“I’m hugely enthusiastic about energy efficiency,” said Edward Davey in his first speech since replacing Chris Huhne, who resigned in the wake of questions regarding speeding charges against him. “It’s the cheapest way of cutting carbon — and cutting bills for consumers. It has to be right at the heart of what we do.”

The concept of energy efficiency is a fairly simple one. Basically, the more closely energy into something (a car, a data center, an air conditioner, an Xbox, etc.) matches that something’s useful energy output (“useful” meaning you don’t include losses from heat, friction, and so on), the more energy efficient it is. Achieving optimal energy efficiency, on the other hand, isn’t always so easy.

Energy efficiency is sometimes called “the fifth fuel” because of its large potential for contributing to stable energy supplies. (The first four fuels are oil, coal, nuclear and renewables.) Efficiency was one of the key strategies identified by Princeton researchers Robert Socolow and Steve Pacala when they developed their climate stabilization wedge game in 2004. Physicist Arthur Rosenfeld, a long-time influential member of the California Energy Commission, made energy efficiency a lifetime quest … to the point a unit of energy savings (the “Rosenfeld”) has been named after him.

So how big an impact could efficiency really have on our global energy appetite?

• At the grid level, a really big one. In the US, less-than-perfect powerline insulation leads to an average 7 percent loss in electricity from starting point to ending point. (“It’s like going to the market and buying a full container of milk and then arriving at home to see a glassful has disappeared,” says IBM researcher Philip Shemella.) Add in the inefficiencies in power generation, and those losses go even higher: “In 2010, 24 per cent of UK primary energy demand was lost through energy generation, transformation and distribution losses,” notes the British government’s brief on the importance of energy efficiency.
• At the other end of the scale — our homes — efficiency can also make a significant dent. The drain of standby power for all those devices we leave plugged in 24/7, even when they’re not in use, amounts to up to 10 percent of total residential energy demand, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). And this problem, writes Cambridge’s David MacKay (author of the brilliant book, “Sustainable energy — without the hot air”) can be boiled down to a different inefficiency: penny-wise, pound-foolish manufacturing. “It’s perfectly possible to make standby systems that draw less than 0.01 W; but manufacturers, saving themselves a penny in the manufacturing costs, are saddling the consumer with an annual cost of pounds,” MacKay states.
• And in terms of global greenhouse gas emissions, the impact of energy efficiency could be nothing short of huge, leading to reductions of 25 to 40 percent.

Efficiency has already put us in a better place than we could be. Without better insulation and home heating improvements, British homes today would be consuming twice as much energy as they did in 1970, according to the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). But clearly we could do a lot better. Why haven’t we yet?

Society’s endless pursuit of growth.

In its 2004 report, “Growth isn’t Possible,” the new economics foundation compared the endless pursuit of growth to an “impossible hamster.” A newborn hamster, the report explains, might grow rapidly in its first weeks, doubling its weight every week until it hits puberty. If it kept growing at that rate, though, the rodent would weigh nine billion tons by its first birthday.

The quest for continued economic growth includes not just more stuff, but endlessly bigger and better stuff. That’s why cars, electronic devices, households and more stay energy-hungry despite all the individual efficiency improvements that have been made to them. It’s human nature, it seems, to keep wanting more … and it doesn’t help when that tendency joins up with conspiracy theories about green energy and smart technology.

Can we efficiency our way out of that? There’s the question.

The answer to both questions is an emphatic yes.

Not only can cook stove technology be dramatically improved, but doing so could be life-saving. Pollution from wood-burning indoor stoves still widely used in developing countries can cause all kinds of respiratory problems and is even blamed for many premature deaths every year. And in conflict-torn regions like Sudan’s Darfur, a better stove can prevent women in refugee camps from having to exchange precious food for fuel … or to risk assault or death by venturing out to gather firewood.

As of October 2011, more than 20,000 such stoves have been distributed in Darfur. The Berkeley-Darfur Stove, as it’s called, was designed with the help of scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and is tailor-made to meet the needs of Darfuri women struggling to feed their families amidst grinding poverty, violence and depleted natural resources.

Starting with a standard cook stove design, the researchers spoke with Darfuri women to figure out how to adapt the technology specifically for their living conditions. The changes they made include air openings that allow the stove to keep burning efficiently in windy conditions with blowing sand and a small fire box opening that keeps the need for firewood to a minimum, cutting consumption by about 55 percent.

“Not only are these fuel-efficient stoves reducing the domestic burden and violence against women, but they are addressing associated environmental issues, like deforestation,” said Diana Gee-Silverman of Plan Canada, an NGO working with the Darfur Stoves Project. “When you take into account the work we’ve done to mobilize communities to participate in the project, it’s been a win-win on so many levels.”

The project has been supervised by Ashok Gadgil, director of the Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division. Gadgil, who has won numerous awards for his work on sustainable technologies, this week added another honor to his resume: a $500,000 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Zayed Future Energy Prize.

Gadgil called the latest award a “tremendous validation of my lifelong passion and efforts for energy innovation and sustainability.”

First awarded in 2009, the Zayed prize recognizes innovation, leadership, long-term vision and impact in renewable energy and sustainability.

“Winning the Zayed Future Energy Prize deepens my commitment to energy innovation for sustainability,” Gadgil said. “Together with my colleagues and co-workers, I will continue to advance the research, design, testing and scale-up of fuel-efficient low-emission stoves for about three billion people (mostly women) that use biomass for cooking.”

Good thing, too: setting their thermostats low saves the average Vermonter more than $500 a year in heating costs.

EnergyHub, a New York-based company that develops software and tools for home energy efficiency, crunched data from its Mercury smart thermostat platform to find that the typical customer in Vermont had a heating setpoint of 63.4 degrees Fahrenheit (17.4 degrees Celsius) in November 2011.

By contrast, in Oklahoma and Texas, the average settings for customers’ thermostats were 70.0 degrees Fahrenheit (just over 21.1 degrees Celsius) and 69.9 degrees Fahrenheit (just under 21.1 degrees Celsius), respectively.

“If Vermonters set their thermostats like Texans, their heating bills would go through the roof,” noted EnergyHub’s blog post about the analysis. “Why? Because Vermont has an average 7,746 heating degree days per year, while Texas has only 1,862.”

On the other hand, Oklahomans and Texans wouldn’t notice much of a difference on their heating bills if they set their thermostats to Vermont-like temperatures. The typical savings in Texas would amount to just around $42 a year, according to EnergyHub.

That’s for heating only, though. Texas and Oklahoma residents use a lot of air-conditioning during their sweltering summers, so chances are that’s when a change in thermostat settings could make the biggest difference for them. EnergyHub plans to take a look at what kind of difference soon.

Friction loss accounts for one-third of a car’s fuel consumption, according to a new joint study from the VTT Technical Research Center of Finland and the US-based Argonne National Laboratory. Worldwide, that means we wasted 208,000 million liters (around 55 billion gallons) of fuel because of friction, and that’s in 2009 alone.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that new technology can help overcome those friction losses by anywhere from 10 to 80 percent for different components in a car.

That means it should be possible, by tackling friction alone, to cut a vehicle’s fuel consumption and emissions by 18 percent in the next five to 10 years, the study’s authors say. Over the next 15 to 25 years, friction-focused innovations could boost mileage and cut emissions by up to 61 percent.

So where are all those friction losses taking place? The researchers says 35 percent is spent in overcoming rolling resistance in the wheels and 35 percent is in the engine, with another 15 percent each occurring in the gearbox and in braking. All of these conspire to produce the result that only 21.5 percent of the energy contained in your car’s gas tank actually goes toward moving your car. The rest is pure waste.

By putting in place the best technology fixes available today in all the world’s cars, the study concludes, we could save $444 billion a year in fuel costs.

