The bass ackwards way to promote energy efficiency.
Think of this:
You have a state regulated company that sells a product with harmful side effects.
Your state government decides that it is in the public interest to minimize the harmful side effects.
The solution: let the company charge its customers to pay for the program that encourages the customers to buy less of the product.
Does this make sense to you?
On December 9, 2008, Endependence was at the California “2008 Center for the Study of Energy Markets Policy Conference”. Policy wonk stuff if there ever was some. Lots of very smart people working to improve energy efficiency in the Golden State. Scientists, public policy administrators, academics, advocacy groups, and utilities all got together to figure out ways to craft public policy that will increase energy efficiency (decrease energy waste?).
Don’t get the wrong impression. California is so far ahead of the rest of the country in the areas of energy efficiency that comparisons to other states are ludicrous. The average Californian uses about 1/3 of the energy that the average Texan uses. There are myriad reasons for this, but one of the big reasons is that California has been working on energy efficiency for years. They even have a bureaucratic department in charge, the California Energy Commission.
A large percentage of the energy purchased by residents of California comes from three “Investor Owned Utilities” ironically referred to as IOUs. Boy, do they owe you.
As you may have heard, California has a major initiative, signed into law by the Republican Governator, to limit Greenhouse gases. The Goals: reduce Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions to: 2000 levels by 2010, 1990 levels by 2020 and 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. This is one of the most agressive GHG reduction plans in the world.
The plan is to have 16% of the GHG emissions reduction come from energy efficiency by 2020.
The big message at the conference: the current efforts are not getting it done. “We need to do much more and urgently” according to the California Energy Commission.
Now the goofy part analogized in the “think of this:” above.
Who is primarily in charge of promoting energy efficiency efforts? The IOUs. That’s right, the people who sell the energy are in charge of getting people to use less energy. Not only that, they get to charge their customers for the energy efficiency programs so their stockholders don’t lose money.
There is much more to this story, which frankly is making my head spin, so I will continue with the saga in a future post.