Negawatts

This image shows the house of Amory Lovins. His house is in the same area as Snowmass in Colorado. Beyond the unusual architecture, this house lacks a furnace. He uses the power of the sun to heat his house. While this might sound like a paradox, my own grandfather used a similar strategy in his own house on a bluff above the Yellowstone River in Montana. My grandfather had a small glasshouse attached to the house with southern exposure and this would trap the heat from solar radiation and distributed it through the house using the existing ductwork via a very small fan. Amory is a bit of an oddity in this world, as described by an article in last week's New Yorker. He is a bubbly enthuasist of energy efficiency. Amory has coined a concept of negawattage - that is that by figuring out obvious ways to reduce energy, you are actually eliminating a drag on the economy (i.e. money spent on inefficient energy is actually waste). The simplicity is disarming but his thoughts are simple exercises in logic.

Some ideas:
1. Large powerplants are inefficient. Distributed power generation at an high number of loci is far more efficient.
2. Solar radiation can be used in many dynamic ways to illuminate and heat which can drastically reduce those associated costs.
3. Retrofitting or renovating existing structures can cost money but, when taking a longer view on the balance sheet, lead to drastic reductions of costs. Something Wall Street abhors but people like Warren Buffett might love.
4. Wringing inefficiencies requires such simple thinking that it shows the inherent short sightedness of "analysts".
5. Incandescent bulbs are probably the most inefficient construction on earth. These bulbs work on resistance (more energy goes to heat (totally waste) than creating photons). Fluorescent bulbs generate a fraction of the heat while producing far more lumens per unit energy (which has been employed in businesses and fitfully in homes).

And so on. Read the article by Elizabeth Kolbert. It is a wonderful example of the amazing power of simplicity and logic