Even if your response is, “Hey, that’s great,” it’s hard not to also feel that this is a bit like eating the seed corn or burning the furniture for fuel. Really, is our water situation so desperate that we’re ready to start drinking toilet water?

Apparently, yes.

While we’re all for efficiency, even if you eliminate the “ick” factor, this potential solution raises a lot of questions. How much energy would go into this process, and would that create an overall plus or minus on the sustainability scale? What happens to all the stuff left over after treatment — how do we manage that? And could this mess up nature’s water cycle even more than we have already?

The exhaustive (363 pages) NRC study acknowledges plenty of uncertainties that need to be addressed before wastewater-to-drinking water goes mainstream: potential impacts on health, greenhouse gas emissions, cost, unintended consequences, security, legal considerations and much more.

Then again, as journalist Charles Fishman, author of “The Big Thirst,” has pointed out, all the water we’ve ever drunk has been around in one form or another for the past 4.5 billion years. At least some of it, he notes, was probably Tyrannosaurus Rex pee.

If you don’t know what gas flaring is – read this post.

Carbon Sciences – a catalyst company based in Santa Barbara – has developed a technology that can make a synthetic crude oil it claims is “ultra-clean.”

Using a dry-reforming methane conversion process, it has learned to produce what it calls CarbonCrude, a synthetic crude oil (conversion of C02) that can be mixed with traditional crude oil.

If true, this new process could pave the way for the elimination of gas flaring at smaller oil fields and for the production of a valuable fuel.

The technology is being offered to oil and gas companies that operate small to mid-sized oil fields, where traditional natural-gas-saving techniques are not considered economically viable enough to pursue.

Byron Elton, CEO of Carbon Sciences, says, “Associated gas is a big problem for resource holders and can negatively affect oil field economics. By converting this excess gas into synthetic crude oil using our low-capital, cleantech solution, we believe we can deliver both economic and social value to oil field operators.

“The solution was developed for a small-scale operation that can convert oil field natural gas into CarbonCrude. (It) can then be blended with natural crude oil from the field and transported to market using existing oil pipelines. Existing refineries can then process this blended crude oil into a variety of products, including transportation fuels.”

What’s more, utility companies are becoming very good at selling less of their top product: electricity. But consumers are the ones paying for that privilege.

A new study from the Edison Foundation’s Institute for Electric Efficiency, for instance, finds that electricity efficiency programs in the US in 2010 saved enough energy to power nearly 10 million homes for a year. Nationwide, of all the efficiency program budgets supported by ratepayer (that’s you and me) dollars in 2011, 84 percent was led by electric utilities.

In other words, utility companies are setting aside a lot of money to encourage customers to buy less of what they’re selling. But it’s consumers who are providing the cash.

Welcome to the brave new 21st-century energy world.

Not that there’s anything wrong with energy efficiency. Using less electricity (and less of many other things) has already become an imperative for millions across the US and elsewhere who’ve been pinched hard by the economy. Globally, energy prices are trending in one predominant direction: upward. And anything we can do to defend against worsening climate impacts by cutting fossil-fuel-generated carbon emissions is a good thing. It makes sense not only for the average Joe or Jane to become more energy-efficient, but to take advantage of any reasonable technologies that can help make the transition to a more electricity-constrained future as painless as possible.

Just remember, the next time your utility company tells you what a great job it’s doing at saving energy, who’s footing the bill. When it comes to electricity, consumers today are paying both to use it … and to not use it.

Between 1980 and 2006, cars sold in the US could have seen their fuel economy rise by a whopping 60 percent, thanks to technology and design improvements by automakers. However, in real life, the average real mileage on the roads improved by a little more than 15 percent. The rest of the fuel-saving benefits, new research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has found, was lost to ever-growing auto weights (26 percent) and increased horsepower (107 percent).

MIT economist Christopher Knittel dubs the effect, “Automobiles on Steroids.”

