Richard Cowart, former chair of the Vermont Public Service Board, is the latest in a stream of witnesses testifying before the Vermont legislature on climate change. There seems to be no one challenging any of the assertions, theories, or plans that these witnesses support.
Take, for example, the following from the January 25, 2007 Burlington Free Press:
"Lots of people are going to come to you with proposed solutions to greenhouse gas emissions," Cowart said. "Here's the question you should ask each of them: How much will it cost to save a ton of carbon?"
He illustrated his point with a light bulb.
"When homeowners replace one incandescent light bulb with a compact fluorescent bulb, they prevent the emission of 1,400 pounds of carbon dioxide over the life of the bulb (assuming the home's electricity comes from coal-fired power plants). The bulb saves the economy $30 in reduced power costs over the same period," Cowart said.
The comment in parenthesis deserves some analysis. How much of Vermont’s electricity comes from coal-fired power plants? According to the Vermont Department of Public Service, the answer is none. Well, maybe some. About nine percent of the power supply in New England comes from coal, so some of those coal-generated electrons may occasionally end up in a light bulb in Brandon.
Two-thirds of Vermont’s electricity supply comes from either HydroQuebec’s water-powered electricity generating facilities or Entergy Vermont Yankee’s nuclear generator in Vernon, neither of which contributes any carbon.
So if a Vermont consumer replaces one incandescent bulb with a compact fluorescent, there won’t be any meaningful reduction in carbon emissions.
(I won’t get into a discussion of whether buying the compact fluorescent bulb will save $30, which may be true. But it probably ignores the time value of money—what economists call discounting. This seemingly technical issue plays a very important role in the economic analysis of climate change, which I may post later.)
Later in the Free Press article, we read this:
Those [energy efficiency] programs have helped reduce Vermont's residential electric energy use to less than 8,000 kilowatt hours a year per customer, compared to a national average of more than 10,000 kilowatt hours a year, Dworkin showed in a slide flashed on a screen in the hearing room.
Well, maybe the efficiency programs are the reason that the average Vermont customer uses less electricity than the national average. But a major reason Vermonters use less electricity is most likely because most houses in the state don’t have air conditioning. And those houses that do have air conditioning probably use it less than people do in most other parts of the country.
Nationally half of all housing units have central air conditioning and another quarter have window units. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, sixteen percent of residential electricity use is for air conditioning. Sixteen percent of 10,000 kilowatt hours is 1,600. Simple arithmetic tells us that the average American household uses 8,400 kilowatt hours of electricity for uses other than air conditioning. That’s not much different than the 8,000 kilowatt hours Vermonters use. And given that Vermont’s electricity prices are well above national averages, economic theory predicts that we will use less than the national average.
Have energy efficiency programs led to a significant decrease in electricity use in Vermont, or do we use less because electricity is more expensive? The answer is not clear, but there are certainly questions that should be raised. I’d sure like to see them raised in Montpelier and in the state’s media.
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