Stanford Lecture on Energy

Preamble

In the last six months, I attended two instances of a series of events entitled "Stanford Leading Matters." This is a touring half-day conference that is going through 28 cities, mostly in the U.S. but with some foreign locations too. The purpose is to re-acquaint university alumni with the challenges that Stanford University is addressing. Of course, as a by-product of this goodwill, the university hopes to successfully appeal to their generosity and raise more money for the "Stanford Challenge," a $10 billion fundraiser.

Leading Matters was a rather stellar production, complete with making the meeting hall look like a scale model of the university's inner quad — sandstone arches and all. At every stop, Stanford University President John Hennessy spoke of the university's vision, which is no less than helping solve the world's toughest challenges; incredibly gifted and involved students provided their views in a panel moderated by Hennessy; professors gave lectures on important issues in today's world; and very good food could be sampled.

The 28th and last stop on this tour will be in Portland, Ore., at the end of May 2011. Because I was at a conference in Boston the week immediately preceding the Leading Matters event there, in late September 2010, I added a day to my trip and went. There were about 550 Stanford alumni, spouses and sometimes their college-bound children in attendance. Then, when Leading Matters stopped in Houston a month ago in January, I went again — in part because the faculty lectures and the student panel involved different people each time, therefore it wasn't a complete repetition.

What I am proposing to do in three successive blog posts is to give a summary of the lectures I personally attended (they can all be found and downloaded for free at "Stanford on iTunes" but some readers will appreciate a more personal touch).

Fixing the Energy System — Why Is It So Hard?" by Prof. James Sweeney

Sweeney is the Director of the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center at Stanford, thus named because it was founded thanks to a $30 million donation by Jay Precourt.

He stated that there are three drivers for a public energy policy:

• Global climate change
• National security
• Economics

Concerning the first one, the world releases about 30 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide each year. To address CO₂ emissions, we should focus on three things:

• "decarbonizing" the generation of electricity
• reducing the use of oil in transportation
• improving how we use electricity

"Energy efficiency" means the economically efficient improvement of energy use — i.e., something that we can be willing to do not only because it is the right thing to do, but also because it will save money.

The possible improvements in the production or use of energy fall into several categories, in terms of their feasibility:

• those for which technology advances are needed
• those for which the technology exists but is currently too expensive
• those that require new regulations
• those against which there are no obstacles, other than our behavioral inertia

Why are some of the energy cost reduction opportunities not being pursued? Sweeney gave several examples:

• Owners or rental property have no incentive to make improvements, for example in insulation: they cost money, but do not allow them to charge more in rent.
• Consumers are not receiving enough information to understand their electricity usage; for example, a cable TV decoder/DVR box uses 45W when it is on, and almost the same when it is off.

The Google Power Meter is a free energy monitoring tool for households. It checks your pattern of electricity consumption, and reports the results a day later. However, apart from the fact that either your utility company must be part of the program (and only a few companies are), or you must install a monitoring device otherwise, Sweeney said that this tool "requires too much analysis by people, and feedback should be more immediate" if we are to obtain real changes in consumer behavior.

Electric utility companies, of course, do not have incentives to reduce consumption. Usually it is the opposite (although he should have mentioned that an increase in peak consumption may cost a utility more than they can recover, because they may need to bring online their most inefficient plants, the one they would otherwise keep shut off, in order to meet the demand). Instead, we should find ways to decouple volume from profit, which California has done through regulation and financial incentives.

For businesses, there should be software packages for energy use management, just like there is to manage and optimize other company resources (people, equipment, etc.). "What you don't measure, you can't manage."

After the speaker ended his talk, someone in the audience, who worked at the Department of Energy for ten years, suggested that there is a rift between blue (Democrat-leaning) and red (Republican-leaning) states: people in red states are opposed to energy management measures because these sound anti-business. Sweeney replied that he did not see this issue as a clear-cut Democrat-vs.-Republican attitude, but he also admitted that as a Republican he could be biased about it.