Doing More While Using Less Power

An interesting article in the New York Times about energy efficiency and the obstacles to efficiency:

“Policy makers are supportive of energy efficiency in concept, but there’s this whole argument of ‘just leave it to the market,”’ Mr. Nadel said. Politically, too, building a power plant brings visible, vote-winning jobs, so “efficiency is everyone’s second choice,” he said.

But some market incentives are misaligned. “Major energy providers make more money out of kilowatt-hours that they sell rather than the ones that they don’t sell,” Ms. Zoi said.

Decoupling utility profits from the amount of energy sold, as California did in 1983, is a way to fix this problem, and it is a growing trend. Twenty-nine other U.S. states have since followed that lead or are about to do so, according to the Institute for Energy Efficiency.