Energy Efficiency
There are many different types of energy efficiency innovations and these include: efficient water heaters; improved refrigerators and freezers; advanced building control technologies and advances in heating, ventilation, and cooling (HVAC); smart windows that adapt to maintain a comfortable interior environment; a steady stream of new building codes to reduce needless energy use, and compact fluorescent lights. Improvements in buildings alone, where over sixty-percent of all energy is used, save tens of billions of dollars per year.
Several states, including California, New York, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin, have consistently deployed energy efficiency innovations. Their state planners officials, citizens, and industry leaders, have found these to be very cost-effective, often providing greater service at lower personal and social cost than simply adding more fossil-fuel based supply technologies. This is the case for several reasons. Energy efficient technologies often represent upgrades in service through superior performance (e.g. higher quality lighting, heating and cooling with greater controls, or improved reliability of service through greater ability of utilities to respond to time of peak demand). So these innovations can provide a better, less expensive, service.
A wide range of energy efficient technologies have ancillary benefits of improved quality of life, such as advanced windows that not only save on heating and cooling expenses, but also make the work-place or home more comfortable. Another example is more efficient vehicles, which not only save immediately on fuel purchases, but also emit less pollutants, improving health and saving on medical costs to the individual and to society.
Read more about this topic: Energy Policy Of The United States
Famous quotes containing the words energy and/or efficiency:
“Since the beginning of time, three-quarters of the mental energy and of the lies inspired by vanity have been expended for their inferiors by people who are only abased by such expenditure. And Swann, who was easygoing and unaffected with a duchess, trembled at the thought of being scorned and put on airs when he was with a housemaid.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“Nothing comes to pass in nature, which can be set down to a flaw therein; for nature is always the same and everywhere one and the same in her efficiency and power of action; that is, nature’s laws and ordinances whereby all things come to pass and change from one form to another, are everywhere and always; so that there should be one and the same method of understanding the nature of all things whatsoever, namely, through nature’s universal laws and rules.”
—Baruch (Benedict)