Thank you very much for inviting me to testify. I'm honoured, and I hope that my remarks are useful to your committee and to Canada.
I think it would be useful for you to understand my personal background first. I am currently working at the University of California, Davis, where I teach energy efficiency. I am creating several projects in energy efficiency research. I'm also a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
My other responsibilities include being editor-in-chief of a research journal called Energy and Buildings. I founded a magazine called Home Energy, which is designed for the practitioners. And I recently returned from a three-year appointment at the International Energy Agency in Paris, where I served as the senior adviser on energy efficiency.
For the past 30 years, my research and activities have focused on understanding how people use energy. I sometimes call that the “other side of the metre”. Most people focus on how energy is supplied. I'm mostly concerned about how energy is consumed, or transformed into useful services. I find that understanding consumption is critical to developing realistic technologies and policies to conserve energy.
Originally my research focused on energy-efficient buildings. Then I began to shift to appliances. More recently, I'm learning a little bit more about transportation. At the International Energy Agency, I focused on research into market barriers to energy efficiency, and monitored developments related to efficiency throughout the world, including Canada. Over the years, I have helped develop many energy efficiency technologies, methods, and policies. I hope today to discuss a few of the insights I have.
I need to apologize in advance that I'm not particularly knowledgeable about Canada. I think you should feel free to interrupt me if my line of discussion appears to be inappropriate to Canada or to your general lines of inquiry.
First I'd like to introduce what I call the “demand-side perspective”. From there I'll give you some observations about integrated planning and reducing energy use in communities.
About 30 years ago, we had a kind of curious asymmetry regarding energy. While the experts knew almost precisely, or with considerable precision, where our energy came from, they had little or no sense of how the energy was used. That is, nobody knew how much energy went to lighting, water heating, televisions, furnace fans, or air compressors in factories.
So the consumption side of the energy equation was a black box, sometimes affected by fluctuations in the weather or the season, but basically something that could not be changed. That absence of information has had a tremendous influence on the choice of energy policies over the last 30 years.
I want to give you some examples of the demand side perspective. Let's consider the demand and supply for electricity. Imagine two kinds of pie charts right in front of me. One would show the supply of electricity and the sources, where the electricity came from. That's coal, hydro, oil, or gas. In the case of Canada, I think the biggest slice is hydroelectric. Almost half of your electricity comes from hydroelectric sources. For the United States, though, only about one-tenth of our electricity comes from hydroelectric.
By coincidence, in the United States this one-tenth fraction of the hydro supply exactly matches the electricity consumed by our refrigerators. So if we had another pie that just showed where all our electricity went, the slice for our refrigerators would be exactly the same size, in the United States, as the slice for hydroelectric.
With that kind of information, we might want to consider the alternatives to building more dams or building more efficient refrigerators. If the electricity use of refrigerators could be halved, which would be more attractive, building more dams or reducing the electricity consumption of refrigerators?
Here's another example that is perhaps more surprising. It's the case of electric motors. Few people realize that about half of Canada's electricity is consumed by electric motors. These motors are everywhere once you start looking for them. They are in the refrigerators. They're in the furnace fans and air conditioners. They're in the compressed air systems that you'll find in many factories. They power pumps and disk drives and house fans and all sorts of things. Indeed, my guess is that motors consume as much electricity as generated by all the non-hydro sources in Canada. So basically if you think about these two pies of supply and consumption, you have all your non-hydro sources supplying electricity, and all of that is consumed by electric motors.
If you want to reduce electricity consumption and carbon emissions in Canada, then we need to address the motors and the services that those motors provide.
Motor applications are complex and typically require professional attention, but the potential savings are huge. There was a well-regarded study in Manitoba recently where they found that by simply replacing the electric motors in furnace fans in homes, they could reduce the electricity consumption of those furnace fans by 70%. This example is important not only because of that 70% reduction for the motors, but that translated into a 25% reduction in the electricity use of that home during the winter. It is a significant kind of saving that could occur. You don't realize these potentials until you begin to understand how the electricity is used in the demand side.
Another example of understanding the demand side is the case of automobiles. Again, automobiles are complex technologies, but nevertheless we know that about 20% of the fuel consumed by an automobile is used to overcome the rolling resistance of the tires. This is the energy--the rolling resistance--which is dissipated by the continuous flexing and re-forming of the tires that spin around. At least in the United States, for comparison, we know that that oil consumption, that 20% of the fuel consumption in cars, equals all the oil we import from Saudi Arabia.
We have recently found that there are some technical improvements possible in tires that can dramatically reduce a tire's rolling resistance, and that can, in some cases, reduce it by as much as 50%. That's without sacrificing the grip or the tread wear. So from a policy perspective we have to begin asking questions on whether the country should invest more in increasing oil imports or whether it should try to reduce the rolling resistance of tires. Again, we can only make these kinds of decisions, these kinds of balances and comparisons, when we have information on both sides of this energy equation.
I understand that one of your goals is to understand how best to integrate the energy policies. I believe that the effective integrated energy planning can occur only when both supply and consumption are taken into account. This applies to many aspects of urban planning where energy is a major input, such as transportation. Here too you have to be careful that you don't take either supply or demand as a kind of black box, because both sides of these equations, even if it's transportation, can be responsive to policies.
Recently, for example, I've been following the city of Toyama in Japan. This is a city of about half a million on the west coast of Japan that has been suffering economic decline as the young people have left to go to Tokyo and Osaka. What is left are the old people, and it is getting more and more difficult to deliver the services to these old people. At the same time, there's a lot of pressure to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions in that city. The city is actually trying to reshape itself and align itself in a way that the key city and social services are on corridors. By getting both the services and the people who need those services on these corridors, they can reduce the cost of delivering those services and keep the city more efficient.
This whole process is under way. It's not going to happen overnight. They expect it's going to take at least a decade to make a significant difference. But they can see that this is the only way they're going to be able to provide those services and allow the city to economically survive in their new demographic situation and with new energy realities at the same time.
Toyama City knows that besides reducing the cost of delivering services, this new compact design will save energy and reduce carbon emissions. You might consider this is a situation where Toyama City is making a virtue out of necessity, but the fact is it's an integration that seems to be successful.
Before concluding, I'd like to stress one important difference between energy supply and conservation policies that I think has everything to do with integrated policies in towns and cities.
Most energy supply technologies—coal, nuclear, hydro, whatever, even some types of solar—are easy to point at when the facilities are finished. And they are relatively straightforward to evaluate in terms of knowing when they're generating electricity, or there's oil coming out of the pipeline, or whatever it is. But on the other hand, these kinds of projects are capital-intensive. And they create few jobs, which are not usually in the communities; they're a long way away from where people live. When they're poorly planned, they fail in huge, expensive ways.
In contrast, most energy efficiency policies are extremely diffuse activities. Sometimes they're touching every single home or store or factory in order to make them happen. But at the same time, their benefits are very difficult to evaluate. You have something that is causing energy savings, and you cannot measure energy savings like you can measure output because you're measuring a difference in energy use. So it's not straightforward. You don't have as much confidence that those savings actually happen unless you do careful evaluation. But on the other hand, energy efficiency investments are labour-intensive. The jobs are in the communities. They may be down the street or next door, so that means these are local jobs. I think if the policies are designed correctly, these jobs will persist.
Thank you for your attention. I would be happy to answer your questions about my remarks, or other topics.
