Gimme more...

Communication gadgets and other consumer electronics burn up 15% of all the electricity consumed in households around the world, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency.

If the use of electronics continues to spread at the current pace, their energy draw could double by 2022 and triple by 2030. At that point, they would absorb as much electricity as all houses in the U.S. and Japan today.

That could well be the paradox of our times. Even as technology has made gadgets more efficient, there are too many devices drawing power to do tasks that once were manual or did not require power.for what once was a manual job?

True they have released more time which can be used for for productive work. But if all the tasks we do now do expending biochemical and physical energy, were to be taken over by gadgets running on power, is that development?

Are we ending up conserving our energy for all the wrong reasons – conversion to mass!

And where will all the power come from, faced as we are with a crunch? Any bright ideas?

Of course, more efficient devices could be part of the solution as advocated by the IEA. But as a recent study says, energy efficiency could see ‘rebound effects’ where improvements are offset by behaviour changes. Like, getting more miles to the gallon might just make people drive more miles. Cheaper energy from making devices efficient could result in more people using more of it!
Called the Jevons Paradox, this was first applied to 19th century British use of coal where it was seen that the more efficient factories became at using the stuff, the more factories there’d be wanting to use it, pushing up overall consumption.

That should set the discussion going on energy efficiency!

Cut the flab

One aspect of productive energy is cutting down waste, the other is of finding ways to obtain maximum work from minimum energy.

Waste can be as visible as in waste heat generated in industrial units. Globally, there are attempts to capture this and recycle it into the energy cycle in CHP plants. A more subtle, and often unnoticed part of energy waste is in the use of materials. Especially materials with a life-cycle cost of energy that is huge.

In the west, the focus by greens is on one such waste - the packaging, or rather, over-packaging! Any average Indian who has been to the US for the first time will come back to tell family about the use and throw culture. Plastic and paper containers, tissues, packaging, etc that any Indian would love to preserve is dumped after single use. A visit to a mall will show buyers wrapping every single apple in a separate plastic wrapper!

Using more cardboard, paper, plastic, space, and fossil fuels, more than necessary to get things from one place to another is the done thing. Perhaps, these are hangovers from the days of plenty.

TreeHugger gives seven stark instances--illustrated in a photo gallery--of when packaging has gone awry. Like the picture that shows the shipment of a single ink cartridge which wasted a whole lot of cardboard, space and fossil fuels. A waste of energy from the shipping of initial raw materials, manufacture and shipping out.

And then again, 40 per cent of American households own at least one video game console. The Wii, XBox 360and Playstation3 all consume vastly different amounts of power but, all together, gaming consoles eat up enough energy to power the city of San Diego! New ways of powering these luxuries are now being suggested.

Most times, all it may require is a small tinkering of a small circuit somewhere to cut the waste from our myriad gadgets. Some little rethinking.

For instance, LG Display has introduced a new LCD panel that can be illuminated by sunlight when outdoors instead of the backlight. The LCD panel uses "backlight data signal switching technology," which means the backlight panels can be switched between reflective mode in sunlight to transmissive mode indoors. When the outdoor mode is in use, energy consumption falls by 75%.

HP users can expect to see laptops more environmentally-friendly by upgrading to Boston Power’s next-generation Sonata Lithium-ion batteries. The Sonata battery lasts for 1,000 charging cycles (3 years), compared to the 300 cycle limit of a conventional Li-ion battery. The powerful battery takes only half an hour to charge up to 80 percent capacity, while conventional batteries take two hours.

Another example is the energy efficient supercomputer in Argonne National Laboratory. The Blue Gene/P high-performance computer runs at an awe-inspiring 557 teraflops (557 trillion calculations per second) and uses only 1 MW of power— about a third of that used by a conventionally built supercomputer of comparable size. How it does this is simply by using six air handlers that move 300,000 cubic feet of air per minute under the facility floor. Other supercomputer facilities use large air conditioners that require significantly more energy.

