A SHARED MISSION

Guest post from Welectricity

I found Chris Baskind's blog tonight, which has inspired me to post this.

I'd already been following Chris on Twitter, but have only just gotten around to checking his other writing out. He lives in Florida and he's been writing some powerful stuff on the unfolding BP oil disaster that threatens him and us all.

Chris describes himself as someone who believes that "life is better and the Earth is happier when we use fewer resources". As I tweeted shortly after reading it, that statement could well be Welectricity's motto.

In fact, our mission statement is pretty close! It's:

"To motivate the world to live better by consuming less".

It's a shared mission. We're excited to see that it's shared by people who are making a difference - and we're working very hard to share it with you. 


Visit Welectricity here

EARTH DAY 2010: CARIBBEAN EDITION - No 2

What do you get when you introduce energy efficiency to social networking?

You get Welectricity, an innovative, low-carbon web application that helps users track and reduce their electricity consumption at home.

The service, launched today by startup Welectricity Inc to mark Earth Day 2010, employs principles of psychology and behavioral economics to nudge householders to consume less energy.  The company blog calls it their "little contribution to the planet".  

A full press release is here and you can sign up to use the app at www.welectricity.com.

I, RATIONAL MAN

What better topic to discuss on All Fools Day than rationality?

Last week, as part of a consultation on national energy policy in St Lucia, I made a presentation on energy awareness to a roomful of ‘energy sector stakeholders’. The audience was knowledgeable and involved. So, I requested a show of hands of people who knew roughly their electricity consumption at home, in kWh per day.

About 12% of the audience showed hands.

This would seem an unexpected outcome. Given the facts that a) many in the audience have some connection with energy and sustainability issues at work and b) they were attending a workshop on energy and sustainability issues, it should be a reasonable assumption that most of them would be aware of something as basic as their own electricity consumption at home.

Well, practically everything I have read over the past year about behavior suggests that such an assumption would be wrong - hence the outcome. And of course, the problem is obvious: if we don't know how much we are consuming, how can we take steps to reduce our consumption?

The field of behavioral economics, now enjoying a resurgence (ably assisted by such bestselling books as Nudge and Predictably Irrational), explains how surprisingly irrational we humans really are.

Seth Godin wrote a perceptive post about irrationality on his blog today, with an interesting example: 

"When Chris Blackwell introduced reggae to the rest of the world (Bob Marley!), it was irrational. That moment in time was the best time to be working with Bonnie Raitt or Jackson Browne, not some unknown spleef-smoking guys from a tiny island in the Caribbean. No amount of rational analysis would have led an investor to back Chris."

Godin’s post inspired me to write this one. Behavioral economists would call that an example of the Bandwagon effect.

A BRIEF YEAR-END ROUNDUP

A brief (and personal) review of a few things that happened in 2009 and a preview of 2010

Renewable energy in the Caribbean

One word: geothermal. It’s the game-changer in the Eastern Caribbean, but only a couple of our countries appear to have seriously recognized this. Those that have, are now well on their way to developing truly sustainable and energy-independent futures. Others are trying to catch up, and yet others are still at the lip-service, do-nothing stage of the game.

First out of the blocks was Nevis. Having started explorations in January 2008, their geothermal project achieved critical milestones during 2009 (proving significant energy potential and signing of a power purchase agreement with the local electric utility). The project developer is now scheduled to commence drilling of production wells in first quarter 2010. This will be followed by commencement of construction on the proposed 11 MW geothermal power plant, which will supply baseload power to the Nevis Electricity Company (whose 2009 peak demand was about 9 MW).

Dominica isn’t far behind – and they're dead serious about geothermal. The Dominica government commissioned two separate geothermal explorations on the island in 2008; so far one of these has (unsurprisingly) concluded that Dominica has the largest geothermal energy potential in the Caribbean. The next steps will be to perform exploratory drilling in specific locations in 2010, to prove the extent of the resource, and to inform the design of the power plant options, which vary from 2+15 MW to 4x30 MW. And that’s only one of Dominica’s geothermal projects.

The other countries? Let’s see what happens in 2010.

Copenhagen

Let’s file this under what didn’t happen. By most reports, the outcome of the climate change summit represented a failure of political will on the part of the leaders of the world’s two biggest polluters, and a few others. China appears to have been particularly intransigent and, some have claimed, largely responsible for the failure of the talks. And it seems a supreme irony that, just weeks after his administration officially declared greenhouse gases to be a public health hazard, President Obama was unable to make any significant pledge for America, the world’s largest per-capita culprit, to cut its emissions of the stuff. The question now is: how to recover and move on? Expect lots of debate (and finger-pointing) in 2010.

Smarter Energy

Energy efficiency became sexy in 2009; look for it to be taken seriously in some parts of the Caribbean in 2010. Its newfound status is partly propelled by the breathless reporting from the developed world about so-called ‘smart’ electricity metering (part of a larger approach to achieving the ‘smart grid’). More important is the growing realization that energy efficiency is truly the low-hanging fruit; the easiest and least costly way to deliver energy services. And, for Caribbean countries that are dependent on imported energy (ie: all except Trinidad & Tobago) the benefits are even greater.

