The growing range of choices in hybrid and electric cars has put ever-growing pressure on automakers looking to earn fuel-efficient accolades such as the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy’s (ACEEE) annual Greener Cars list.

“Earning a spot on the ‘Greenest’ list is proving to be a real challenge for automakers given the variety of vehicle technologies on the market and the proliferation of highly efficient conventional vehicles,” said Shruti Vaidyanathan, the ACEEE’s lead vehicle analyst. “Just using the latest technology does not guarantee a top spot.”

This year, according to the ACEEE, if you’re a US motorist looking to boost your “green cred” with a new car purchase, the 2012 Mitsubishi i-MiEV is the way to go.

The battery electric vehicle, making its debut this year in the US market, has earned the ACEEE’s highest Green Score ranking ever: 58 out of a possible 100. Because it’s electric, its efficiency isn’t measured in miles per gallon but in miles per kilowatt-hour, which is this case is 3.8  in the city and 2.9 for highway driving. If that doesn’t sound all that impressive, this should: that’s the equivalent of 112 miles per gallon for city and highway driving combined.

“Even taking into account the emissions generated from the electricity used to power the i-MiEV, it still handily outscores other vehicles on the market today,” Vaidyanathan said.

The Mitsubishi also usurped the long-time previous Green Score leader, the Honda Civic Natural Gas, which has held the ACEEE’s top spot for the past eight years. That Honda model now ranks second, followed by the Toyota Prius, the Honda Insight and the Smart ForTwo.

“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.

Exciting new business opportunities? Check. A stepping-stone to even more innovation? Check. An open-door invitation to a lawsuit?

Check.

As the smart-grid industry matures and evolves, it should come as no surprise that there will be mergers and acquisitions, winners and losers … along with increasingly fierce competition along the way. And with the competitive territory comes an increased likelihood of litigation.

Now that advanced energy meters and smart thermostats have entered the mainstream, the competition is heating up. This week, Honeywell dialed up the temperature a bit more by filing a lawsuit against Nest Labs, which last year unveiled its Nest Learning Thermostat.

Honeywell alleges that Nest is infringing on seven of its own thermostat technology patents: “among other things, simplified methods for operating and programming a thermostat including the use of natural language, user interfaces that facilitate programming and energy savings, a thermostat’s inner design, an electric circuit used to divert power from the user’s home electrical system to provide power to a thermostat, and controlling a thermostat with information stored in a remote location.”

Filed in US District Court in Minnesota, the Honeywell lawsuit also names Best Buy, which carries the Nest thermostat. The suit seeks to halt the sale of Best thermostats and also asks for monetary damages.

Honeywell recently also filed suit against Venstar Inc. and ICM Controls for “infringing thermostat and combustion controls patents.”

Serious energy analysts usually find lots to complain about in the mainstream media’s coverage of energy issues, and those complaints — a tendency toward stenography, innumeracy, lack of context and “magical thinking” — are often justified. But the Daily Ticker article titled “US to Be Free from Foreign Oil by 2030: BP” dials those complaints up to 11.

How? Let’s have a look, shall we?

• Start with the headline: “US to Be Free from Foreign Oil by 2030: BP” – This is supposedly the big news flash coming out of BP’s latest “Energy Outlook 2030,” which was released last month. Only that’s not what the “Energy Outlook 2030″ says. The closest any statement from BP comes to resembling the breathless headline is this comment from the press release accompanying the report: “The growth of unconventional supply, including US shale oil and gas, Canadian oil sands, and Brazilian deepwaters, against a background of a gradual decline in oil demand, will see the Western Hemisphere become almost totally energy self-sufficient by 2030.” Hmm, Western Hemisphere = US? Nope. Foreign Oil = Energy? Wrong again.
• Then there’s this howler from the article: “The drilling process used to bring (natural) gas to the surface is widely known as ‘fracking.’ ” Um, no. “Fracking,” the much-despised (by the gas industry) shortened term for “hydrofracturing,” is just one way of extracting natural gas from the earth.
• Preceding that reference to fracking, the article also offers up this non-sequitur: “As the country expands its domestic natural gas production, the US will buy less foreign oil.” Sorry, the two aren’t equivalent fuels … and if you want to replace transportation oil with natural gas, there’s a heavy price to pay. As Natural Gas Vehicles for America has pointed out, converting an existing new vehicle from gasoline-powered to natural gas-powered costs an average of $12,000 to $18,000per car. Multiply that by the 194 million or so light-duty vehicles the Bureau of Transportation Statistics estimated were on US roads in 2009, and you get a price-tag of $2.3 to 3.5 trillion. Yeah, that’ll happen.