A little tinkering with the system in hand. But prior to that, one needs a big rewiring in the way we look at energy and resources! As long as it is almost free, and seemingly continuous, not many will bother about the tinkering.

Can we have some suggestions for five small changes at work that could cut down on energy use? (NOT power alone.) Just five.

Save $600 bn or spend $360 bn?

The output from the world’s oilfields is declining faster than believed to be. With a natural annual rate of oil output decline of 9.1 percent, India, China and other developing countries’ demand for oil will require investments of $ 360 bn each year until 2030. Even with investment, the annual rate of oil output decline is 6.4 per cent.

That is the gist of a leaked version of the International Energy Agency’s annual report.

The Financial Times that obtained a copy of the report said the watchdog's annual World Energy Outlook report, which studied the biggest fields, showed that without extra investment to raise production, the natural annual rate of output decline was 9.1 percent.

It goes on to acknowledge that current energy trends are not sustainable and that a better balance must be found between the three Es – energy security, economic development and protection of the environment. Energy, it says, must be part of the solution.

In a closely related report, the WWF warns that our global footprint now exceeds the world’s capacity to regenerate by about 30%. If our demands on the planet continue at the same rate, by the mid-2030s we will need the equivalent of two planets to maintain our lifestyles.

As to how we can return to sustainability, WWF advises that we need to reduce natural resource demand by reducing population levels, individual consumption, and lowering the resources used and waste products emitted by producing goods and services.

Sustainable and efficient are clearly the keywords ringing everywhere. Mckinsey Global Institute finds that, under current policies, energy demand in developing countries will increase by 65 percent in the period to 2020, representing 80 percent of global energy demand growth. These countries currently account for 51 percent of global energy demand, and this share will rise to 60 percent in 2020 without further action.

By choosing more energy-efficient cars and appliances, improving insulation in buildings, and selecting lower-energy-consuming lighting and production technologies, developing countries could cut their annual energy demand growth by more than half from 3.4 to 1.4 percent over the next 12 years. This would leave energy consumption some 22 percent lower than otherwise, says MGI.

All this can be achieved by using solely existing technologies. Consumers and businesses in developing countries could secure savings of an estimated $600 billion a year by 2020. Far from costing money, investing in energy productivity generates energy savings that could ramp up to $600 billion annually by 2020 across all developing regions.

Is there any reason why there are no takers? Are there hidden issues?

Fuel standards

In an instance of conflicts on the national stand on climate change, which is that India should not be asked to take on economic burden of reducing emissions as it is the rich countries which are responsible for the accumulation, India's transport ministry has now come up with a set of norms for the road sector based on emissions from the sector. The ministry of heavy industries too plans to come up with its own standards.

Not only do these oppose the official stand but the basis of setting fuel standards is in conflict with what the Bureau of Energy Efficiency has set. The latter has prepared norms based on the mileage, and not based on emissions.

The move is being opposed by not only the power industry but also the environment ministry which sees this as a case of the two sectors being taken for a ride by the interests of developed world. Already it has struck down a proposal by the auto industry to come up with emission based norms.

The legal implications aside, the question to be asked is: who is right?

With fuel prices on the rise and a peaking of production almost here, obviously there is a crying need for fuel standards in the country today. Many of the bigger private vehicles run on cheap diesel meant primarily for public transport. Some of the imported makes have not been modified in tune with fuel efficiency standards prevailing in Europe. In the process, not only do they guzzle fuel but also emit polluting gases.

But, should we have norms based on carbon emissions or mileage?

True, we are slowly reaching a stage where aspirations are being fulfilled. But when talking of per capita figures and the need to sustain the economic growth we are so proud of, what percentage of the population is one catering to, in protecting our 'rights' to pollute? How many of our 1.2 billion own cars and bikes?

Or as the environment ministry argues, are emission figures not consumer friendly? Is it that our vehicle users can only understand if you talk of mileage?

Even so, can we afford to ignore emissions, in the light of hard evidence of the damage that continues to be wrought on the planet? Simply because someone stabbed the body first, can one condone subsequent stabs?