One of my favorite comments from Skip Laitner (the guy who authored that report) is when he asks people how big our "strategic energy efficiency reserve" is.  It's a really interesting framing, since energy use per dollar of GDP (even after adjusting for deindustrialization) has fallen so steadily over the past three decades.  Skip calculates that we'd currently use three times as much energy if we still had the same energy intensivity today as we did in 1970.

Thus the "strategic reserve" question.  To wit: how much more can we pull, and how quickly?  Those are the only two questions anyone ever asks about fossil sources, and yet they are never asked about efficiency.  And since the Danes are a little over twice as efficient as we are in the US, one would have to conclude that - at the very least - we haven't yet reached "peak energy efficiency".  It's where our entire energy and environmental policy ought to start.

In fact, during the last 30 years we've slashed our energy needs mostly through 'efficiencies' like higher R valued insulation.

I think you'd be referin' to per capita energy use (and even then, I think per capita has increased thanks to SUVs, big screens, and McMansions).

But overall energy use has most definitely increased, 'specially when commercial and industry are included.

If they hadn't, then we wouldn't have needed to build any new power plants in the past 30 years.

Is efficiency making a fuel oil or natural gas furnace 10% more efficient?

Or is it replacing that furnace with geo heat exchange heating/cooling and solar cogeneration?

That's the problem with efficiency alone.  It will make an excuse to keep the furnace going.

Or even worse coal power plants!  Install cogeneration and boost the efficiency of the coal plant 20% and industry will want it to stay running 20 more years.

Wouldn't it be better to invest in geo heat exchange and solar cogeneration, wind, and biogas to simply replace that coal plant?

These are difficult decisions.  Given the climate crisis and the need for economic stimulus, replacement is the better option.

If you can do both, that's fine.  But will it keep the coal plant going longer?  Limited capital is left to do this.

But if capital is put into new efficiency/conservation solutions like geo heat exchange instead, it will stimulate the economy, reviving the job and tax base, generating more investment capital.

Cogeneration is better with solar than coal.  And geo heat exchange is way better than fuel oil or natural gas heating or standard air conditioning, that uses far too many fossil and nuclear fueled kwhs.

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It's a similar argument with oil war.  Keep on fighting them, as oil prices rise ever higher on fear of wider war, an attack on Iran.  Bush is threatening to start that now, before he is ousted.  Bush-lite (mccain) keeps on with the tough attack Iran rhetoric.

Or just end the oil wars and put all the wasted capital into oil alternatives.

The economic choice is obvious.  Further capital wasted tryinmg to keep oil prices down is a futile waste of resources.  Resources better applied to new energy modes.

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The goal is using less fossil fuel, not stipulating technologies.  Driving a 30%, 100 MW coal plant up to 50% efficiency with waste heat recovery saves 133 MW of coal (333 MW of coal to fuel the first case, 200 MW of coal to fuel the second.)  Put in environmental terms, that reduces CO2 emissions by about 47 tons/hour.  

One can get to the same place by building solar, wind, or other zero-carbon sources in sufficient volume to offset 133 MW of coal, but the path is irrelevant - it's the goal that matters.  Efficiency, at core, is fuel agnostic.  Whether one uses biomass, solar, coal, gas or orange rinds, it is in our economic and environmental interests to use it efficiently.  

"Efficiency, at core, is fuel agnostic."

In a static state that maybe true Sean.

But eliminating that energy use with geo heat exchange starts a shift that will save more and more as it is applied.

The limit for cost effective efficiency boost of the coal plant is reached and that's it.  One improvement, a static state.

But energy policy shift occurs in a changing world.  Improvements in efficiency of old energy economy devices, coal, nuclear, gas guzzling ICEs, delays investment in much better technologies.  That can eliminate the entire GHG footprint, before the efficiency improvements pay their capital investment back.

They tie up scarce capital in incremental gains.  Capital that could instead impell exponential gains in GHG free lower cost energy.

Change necessary to head off exponential GHG climate disaster need to have exponential growth on their side.  Efficiency of the incremental kind, doesn't have this crisis beating feature.

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Can the cogeneration system live on in another form after the coal plant is shuttered?  That would be possible Sean.

A secondary refrigerant gas turbine generator could be recycled after use in a coal plant then installed in a solar furnace powered factory.

Otherwise investment in incremental efficiency could go down the drain with the coal plant closed in (hopefully) a few years.

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