FRED YEBRA (Director of Demand Side Management, Austin Energy): “Before considering building another power plant a community should look at what is the potential for energy efficiency in the community.”
VO: “I traveled to Austin TX, where they are mining for energy savings in buildings instead of building new power plants. Mayor Will Wynn explains
MAYOR WILL WYNN (Austin, TX): “One of my favorite stories is that in the early 1980s the city had also purchased three thousand acres on the edge of town all of which was to build a 500 megawatt coal fired power plant. Immediately after purchasing the land, the city, however, started thinking about what would be more cost affective and instituted some aggressive utility sponsored conservation programs.”
VO: “Every day, Austin Energy sends a team of experts to homes and businesses in the community to find wasted energy, and eliminate it.”
BILL SPARKS (Conservation Specialist, Austin Energy): “Gary Raesz Custom Floors! Part of what I do is educate our customers because knowledge is power. Okay, what we’re gonna do is just kind of do a spot check of the light around here . We also look at high efficiency HVAC Units, high R value of insulation, as well as TPO, white, reflective roof coating. Those are all some very effective methods of reducing energy consumption. And then if you look at the pay back just by energy savings alone, it’s 1.6 months to switch to this new energy efficient technology.”
KATIE JENSEN (Green Building Expert, Austin Energy): One of the things we look at is, you know, what percent better than code can we achieve through our design and installation.
JAMIE GOMEZ (Duct Doctor, Austin Energy): Oh, Oh, Oh, Ah, there you go.? Here’s a good shot of what we face here. A huge, huge loss of, uh, energy is goin’ through that hole right there.
FRED YEBRA (Director of Demand Side Management, Austin Energy): One of the most cost affective things we’ve seen in the recent years is sealing your air duct work in the air conditioning systems reduces energy consumption by a tremendous amount.
GOMEZ: That needs to get sealed up. And we need to isolate this whole area as best we can. We’ll use this material here to cover the big holes then we’ll go back here over all the seams with this stuff here. It’s called mastic, and it’s an air seal.
YEBRA: What we have done here in Austin is in essence build a conservation power plant, um, which is basically building, uh uh, the equivalent of a typical conventional power plant. Through energy conservation and efficiency measures."
VO: “Austin Energy’s conservation programs provide the same amount of energy as building a coal fired power plant, but for half the price making this the cleanest and cheapest source of new energy.”
WYNN: We can demonstrate, daily, that we conserve more than 600 megawatts of electricity each day. That coal fired power plant was never built, is never going to be built. And we have continued to grow our economy while doing that.
VO: “I found another example of energy conservation working on a much larger scale in the 7th largest economy in the world, the state of CA”
DIAN GRUENEICH (commissioner of California Public Utilities Commission): We’ve really learned from experience over the years that energy efficiency not only makes sense, but it needs to be the resource of highest priority.
ART ROSENFELD (Commissioner of CA Energy Commission): If we can improve the efficiency of our buildings and industry by just 1% a year after 30 years that’s 30 or 40% in compound growth. That’s a huge oil well under all our cities and industrial plants.
VO: “Energy commissioner, Art Rosenfeld explains how California has been conserving energy since the 1970s.”
ROSENFELD: The gold line is CA, kilowatt hours per person per year, and we’ve kept our electricity use per person constant, and the gray line is the United States. It’s gone up 2% a year, and is now up 50 %.”
VO: “California achieved theses savings thanks to stringent standards for buildings and appliances, and it’s sentience for electric utilities. But around the year 2000, a combination of factors including regulatory changes and a severe drought caused a shortage of power. The state was threatened by summer full of potential black outs. Building new power plants was not an option.”
GRUENEICH: When you’re in a crisis situation such as we had In 2001 and 2002, nobody wants to get up and tell the public ‘well you may be having problems today, but don’t worry in three years we’ll get a power plant built.’
VO: “Since new power plants could not be built fast enough to avoid the crisis, the state tried a quicker and cheaper solution.”
WALLY MCGUIRE (Director of Flex Your Power): It was clear that the only way CA was going to avoid what was predicted to be 34 days of blackouts was to cut energy use dramatically. You just can’t build power plants that quickly.”
VO: “The California government launched a wide spread public education effort, encouraging people to do simple things like unscrew every 4th light for the summer, unplug that 2nd refrigerator, and turn the thermostat up to 78 degrees in the summer. 99% of the population responded and the simple steps added up. Big time.”
MCGUIRE: “Californians in that year were able to cut peak demand by 14%, 5,570 megawatts. That was historic. No one thought that anything could be done to cut that much.”
VO: “5500 Megawatts saved means that California avoided building 10 power plants in one summer, simply by asking people to do their part. It is one of the greatest energy conservation success stories in history.”
MCGUIRE: And, we didn’t have blackouts!
VO: “Since the crisis of 2001, California has focused on solving a bigger crisis.”
ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER (Governor of CA): “We simply must do everything that we can in our power to slow down global warming before it is too late. By 2050 we will reduce emissions by 80%. This is something that we owe our children and our grandchildren because nothing is more important than protecting our planet.”