EU.
One evening he was in Washington, D.C., at a dinner at the home of the EU ambassador. Piebalgs had come over for a renewable energy conference that had filled the Washington Convention Center with over three thousand people and had overflowed with enthusiasm and optimism.
Over drinks before dinner, Piebalgs was asked—in light of the EU’s aggressive 2020 efficiency targets—about the relative popularity of renewables versus efficiency.
“Renewables are more popular,” he said. “Renewables are supply side. They provide new energy. Efficiency is something that pays back over the years. Energy efficiency involves a lot of nitty-gritty, a lot of incentives and a lot of regulations.
“And there’s no red ribbon to cut.” Conservation—energy efficiency—may be so obvious as a solution to cost and environmental issues. But there is no photo op, no opening ceremony where government officials and company executives can cut a ribbon, smile broadly into the camera, and inaugurate a grand new facility. He shook his head as he considered one of the most powerful of the life lessons he had learned from his deep immersion in global politics.
“It’s very important to be able to cut a red ribbon.”20
32
CLOSING THE CONSERVATION GAP
As people moved from the countryside and crowded into cities in the nineteenth century, urban heat waves could be ferocious in their effect. “Apprehension of a Pestilence” and “The Rising of Today’s Sun Awaited with Absolute Terror” were headlines in 1878 when one such heat wave struck parts of the United States. In 1901 one of the nation’s worst heat waves left hundreds and hundreds of fatalities in the East and the Midwest. Local hospitals stopped sending horse-drawn ambulances to pick up those felled by heat prostration because the horses themselves were collapsing from the heat. So severe was the heat in 1901 that for the first time ever, the New York Stock Exchange allowed its members to remove their suit jackets on the trading floor.1
Traditionally, buildings had been constructed to serve as the bridge between the natural elements and the human requirements for shelter, heating, cooling, and lighting. In the Southwest, forts like the Alamo used adobe walls to help stay cool during the hot days but warm during the chilly nights. In cities, stone buildings were designed with recessed windows to shade against the sun, and with central courtyards to bring light and ventilation to the interior rooms. But as people congregated in the cities and buildings rose in height, and as industrial knowledge expanded, increasingly sophisticated and varying uses of energy were employed to deliver the heat, cooling, light, and power that were required to make these structures livable and productive—and to enable cities as a whole to function.
Today in the United States, the residential and commercial sectors (including the electricity used in buildings) consume about 40 percent of total U.S. energy and three quarters of electricity, and emit substantial amounts of CO2. In other countries, the share is even higher: in Britain, 50 percent of total energy. In China, buildings’ share of energy use is much less, but that will rapidly change as that country adds at least 10 million new residential units a year. Now the challenge is not only how to construct livable buildings but also how to use all of the energy that goes into them more efficiently. That means addressing design, behavior, and the difference between the potential of efficiency and the reality—what is called the conservation gap.2
PATENT NUMBER 808897: “MANUFACTURED WEATHER”
Over the nineteenth century, inventors and businessmen had struggled to find a way to control the heat and humidity that could disrupt industrial processes. By the last decade of that century, crude refrigeration systems had been deployed to help sanitize the great meat-packing industry in the “hog butcher to the world,” Chicago. After the heat wave of 1901, the New York Stock Exchange finally decided that it had to do something more than just permit floor traders to take off their jackets. And so it commissioned a massive refrigeration system. But the system did not work very well; the air was clammy and uncomfortable. Cooling was not enough; humidity needed to be controlled. But how?3
Willis Carrier was a 25-year-old engineer from Angola, New York, who had an intuition for mechanical engineering, a gift for mathematics, and a flair for visualizing solutions. Working for the Buffalo Forge Company, he had helped a magazine printer figure out how to control humidity, which was causing colored ink to end up smudged on the wrong part of the page.
Carrier himself, however, was not satisfied