I'll leave it to Gar to judge if the targets are sufficiently aggressive, but either way I'm happy to see new legislation on energy efficiency being proposed in Congress. This stuff isn't sexy and doesn't garner much media attention, but -- as we keep saying -- efficiency is the low-hanging fruit. Time to eat some of it.
Bingaman and Domenici propose Energy Efficiency Promotion Act
Good stuff 1
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Posted 4:37 PM on 19 Apr 2007
by David Roberts -
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David Roberts is staff writer for Grist. You can follow his Twitter feed at twitter.com/drgrist.
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smoothsilk Posted 11:39 am
19 Apr 2007
some areas in Europe that are doubling the efficiency of their current power plants (among other things):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klooRS-Jjyo
From the film, Kees den Blanken of Cogen, Netherlands:
"The combined generation of heat and electricity is great stuff, because there you find true efficiencies . . . because electricity generation automatically cogenerates a lot of heat . . . and if you use that . . . to heat homes or industrial processes . . . you double the efficiency that you have in using [just] the fuel."
It really blows my mind how idiotic our entire energy -generation/consumption model is here is the USA. Unlike Holland (and most of Europe), our power-generating stations are far bigger and centralized, and thus far removed from most of the homes and businesses that could use the normal "waste" heat from the generating process.
Even in the sixties, before I had quite reached my teen years, I often read in car magazines like Motor Trend and Car & Driver and Road & Track about the "grossly" more efficient internal combustion engines of the Europeans, who started using things like fuel-injection and overhead camshaft technologies long before we did. We considered such things "exotic" and prohibitively "costly," not because they were, but because we were spoiled (rotten) by the endless glut of cheap gasoline.
I always marveled that here were folks that (usually) liked to drive faster than Americans, and yet -- at the same time -- had so much more finesse and rigor in their approach to automobile transportation (and this was before I knew much about their trains, trams, bicycles etc.).
I recall in particular an interview with the Mercedes-Benz engineer, Rudolf Ulenhaut (not sure of the spelling there) in Motor Trend. He laughed at the way his most famous project, the 300 SEL 6.3, got around 16-18 miles per gallon, and yet was the fastest production sedan in the world at the time, while a far slower Caddilac, Buick, Lincoln etc. often averaged in the 10-14 mpg.
And of course there was the famous French Citroen SM (a Citroen with a Masserati engine), as well as so many others, including the much smaller, cheaper cars.
It is nice to know that our Euro-cousins have broadened their efficiency to other areas, and done so with such success. Too bad, though, that Daimler-Benz and most of the other auto manufacturers haven't kept up with the Japanese very well.
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