Welectricity, an award-winning new service to be launched in first quarter 2010, is based on this realisation. With its innovative, behavior-based approach to the energy efficiency problem, Welectricity will help households to achieve positive energy efficiency outcomes. Watch this space (and get more information at www.welectricity.com).

Twitter

The surprise of the year. I started using twitter in January (my first tweet: “Finishing off a commentary for my website www.greenislandinc.com”). In less than 12 months, it had become my number one source of information on developments in renewable energy and energy efficiency.

When I started using the micro-blogging service, it was because I vaguely realized that I ‘had to’. According to what I had read, it was supposed to allow me to extend my marketing and advertising reach beyond my traditional sphere of connections, budget, and so on.

I’m not quite sure how the marketing and advertising bit has worked out yet. John Wanamaker, a US department store merchant, once famously said that “half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which half.” That’s sort of how I feel about the time I’ve invested in twitter. But I do know that what I have gotten is a great and growing source of relevant and timely information and opinion that I didn’t previously have - all in one place. Priceless.

For more insight on the twitter phenomenon, read the June 2009 Time cover story (the opening sentence is spot on). Then follow me on twitter at http://twitter.com/hazbert

BEHAVE

When we were children and our mothers, grandmothers or assorted aunts wanted us to stop acting like children, their command was “Behave!” When you heard that and got the look that went along with it, you generally shaped up. Or else. These days, the problem with behaviour is that no one pays attention to it any more (no, this isn’t a discussion about parenting; it’s about energy efficiency and conservation in the Caribbean).

The energy problem in a nutshell is that we need to find ways to supply more green energy – and to reduce our demand for it at the same time. So energy conservation and energy efficiency are vital aspects of the solution.

The thing is: our policymakers (and here I’m also referring to the consultants who write the policies and plans that the politicians approve) have quite often misunderstood the demand side of the problem – and have traditionally framed it as being comprised of two separate things, one having to do with people and the other with technology.

For example, according to a national energy policy document published this year by a large CARICOM country, energy conservation is defined as “practices and actions that reduce the amount of energy that is used”, whereas energy efficiency is “changing technology so that less energy is used to accomplish the same task.”

In other words:

Conservation = Behaviour
and
Energy Efficiency = Technology

So, according to the above formulation, if I walk to the bar instead of driving there, I would be reducing my energy use by conservation. But if, on the other hand, I bought a new, more fuel-efficient vehicle that gets far better gas mileage than my current vehicle, I could still drive to the bar – but I would also use less energy, so I achieve the same result, thanks to technology!

New technology is so much sexier than better behaviour.

Except that: a British economist named William Stanley Jevons explained, some 144 years ago, why this would not actually be the case. “It is wholly a confusion of ideas”, Jevons wrote then, “to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.” In his book The Coal Question, published in 1865, Jevons pointed out how James Watt’s steam engine, by improving on the previous design, provided much better fuel efficiency – thereby causing England’s consumption of coal to soar. His observation came to be known as the Jevons Paradox.

The Jevons Paradox is explained by what is called the rebound effect; an economic theory which says that if the cost of a resource is reduced due to increased efficiency, people will consume more of the resource (or the services dependent on the resource) than previously, thereby offsetting (partially or entirely) the effect of the efficiency improvement.

For example: a colleague recently told me the story of his neighbour, who never used his outdoor lights at night – until he got energy efficient compact fluorescent lamps. Since then, he has been leaving the lights on outside, because he knows he now has “energy-saving bulbs” inside. Well, guess what the overall effect on his electricity bill is likely to be? (This is an example of a direct rebound effect).

Or, take television. I want a new TV. I have a 32” Sony cathode-ray tube model, and I’m interested in a sleek flat-panel set. Flat-panel plasma or LCD TVs are more energy efficient than their bulky CRT counterparts; they use less electricity per inch of screen. But what are the chances that I will replace my 32” CRT with a 32” flat-panel? More than likely I (and many other buyers of new TVs) will upgrade screen size as well, which then causes the better energy efficiency per screen inch of the new TV to be offset by the larger number of screen inches. And, you know what? Flat panel TVs look really sexy when they’re on, so maybe I’ll inadvertently leave my new TV on more often than I did the old one. This all adds up to using more electricity, not less.

The important point here is that these are not isolated examples. A growing body of research indicates that the rebound effect is a universal behavioural response, one that gives rise to energy consumption outcomes that are quite different to the predicted ones.

So how is this relevant to Caribbean energy policy?

To date, I have seen no energy policy published in the Caribbean that makes any reference to the rebound effect or to behavioural factors in relation to energy efficiency outcomes. This omission causes us to get our sums wrong.

We can calculate, based on the technical efficiency differences, the energy-saving effect of new technology (importing fuel-efficient vehicles; replacing incandescent bulbs with CFLs and so on), but without taking behavioural factors into account, our estimate of the amount of energy to be saved will be incorrect. We need new equations, which are:

Conservation = Behaviour
and
Energy Efficiency = Technology + Behaviour

Who’s sexy now?

I’m writing some more on this soon, but here’s some reading on the rebound effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation)