Cost
The most noteworthy advantage in creating a negawatt market is the cost incentive. As many will say, "The cheapest watt is the one that's never created." In this market, the consumers who increase their home efficiency, or decrease their energy consumption, can earn money by selling the saved electricity. This is similar to an emissions trading or a cap-and-trade system, in which the energy that is not used can be bought from the consumers who saved the energy and sold to those who need to purchase the extra energy. Providers of electricity can encourage consumers to sell back their unused energy, or negawatts, especially during peak hours. A major question that electric companies need to ask themselves is whether it is less expensive to pay consumers to reduce consumption for a few instances a year or to build and maintain a side-supply resource that would only be used a few times a year. Many argue that the "cost of foregone consumption is less than the cost of increasing the supply of electricity."
If a consumer conserves a substantial amount of energy then there can even be an allowance for a tax deduction. According to the Negawatt Power Solutions Group, a "building that achieved a 50% energy cost reduction may be eligible for tax deduction up to $1.80 per square foot." Negawatts can help alleviate some of the costs of constructing new, efficient buildings. "The negawatt revolution now provides a way to cut construction costs, capture big returns on capital in renovations, dramatically cut operating expenses." Existing buildings can be made more efficient by renovationg the insulation to cut back on electricity used for heating, installing more efficient light fixtures, and an upgraded HVAC design. Renovating a building to be more energy efficient will cost less than creating entirely new, more efficient buildings.
Read more about this topic: Negawatt, Advantages
Famous quotes containing the word cost:
“To call a posit a posit is not to patronize it. A posit can be unavoidable except at the cost of other no less artificial expedients. Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“I acknowledge that the balance I have achieved between work and family roles comes at a cost, and every day I must weigh whether I live with that cost happily or guiltily, or whether some other lifestyle entails trade-offs I might accept more readily. It is always my choice: to change what I cannot tolerate, or tolerate what I cannot—or will not—change.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“It is not enough for theory to describe and analyse, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes. In order to do this theory must partake of and become the acceleration of this logic. It must tear itself from all referents and take pride only in the future. Theory must operate on time at the cost of a deliberate distortion of present reality.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)