Knittel doesn’t blame the auto companies. If anyone’s responsible for failure of improved auto efficiency to translate into real-world energy savings, it’s Adam Smith’s infamous “invisible hand” of the marketplace.

“I find little fault with the auto manufacturers, because there has been no incentive to put technologies into overall fuel economy,” Knittel said. “Firms are going to give consumers what they want, and if gas prices are low, consumers are going to want big, fast cars.”

While the price for crude oil — as well as gas at the pump — hit new highs in 2008, the cost of fuel had before that been trending downward. Adjusted for inflation, gas prices dropped by 30 percent between 1980 and 2004.

If more efficient vehicle designs alone aren’t the cure for the US’ oil addiction and global climate change, what is? Knittel sees the solution in a higher tax on gas consumption. Only then will motorists begin to value fuel as the valuable resource it is, and start making efforts to use a whole lot less of it.

“When it comes to climate change, leaving the market alone isn’t going to lead to the efficient outcome,” he said. “The right starting point is a gas tax.”

That spells opportunity for technology and service companies that can deliver the best — and fastest — returns on investment. On the other hand, investments with longer-term or hard-to-quantify payoffs will be increasingly difficult to justify, especially as government stimulus spending (think smart-grid grants and loans) begins to dwindle.

Under those circumstances, the business model with great potential is the one where efficiency solutions can be had for no upfront cost at all on the customer’s part; that is, one where companies can implement new technologies or services that lower their energy bills steadily over time, with all or part of those savings going to the technology or service provider in the form of residual-like payments.

That’s a model already in use by quite a few solar-energy companies that use power purchase agreements to motivate homeowners to install photovoltaics on their rooftops. Under such leasing arrangements — offered by firms like SolarCity, SunRun, CT Solar Lease and Sungevity — customers have gotten solar panels on their roofs for little or no upfront cost, with the installing company earning revenues through homeowners’ ongoing lower utility bills.

Even with solar-energy costs approaching parity with traditional electricity sources, such leases typically last for 20 years to make them worthwhile for PV companies. Other efficiency improvements, though, can pay for themselves more quickly, and that’s where we can expect to see a lot of activity in the coming year. Think “free cooling” solutions like Iceotope’s for data centers, demand response services such as EnerNOC’s and low-cost behavior-based ways to lower energy costs (GreenRoad’s approach for reducing fuel consumption, for example).

As the Great Recession drags into yet another year, efficiency will continue to be good … but cheap, or — better yet — free, efficiency will be even better.

That seems to be the case for US House Republicans who, according to a report released yesterday, have yet to meet a green law they like. (“The Most Anti-Environment House in the History of Congress” saw GOP reps vote anti-environment 191 times this session, say Democrats on the House Committee on Energy & Commerce.) Long eager to repeal a section of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 that would have required new efficiency standards for light bulbs, the right side of the aisle today didn’t manage to kill greener lighting. They just succeeded in starving enforcement efforts for the coming year.

“A rider related to light bulbs on the FY 2012 Omnibus funding bill does not repeal or adjust the standards themselves or their effective timeline,” noted the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA), which represents more than 95 percent of the US lighting manufacturing sector and supports the 2007 efficiency standards. Instead, NEMA points out, the rider attached by Republicans “imposes funding limitations on the Department of Energy (DOE) to enforce the light bulb standards for FY2012.”

That move, the association claims, creates regulatory uncertainty for manufacturers, puts makers of efficient bulbs at a disadvantage compared to companies that flout new standards and sets the stage for a confusing patchwork of state enforcement efforts.

It also essentially creates a zombie green light bulb law … alive, but not alive; dead but undead.

The silver lining, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), is that the spending bill vote kept out “dozens” of other GOP-designed riders aimed at blocking restrictions on air and water pollution, protecting endangered species or allowing more development on public lands.

The NRDC also notes ironically that the light bulb efficiency standards now drained of enforcement funding were signed into law by President George W. Bush.