than the Energy Research and Development Administration's 140 or the utilities' 160-odd. Then in 1976 in Foreign Affairs I was sugg~sting 95 would be ample, but in speeches I was already saying that 75 made much better use of the technical fixes which by then we·had • already discovered. Some Princeto'n analysts came up with a solid 89. By then ERDA had come' down from 140 to 124- • they had discovered technical fixes. Edisqn Electric Institute had dropped down to 140-they had discovered price elas~·· ticity. • By 1978 John Steinhart of Wisconsin, for the year 2050, was talking about 33 quads. If you read Science magazine in April 1978, you would have seen the very distinguished De; mand Panel of the CONAES Study of the National Aca<;lemy of Sciences giving some scenarios for the year 2010, including 77 and 96 quads, which were pur.e technical fixes, and 63, • which could have been. Alvin Weinberg, the grandaddy of the nuclear business, was by then happy with 101, and even Ralph Lapp was happy with 124. • . This matrix even turns out to have some predictive power because about 6 months after I made it, Dr. Schlesinger gave· ' his latest forecast with what now lo'oks like a rather modest oil price of $32 per barrel. He came out with 95 quads. In November 1979 RAIN Page 5
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