All we can say is, considering coverage like this, it’s impressive that so many of the article’s commenters cried foul. As one appropriately responded, “And the US will colonize Mars by 2040.”

The US remains the world’s second-largest consumer of coal. And, globally, coal use has been on the rise, growing by more than 70 percent between 2000 and 2010, with China dominating the market. Not only is China the top consumer of coal … it’s also the leading producer by far.

“China’s share in global coal production is almost four times that of Saudi Arabia’s production of oil,” the International Energy Agency (IEA) notes in its “Medium Term Coal Market Report 2011.”  “Its share in global coal consumption is more than twice that of the demand for oil in the United States. Overall, the Chinese domestic coal market is more than three times the entire international coal trade. Therefore, any imbalance between Chinese production and demand has the ability to have a large impact on global coal trade.”

It’s largely because of China’s huge appetite for coal that the global outlook is “marked by extreme uncertainty,” the IEA states. The country is already consuming about half of all the world’s coal every year. It’s uncertain how much longer that trend could continue.

In fact, even though global reserves are “plentiful,” as the IEA puts it, coal is facing price and production pressures similar to that of oil: wildly increasing demand has forced producers to turn to more marginal — and more expensive to produce — sources to keep up. With many of those sources farther away from export infrastructure, and because of shipment bottlenecks in transport, the result has been “significantly higher costs of supply.”

All those challenges aside, though, how much coal is realistically left worldwide?

In its most recent World Energy Outlook, the IEA estimates that “economically exploitable” global coal reserves add up to 1 trillion tons, or “some 150 years of production in 2009.” That’s 3.2 times as much energy as natural gas can supply us with, and 2.5 times that of oil.

And what about the coal that’s not currently economically exploitable with current technology? Add that to the mix, and the world has some 21 trillion tons of coal buried underground … enough, in theory anyway, to keep meeting 2009-level demand for more than 3,000 years.

Whether that coal remains affordable, both literally and figuratively, though, is another matter. Harder-to-produce supplies, transport challenges and health, safety and environmental regulations all add to the price of coal, and supply costs have already gone up by an average of 12 percent a year since 2005. As affordable oil supplies are depleted, coal-to-liquid technology might become an option to create fuel for cars and trucks — but that’s a costly (not to mention carbon-intensive) process.

And then there’s the carbon footprint of coal itself — far higher than that of oil or natural gas. If we keep burning the stuff at current rates (or ever higher ones), we’ll be adding yet more carbon dioxide to an atmosphere that’s already more carbon-heavy than it has been for 15 million years. Considering that, back then, “global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today” and sea levels were anywhere from 75 to 120 feet higher than they are now, we might want to look seriously at other energy alternatives than coal.

Beyond that challenge, though, is another one that doesn’t always get as much public attention: how to incorporate the impact of renewables into energy trading markets.

Making our power grids “smarter” and cleaner can affect energy trading markets in a number of ways. For one, by creating so-called “supergrids” that connect many smaller and more local grids, energy buyers and sellers will have a wider, more competitive market open to them … with all sorts of new implications for prices.

For example, the Tres Amigas SuperStation project being developed in the southwestern US will link three regional grids that until now have operated as virtual energy islands, with little electricity exchanged among them. Once in place (the project is set to begin early operations in 2015), those links have the potential to “revolutionize” US power markets, according to Tres Amigas LLC.

“The SuperStation’s ability to transmit, for the first time ever, significant amounts of power across the three main US interconnections will increase the value of regional transmission investments, both in place and planned, due to the newly created enhanced ability to use those assets,” the developer says.

Managing and selling all that power through a single hub will also make it possible, for instance, for energy-hungry cities on the East Coast to purchase electricity generated by solar farms in the Southwest. That could encourage more development of wind and solar in areas where local demands alone aren’t enough to justify further building.

