Potential for Improved Energy Efficiency to Help Meet Future Energy Needs

摘要

The estimated technical potential for cost-effective energy conservation is summarized for both the US and California. These estimates should be viewed as theoretical opportunities for improving energy efficiency; they are not necessarily forecasts of the actual savings that might result from government policies and the market's response to higher energy prices. Detailed analyses are offered for residential buildings, using supply curves of conserved energy. This technique allows the quantity and cost of energy supplied through improved efficiency to be readily compared with the production potential and unit cost of new conventional energy supplies. By the year 2000, there is a potential for the US to reduce its annual resource energy consumption from a projected 103 Quads (10 exp 15 Btu's) to about 62 to 65 Quads. This savings potential is the energy equivalent of about 18 million barrels per day (MBD) of oil production. Annual savings in the buildings sector alone could be as high as 8 MBD oil-equivalent, or more than the total amount of US oil imports, for all sectors, in 1980. California's proportional share of this technical potential appears to be of the same order of magnitude as USGS estimates of California's OCS resources, but any more precise comparison may be premature. To achieve these efficiency gains will require investments of hundreds of billions of dollars over the next two decades, but the savings for businesses and consumers would be even larger. The average cost to save this energy would be about $10/barrel, in today's dollars. The conservation technical potential for California has not been fully evaluated, but estimates have been made for some end-use sectors. A future low-energy scenario for the State, while not specifying the full technical potential, identifies some possible goals for conservation and renewable energy use. (ERA citation 07:047092)