Recently in Energy efficiency Category

Some energy regulators are pretty much self-proclaimed "geeks" about their subject, but Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Jon Wellinghoff may have taken his penchant for touting energy gadgets to a new level Thursday, as our colleague Tom Tiernan reports.

At a conference on one of his favorite subjects, demand response (which can't help also being about smart grid), Wellinghoff unselfconsciously displayed his home electricity usage -- in real time, as he spoke -- pointing out how different appliances in his home were kicking on without synchronization, creating a usage peak that could be shaped if only his house had better management technology or a home area network.

When your dad stalked around behind you turning off lights, lowering the thermostat, he was all about the utility bills. Since they were pretty theoretical -- and yes, we did understand that he wasn't made of money -- it just didn't carry much weight. When we grew up we would just not make so much of such a boring issue.

(Boring?? Barack Obama might argue. He just told a Home Depot audience in suburban DC that "insulation is sexy." Maybe his saying so will make it so.)

Amory Lovins at the Rocky Mountain Institute has been showing people different ways of doing things for years. His "soft path" has been lionized and mocked. Years ago, on a group's visit to Lovins' Snowmass home/headquarters, one utility industry executive said Amory was very smart, interesting and innovative, but his path was just ridiculous as a notion for the country. Big central station power was better than building-based energy solutions, and that was that.

Now the soft path is the cool path. Lovins has never stopped working, consulting, advising utilities and industries that were interested in energy efficiency, new technology and new ways of planning. And now he is seeking donations to a project RMI calls Reinventing Fire -- "driving the business-led transition from oil, coal, and ultimately natural gas to efficiency and renewables."

Update: Nostalgia counts for little, it seems. And that's as it should be. Still, it was with a twinge that we saw CPower lose its effort to institute a back-to-the-future "virtual Green Stamps" program for energy efficiency products in Connecticut.

The state Department of Public Utility Control decided the intriguing idea was only that. It had "fatal" free-rider issues and misguidedly relied on customers to promise they were not double-dipping, our correspondent Lisa Wood reports. Whether any changes are possible to overcome these problems is not apparent.

For conservationists, it's a pretty picture: California just became the first state to adopt energy-efficiency standards for televisions.

Needless to say, TV makers are giving the new rules a bad reception.

Under the policy adopted by the California Energy Commission on Wednesday, all new 42-inch TV sets sold after January 1, 2011, must use less than 183 watts; by 2013, that drops to 116 watts. By comparison, according to the CEC, a 42-inch plasma TV sold in 2007 uses about 313 watts, while a 42-inch LDC set uses 232 watts.

Senators from California and Massachusetts are leading the climate-bill effort. At least so far, it is named for them: the Boxer-Kerry bill. Or Kerry-Boxer. Depends on who's talking. It is surely no coincidence that the two states are energy efficiency leaders, and now the rivalry (if indeed they have competitive streaks) has gotten a bit more interesting.

Senator John Kerry's state, Massachusetts, has just enacted a plan to spend more than twice as much per capita as famously energy-conservationist California on energy-saving initiatives. California will still spend a lot more, because it's so much bigger, but Massachusetts will outspend it per person, the state Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs said.

Barclays Capital says power demand has dropped this year for residential and commercial consumers for the first time since complete national data about it became available in 1973.

"There used to be one reassuring maxim in the power industry," a Barclays commodities research report says. "Residential and commercial power consumption grows through good times and bad." But this bad time is unlike all the others.

Our colleague Mark Watson reports that some industry experts see the stressful economy as the main reason; their consumption will go back to previous levels once money is not such a problem. Others think "green" consciousness and energy-efficient products are producing a more permanent effect.

Should one admit this? Some of us have pretty clear, and fond, memories of something called S&H Green Stamps. Our mothers would get sheets of them for purchases at the supermarket, and we would spend stupid amounts of time licking them and pasting them into S&H booklets. We would then go to the Green Stamps redemption store and buy something glamorous because it was "free": a toaster, a mixer, maybe a vacuum cleaner if you saved up a big stack.

Not everyone would agree, but part of the charm was the labor of licking and pasting, and the tactile satisfaction of the fat little books piling up in a corner. "Virtual" collecting may be as satisfying to many, and it's that notion driving the idea for a green stamp program in Connecticut -- aimed at helping people buy energy efficient appliances and products.

Sell me light-hours, cooling hours and water-heating hours. But don't sell me kilowatt-hours. If I took Peter Fox-Penner's advice, that's what I would tell my electric company.

And if utilities took his advice, that's what they would do. Roger Sant, who founded AES, proposed the idea in 1980, Fox-Penner, of the Brattle Group, recalls in a paper, and Thomas Edison's business started out that way: as an energy services company. Only later did it switch to selling only the kilowatt-hours, and leaving the electric appliances to others.

In 1980, the time was not right. But Fox-Penner sees its moment coming.