Enabling such wider-reaching, more competitive energy markets will take wider-reaching, more advanced data sharing and analytical capabilities as well. Tres Amigas, for example, is partnering with Mitsui to help ensure its smart-grid system is backed with plenty of smart computing as well.

As Tres Amigas president, chairman and CEO Philip Harris has said, “Apart from the purely electrical engineering aspects of the project, the commercial operation of the SuperStation requires intensive use of information systems and technology, as well as management of large-scale infrastructure.”

The giant energy and infrastructure company Siemens also sees opportunity in support for smarter, more nimble energy markets. It announced today that it’s collaborating with IT services provider Atos to together develop integrated software for optimizing both power generation and energy trading. The joint development is “designed to significantly boost the profitability of power generation and trading by optimizing the bid creation and by providing a seamless data flow at IT level. This furthermore saves costs for integration and reduces the project risks.”

“The cooperation with Atos puts us in a position to offer our customers an IT solution that covers their entire value chain,” said Jan Mrosik, CEO of the smart-grid division in Siemens’ Infrastructure and Cities Sector. “At the same time, a single source of supply reduces the project risk significantly when introducing or exchanging tools of this type.”

The Siemens-Atos “joint Resource Optimization and Scheduler” (jROS) “offers a seamless data flow between generation planning and energy trading, allowing faster decisions to be made in the bidding process on energy exchanges and for bilateral trading.”

Google that question, and you’ll quickly find more than 1 million results, including definitions from the US Department of Energy, its spin-off website SmartGrid.gov and Wikipedia. All, though, are describing essentially the same thing: an energy infrastructure with built-in, automated and real-time or near-real-time sensing, monitoring, measurement, communications and control capabilities.

What the smart grid does, on the utility side, is make it possible to manage energy demands and issues not only at the consumer level but at every key point along the transmission and distribution network.  Another benefit is demand response, in which energy users reduce or switch off non-essential energy-using devices during times of peak demand to reduce stress on the grid.

On the user side, the smart grid would give people and businesses insight into how much energy they’re using and when. It would also enable them to easily and automatically control their consumption through web- and smartphone-based portals, managing tasks like — for example — automatic scheduling of dishwashing for times when electricity prices are lowest.

The smart grid is often called the “energy internet,” and it’s a useful (though not 100-percent accurate) analogy. Essentially, it connects every element of the energy grid much in the same way the internet connects every networked computer, so all the parts can send and receive information from one another. and control and manage applications. It probably won’t end up being as entertaining as the ‘net, but the potential benefits — in energy, money and carbon emissions saved; improved resilience; better support for green energy and electric cars; etc. — could be equally huge over time.

Consider these recent developments:

• Spain this past week announced a “temporary” freeze on any new incentives payments for installing renewable technologies. The AEE, Spain’s wind-energy association, warned the move “involves a significant risk to the wind industry and the more than 30,000 people it employs.” The organization also noted that the country’s wind industry had zero impact on worsening the national deficit, and actually benefits the government’s bottom line by preventing the need for higher fossil fuel imports.
• Meanwhile, UK officials are vowing to appeal a recent court ruling that found the government’s abruptly announced plan to halve feed-in tariff (FIT) payments for solar panel installations “offends the legality principle.” Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne’s response: “The reason for appealing is that we want to maximise the number of installations that are possible within the available budget for FITs, rather than use available money to pay a higher tariff to half the number of installations.” That, however, begs the question of whether a lot fewer people might be willing to install a rooftop solar system if they’re getting only half as much money for the energy those systems generate.
• On top of an already-planned 8 percent cut in feed-in tariff payments for solar power, Switzerland this week  announced plans to reduce the incentives even more — by an additional 10 percent — starting this March. Greece — no surprise, considering its fiscal state of affairs — is also lowering its FIT rates.
• In the US, which has generally lagged behind much of Europe in terms of government incentives for small-scale renewables, momentum is again building for the “drill, baby, drill” energy philosophy. Funding-strapped states like Colorado and Ohio are opening up state parks for oil and gas drilling, and Republicans in Congress are exploring every trick in the book to make sure the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta’s tar sands gets built and oil exploration can proceed in pristine natural areas like Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Granted, many of the cuts to solar incentives can be justified by the sharp drop in photovoltaics prices over the past year or so — solar is in some ways a victim of its own success. But one of the arguments behind offering FIT payments for developing renewables has always been to minimize “uncertainty” for the clean-energy industry. Instead, it looks as if — in a situation reminiscent of the late Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley’s mangled take on police brutality (“The police aren’t here to create disorder. The police are here to preserve disorder.”) — clean-energy incentives these days are helping to create uncertainty for the market.

