Open letter to the Economist

I was rather disappointed after reading your article on The Future of Energy in the June 2008 issue. I am an electrical engineer working in power distribution and generation, I deal mainly with commercial and industrial clients and therefore am well versed in the scale of power consumption that is required to maintain our economy.

After discussing the various options for generating clean, renewable energy, you briefly mention that we cannot conserve our way out of this problem, I strongly agree that we cannot simply just reduce what we use and expect that it is a viable and relevant solution, however you eluded that conserving energy is not worth much of the attention the energy sector receives. The article neglects to discuss the large benefits of reducing our current demand on existing generating capacity, the economics are surely worth studying, even for the Economist.

The best course of action still remains to be a reduction in current demand, this reduction does not have to come at the expense of the public's quality of life, many experts in the industry strongly agree with this idea. The cheapest power available still remains to be that which we do not use, approximately 0.5 cents per kWh, which means negawatts are the cheapest energy solution we have at our disposal. We can increase the resilience and productivity of our economy while creating new markets by investing in technologies that allow us to perform the tasks we perform today while saving vast amounts of electricity, many improvements are already available to us. The concept that we can do what we already do while using less electricity is very different from that of conservation, do more with less.

If we reduce our current demand on existing generating infrastructure we free up that capacity for growth in other ares of our economy. Instead of building new infrastructure power companies can realize increased profit margins by selling capacity that has been freed up through increased efficiency, to new clients at higher rates than it was previously available for. This represents the most profitable scenario for the power companies as the generating sites do not require additional financing which means any increase in revenue goes straight to the bottom line. If you think that freeing up power is difficult to achieve you are seriously mistaken, we are very inefficient users of electrical power and there are many opportunities to reduce consumption without altering our productivity.