Waypoint 5

I am documenting my own journey into & through the global Energy Transition movement. Along this renewable path, I am marking waypoints to capture and share my insights with those on similar paths.

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It has been awhile since my Waypoint post as I took a short break and expanded my travels. I have still been actively collecting ideas and absorbing information related to all things renewable energy and it is time for another miscellaneous topic post. I hope you enjoy this next batch:

Reevaluating mobility decisions

Image credit here.

I have been listening to electrification conversations that continue to highlight the need for consumers to change the way they think about mobility, namely letting go of habits that we created around fossil-fuel transportation. I had been thinking about how we need to change the incentives to modify our consumer behavior at scale and recently began to see some early evidence(?) of this happening already.

Like many of my friends, I still own a gasoline-powered car and typically don’t think twice about using it to run errands or take long trips. However, when it comes to opting to use a ride-sharing service, I have noticed that many of us are becoming more sensitive to price fluctuations. More than once now, I have paused on confirming my Lyft when I see the price is higher than what I expected or remembered.

We never really learned to do this when driving our own cars but this new fare evaluation step may be a good way to help people rethink commuting or other forms of public mobility when the price fluctuates. Could this be a sign of things to come when more options are available?

My last gas-powered vehicle?

Image source here.

Related to my last point on mobility (I’ve been doing a lot of driving these past few months), I have been thinking about the longer lifespan of vehicles and how I had already settled on an expiration date for my current truck, a 2004 model. My expectation was that I would replace it with a newer gas-powered SUV but because that vehicle is expected to last 20 years, I would only perpetuate the GHG emissions problem, albeit a small amount.

So, my current dilemma is whether to invest in another used fossil-fuel based vehicle or switch to EV. Obviously, we should all do our part to encourage EVs but as long as they are making gas-powered cars, somebody will be buying and driving them.

I am going to search for some solid financial incentives that make it easier for me to give up my current (far cheaper!) car for an EV, but the larger issue still weighs heavy on me: we need to end the wholesale production of gas-powered vehicles if we want to address carbon emissions!

Energy Efficiency -> Emissions Efficiency

Image credit here.

By now, most adults have become somewhat familiar with the term Energy Efficiency. And for most, that phrase has positive connotations, and we want to believe (like recycling :-) that more energy efficient appliances and cars and machinery will be good for the planet.

And that’s true! By reducing the amount of energy needed to power our lives, we either directly or indirectly reduce the amount of greenhouse emissions we are releasing into the atmosphere. But I feel the link is not as strong as it could be, and I propose adopting a different term that makes an even stronger connection:

Emissions Efficiency

Energy efficiency would seem to be a conservation-minded phrase and a direct response to the now-known hazards of incorporating fossil fuels into every aspect of our lives. But instead of asking people to “cut back” on the use of power by turning off their lights or turning down the thermostat and wearing a sweater, we need to signal that actions like these are designed to do more than preserve outdated and harmful energy practices. We need don’t need more conservation of oil and natural gas and propane and kerosene and … - we need to transition away from these entirely!

My search engine doesn’t return many results for Emissions Efficiency but I did find this nugget from 2016 which might have beat me to the punch. When pitching the idea of “environmentally beneficial electrification,” the authors submit that:

“emissions efficiency” may be as or more important than “energy efficiency” moving forward

I believe using this alternative term will help people get behind and support modern global transition movements. I want them to understand that their individual decisions will not just “save electricity” or “save on gasoline” but actually save our planet.

Negawatt ?

Image Credit: Green Alliance

What the watt? I came across this term scanning an obviously outdated book from 2008 called The Clean Tech Revolution by Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder. Mostly I was fascinated to read through the predictions they made more than a decade ago about what tech would be here by now. The fledgling electric automaker Tesla was called out as a company to watch for example - ha!

But the negawatt term which is credited to the founder of RMI, Amory Lovins describes a unit of conserved energy, or more specifically, a megawatt of energy that is never generated.

Lovins was looking to popularize a range of efficiency measures including better building designs, lightbulbs and appliances that would require less power and thus reduce the need for electricity - a demand-side approach.

I have since found more current references to this term like this page on Renewable Energy World’s site.

More Waypoints on the Renewable Path