While advanced technologies and green building standards like LEED certification have helped to make many new construction projects über-efficient and energy-smart, it turns out that the greenest building of all really is — as architect Carl Elefante has said — “one that is already built.”

A new, first-of-its-kind, detailed analysis shows why, in most cases, renovating an old building in the right way is usually far more environmentally responsible than new construction, even new construction built to the highest, greenest standards.

“(I)t takes 10 to 80 years for a new building that is 30 percent more efficient than an average-performing existing building to overcome, through efficient operations, the negative climate change impacts related to the construction process,” according to “The Greenest Building: Quantifying the Environmental Value of Building Reuse,” a new report from the Preservation Green Lab of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

For example, if the city of Portland, Oregon, were to renovate and “reuse” all the single-family homes and commercial office buildings that are instead likely to be demolished over the next 10 years, it could cut its carbon dioxide emissions by about 231,000 metric tons. That’s around 15 percent of the entire county’s carbon reduction goals over the next decade.

On a global basis, the potential benefits of building reuse are even more jaw-dropping, simply because of the sheer number of buildings torn down every year. According to the Brookings Institution, nearly one-fourth of all the buildings in existence — covering a total area of some 82 billion square feet — are likely to be demolished and replaced between 2005 and 2030.

The National Trust study compared the potential impacts of remodeling/retrofitting versus demolishing/new construction for six different types of buildings in four different climate zones and found just one instance in which a new building is greener than an old one. Compared to putting up a brand-new multifamily housing project, converting a warehouse to multifamily residential has an environmental footprint that’s between 1 and 6 percent higher.

Of course, there are always caveats. A new building would have to be about the same size, and serve about the same purpose, as an old one to ensure the old-is-better results. Renovations need to use sustainable materials and methods to be green. And, despite the many benefits it offers, building reuse alone won’t help us cut our carbon footprints by the total amount we need.

Finally, there will always be times when renovating an old building just isn’t an option.

“First, the continued use of certain older buildings may be impractical for a number of reasons,” the National Trust study states. “An existing building may not suit a new proposed use that makes sense in the context of its neighborhood, or geographical impracticalities may render reuse unrealistic, e.g. as in the case of many vacant buildings in depopulating cities. Secondly, changing demographics and the evolution of vibrant, successful urban spaces will continue to necessitate new construction. Even so,
a paradigm shift is needed to account for the relative environmental benefits of reuse and to ensure that reuse be seriously considered in decisions regarding demolition and new construction.”

In his State of the Union address late last month, President Barack Obama spent a lot of time outlining plans for a more energy-independent, “all-energy-sources-go” US. And while he didn’t specifically mention the Commerce Department’s ongoing investigation into solar-cell “dumping” by China, he did announce the launch of a new Trade Enforcement Unit and added, “There will be more inspections …”

Now, as OilPrice.com notes, “it’s wind power’s turn.”

Asking whether a US-China “energy trade war” is imminent, OilPrice.com’s John Daly writes that Commerce is targeting for investigation China’s imports of utility-scale wind towers to the US. He adds:

“What is surprising about the brewing dispute is the relatively minor amounts of money involved … (A)ccording to US Customs statistics, in 2010 China’s wind technology exports were worth a paltry $104 million.”

That small figure would certainly seem to suggest there’s some “fight-picking” going on in international trade officialdom. However, another theory is floated by Liu Pengxuwhen, deputy director of the legal services division for the China Chamber of Commerce for Import and Export of Machinery and Electronic Products.

Pengxuwhen says, “(S)ince the US presidential election is around the corner, we noted that the US government continuously makes speeches on domestic alternative energy policies, expressing support for its alternative energy industry. In connection with such a political environment, we are convinced that the United States’ launch of the ‘anti-dumping and anti-subsidy’ investigation is inevitably connected with political considerations.”

Hmm … might he be onto something there? Read more details at OilPrice.com and decide for yourself.