Energy Efficiency: An Uphill Battle on A Slippery Slope

With apologies for the dueling clichés in today's title, that image conveys the conflicting messages I received from a pair of events on the topic of energy efficiency this week. Yesterday I watched a panel discussion on energy efficiency finance, part of the valuable First Wednesday series of seminars from Resources for the Future in D.C. Yet as I listened to the discussion of creative mechanisms for overcoming the numerous financial and behavioral obstacles impeding the widespread adoption of efficiency technologies, I couldn't help framing it in the context of Tuesday's blogger call on "efficiency rebound", also known as the Jevons Paradox, hosted by the Breakthrough Institute. This latter, offsetting effect has been controversial in the US but is apparently more widely accepted in EU policy circles.

Energy efficiency is probably the energy topic to which I've devoted the least space in this blog in the last seven years. That hasn't been a deliberate slight, though perhaps it reflects the bulk of my personal experience on the supply side of energy. It's also a tricky subject because it's a moving target. We often hear efficiency described as the low-hanging fruit in discussions of energy security or emissions reductions, but that usually ignores the fact that the truly low-hanging fruit in efficiency was mainly captured during the energy crises of the 1970s and early 1980s, and in subsequent price spikes in electricity and natural gas. That doesn't mean there isn't still ample scope for further improvement, but it does leave those efforts subject to the long list of barriers described in yesterday's presentations. They include lack of funding, low awareness, landlord/tenant issues, and lack of expertise.

One of the other obstacles that intrigued me was the mismatch between the scale of most efficiency projects, even in the commercial sector, and the much larger scale of investor interest in financing efficiency, as described by the panelist from Citibank. He suggested the answer lies in aggregation, in which the financing of numerous smaller projects would be bundled and sold off in tranches to investors. If that sounds familiar, it should, because it reflects a similar approach to securitization to the one that contributed to the recent housing bubble. However, I would stress that efficiency instruments need not be inherently very risky, as long as they are assembled with due concern for the creditworthiness of the project owners, and without heroic assumptions about the risk-abating portfolio effect of aggregation. Another element that could assist this process is the sort of project performance guarantees described by the panelist from Johnson Controls. In any case there is no shortage of federal, state and local programs focused on energy efficiency financing, including the controversial Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) mechanism.

I hope you get the sense from this brief summary that implementing energy efficiency on a large scale is quite difficult enough in its own right, even when those investing in such improvements can safely assume that they will enjoy 100% of the promised cost savings when the projects are completed. The research on rebound by a team commissioned by the EU's Directorate General for the Environment highlighted a number of mechanisms by which efficiency gains may lead to additional energy consumption, either by the individual or organization implementing it or within the larger economy. In some cases this could even lead to post-efficiency consumption exceeding the pre-efficiency level, a condition referred to as "backfire." The potential for these offsetting effects not only makes efficiency a tougher sell on a project basis, but it also undermines the efficacy of macro-scale efficiency measures in mitigating climate change or reducing energy imports. This view is consistent with the findings concerning rebound assembled by the Breakthrough Institute.

The logic of rebound begins simply and locally, before becoming complex and widespread. When you invest in efficiency, your energy bill goes down, leaving you more money to spend on either more of the services that consume energy (e.g., transportation, lighting, heat or air conditioning) or on other goods or services, after accounting for the cost of the upgrade or the cost of financing it. Now think about what happens in the economy: the demand for energy has dropped by a little bit, as has the money spent on it. You'd expect energy prices to fall and the freed up money not spent on energy to result in consumption or investment somewhere else. But those goods and services likely consume energy, too, along with the embedded energy in the efficiency technology, the installation of which started this cascade. And as overall energy productivity goes up, economic growth should also increase, resulting in additional energy use. The EU report found evidence of rebound in the range of 10-30%, including 26% for the UK efficiency investments that were studied. For example, the UK government apparently assumes that 15% of the benefit of home insulation will be lost to rebound.

Some of these mechanisms are more intuitive than others, and I am still thinking through what I heard, particularly in terms of why much of the rebound effect wouldn't be offset by market feedback mechanisms or by the reaction of company management to disappointing post-expenditure reviews on efficiency projects. When I raised these points during the call, Dr. Maxwell, the co-leader of the EU study team, assured me that my concerns weren't supported by the empirical research they examined.

If this rebound effect is as prevalent as the evidence seems to indicate, then the implications aren't very positive. Although individuals and companies implementing efficiency measures are likely to get most of the value they expect, even if it's in some form other than direct savings on their energy bills (e.g., more mobility, more comfort, higher output) society likely wouldn't see the expected energy and emissions savings at the level of the entire economy. That requires increasing efforts on efficiency even further--against all the barriers discussed above--or expending more effort on the supply side of energy, through promotion of higher energy production and more investment in renewables. In other words, those low-hanging efficiency gains that have defied so many efforts to implement look even harder to achieve in practice and somewhat less valuable.

I'm not sure to what extent I buy into all this, yet. Direct rebound due to less expensive energy services for the individual or firm seems fairly straightforward, but the wider ripple effects involve positive and negative feedback loops requiring complex modeling to assess--with all the uncertainties to which such models are subject. Nor does it require the existence of a large rebound effect to appreciate just how difficult it will be to move the needle on total energy consumption and emissions very far by means of efficiency measures that must ultimately be implemented by individual companies and consumers that already face a large array of competing priorities. I intend to look into this further and report later on any insights that turn up.