Suppose I paid you for every pound of pollution you generated and punished
you for every pound you reduced. You would probably spend most of your time
trying to figure out how to generate more pollution. And suppose that if you
generated enough pollution, I had to pay you to build a new plant, no matter
what the cost, and no matter how much cheaper it might be to not pollute in the
first place.
Well, that's pretty much how we have run the U.S. electric grid for nearly a
century. The more electricity a utility sells, the more money it makes. If it's
able to boost electricity demand enough, the utility is allowed to build a new
power plant with a guaranteed profit. The only way a typical utility can lose
money is if demand drops. So the last thing most utilities want to do is
seriously push strategies that save energy, strategies that do not pollute in
the first place.
America is the Saudi Arabia of energy waste. A 2007 report ...