Getting Energy Efficiency to Fly Requires Great Engineering and a Bit of Magic

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Written by Richard Finlayson, International Correspondent for Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources, Incorporated; Houston, Texas). If you take the current extreme of reports on energy priorities and clean energy, you will see the major global energy generators in coal, gas and oil, cogen, and nuclear power announcing major new sets of top end projects in the gigawatt range, while stressing how they are involved in renewables and sustainables - and the companies and groups primarily dedicated to ‘clean’ power technologies announcing a stream of new products and projects in the kW and MW range, ignoring the top end demand capacity gap, and mentioning the top end output only in terms of fear and loathing.

Both extremes are exercised by regulatory formations, industry taxes, and direct and indirect subsidies, and their worthiness. Depending on your viewpoint you can be extremely for, or extremely against the directions of these unnatural, but necessary evils, on a selective basis.

I think it is called 'talking past each other.'

As the International Energy Agency reported that carbon dioxide emissions fell significantly between 1973 and 1990, but climbed 13% between 1990 and 2000, European power companies announced plans to invest over $1.8 billion in wind energy generation over the next ten years. The British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) says that UK wind capacity will be well over 1,500 MW by the end of 2005 and that 474 MW will be added to the national total this year, both onshore and offshore. They report that by the end of 2005 wind energy (1689 MW will provide 1.3% of total UK electricity needs. By 2010, expectations are that wind will provide 8,000 MW and contribute 75% of the targeted 10.4% of total UK electricity provided by renewables sources. The government intends to extend the Renewables Obligation to 15% by 2015. Statistical support is provided in terms of the number of domestic dwellings that will be powered by the clean energy projects.

The IEA, report while saying that energy efficiency in industrialized states has slowed, also says that reliance on energy to fuel economic growth has fallen over the past thirty years. The amount of energy needed to produce a unit of gross domestic product (GDP) in the economies of member states has fallen by 33% since 1973. But annual energy savings rates of 1.5%, current from 1973 to 1990, have since stalled to 0.5%. After falling significantly between 1973 and 1990, carbon dioxide emissions have climbed 13% between 1990 and 2001. Cheap fuel prices have fostered continued economic dependence on oil, the report said.

IEA executive director, Claude Mandil, said, "There is an urgent need to consider ways to accelerate the decoupling of energy use and CO2 emissions from economic growth. It is still possible to obtain at a low cost, a dramatic increase in energy efficiency in our economies," Mandil added.

In the U.S., the DOE's Annual Energy Outlook says that non-hydro renewables will experience a modest, but steady growth over the next two decades. But the DOE says that coal and natural gas will make up a growing share of overall generation in 2025 - 55% for coal and 23% for gas. Biomass will add 6,000 MW and wind energy will add 11,000 MW in the twenty years the DOE estimates. Factors affecting wind will include future cost and performance, transmission availability, and the future availability of the production tax credit. The AWEA (American Wind Energy Association) has reported that "thousands of megawatts" are now on hold due to uncertainty surrounding the wind production tax credits AWAE reported that nearly 1,700 MW of new wind energy capacity was installed in 2003. The 36% increase brought the installed U.S. wind energy base to 6,370 MW.

Taking Mandil's comments on energy efficiency as being unextreme and the DOE’s cautious lack of renewable over exuberance looking at the next twenty years, we should hope that solutions can be engineered in both senses of the word; by trying to create priorities and public attitudes in a more structured way and by pushing the existing technologies as far and fast as they can go. Oh yes, and hoping that a couple of bright guys with spanners in a garage will think of something simpler and more effective than the power generation means we have at present. I mean the aerofoil idea and the theory of lift is extremely simple chaps, and look where it got us! Don't knock it; magic happens as well as the other stuff, which we currently are in.