In my last blog I referenced a book by Peter Tertzakian titled “The End of Energy Obesity”.  Here is a video where he talks about the Asymmetry Principle of Energy.

He writes that there are basically three paths forward for us in terms of satisfying our global energy demand.  The path he recommended was to make significant changes to the way we use energy through the implementation of better energy efficiency technology, especially by targeting wasteful consumption by end-users, and by focusing on energy supplies that are less harmful in terms of their greenhouse gas emission output.

Focusing on the end-user is key.  In my opinion not enough people understand that the power of saving energy at the end-user level instead of focusing on technologies further up the “energy supply chain”.  Drawing from Mr. Tertzakian’s work again, here’s why the end-user focus is so important:  a unit of energy saved at the end consumer level cascades into multiple units of energy saved at the source.  This is especially true of the electricity industry.  Mr. Tertzakian calls this the Asymmetry Principle of Energy Consumption.

Here is an example for electricity.

• If we start with 100 units of natural gas at the point where it comes out of the ground, by the time we have shipped it to a generating station fueled by natural gas and then burned it to create electricity, we have only 40 units of energy remaining.  The generation process of burning fossil fuel to create electricity is not very efficient.
• After we transport the electricity to a home we have 35 units left due to transmission and distribution losses.
• If we use that electricity to power something inefficient like an incandescent light bulb, we may have used only 2 units of that energy to actually create light in the visible spectrum where we can see it.  An incandescent light bulb is really a heater that gives off only 20% of its energy as light, and then only a fraction of that as light that is in a wavelength we can actually see.

What this means is that we should be highly focused on reducing the amount of energy we use at the end consumer level because there is a huge amount of leverage back up the supply chain when we make that happen.  In this example, there is a 50 times leverage factor – for every unit of energy we save at the end use, we could save 50 times that many units at the initial supply point.  While this may be an extreme example, this Asymmetry Principle is still very powerful and leverage ratios of 20:1 are not uncommon for many end-user devices that consume electricity.

Richard Jones has written 10 articles on this blog.

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Richard has over 27 years of experience in integrated petroleum, natural gas distribution, and Information & Communications Technology firms. SHIFT Energy has allowed Richard to combine his engineering, IT, and management experience into a single role that he is very passionate about. Richard is actively involved in several not-for-profit organizations. He enjoys golf, piano and guitar.