Comfort Zone

　　Water boilers, space heaters and air conditioners have been notoriously inefficient. The heat pump has altered that equation. It removes heat from the air outside or the ground below and uses it to supply heat to a building or its water supply. In the summer, the system can be reversed to cool buildings as well.

　　Most new residential buildings in Sweden are already heated with ground-source heat pumps. Such systems consume almost no conventional fuel at all. Several countries have used subsidies to jump-start the market, including Japan, where almost I million heat pumps have been installed in the past two years to heat water for showers and hot tubs.

　　Remake Factories

　　From steel mills to paper factories, industry eats up about a third of the world’s energy. The opportunities to save are vast. In Ludwigshafen, German chemicals giant BASF runs an interconnected complex of more than 200 chemical factories, where heat produced by one chemical process is used to power the next. At the Ludwigshafen site site alone, such recycling of heat and energy saves the company ￡200 million a year and almost half its CO2 emissions. Now BASF is doing the same for new plants in China. “Optimizing (優化) energy efficiency is a decisive competitive advantage,” says BASF CEO Jurgen Hambrecht.

　　Green Driving

　　A quarter of the world’s energy---including two thirds of the annual production of oil—is used for transportation. Some savings come free of charge: you can boost fuel efficiency by 6 percent simply by keeping your car’s tires properly inflated (充氣). Gasoline-electric hybrid(混合型的) models like the Toyota Prius improve mileage by a further 20 percent over conventional models.

　　A Better Fridge

　　More than half of all residential power goes into running household appliances, producing a fifth of the world’s carbon emissions. And that’s true even though manufacturers have already hiked the efficiency of refrigerators and other white goods by as much as 70 percent since the 1980s. According to an International Energy Agency study, if consumers chose those models that would save them the most money over the life of the appliance, they’d cut global residential power consumption (and their utility bills) by 43 percent.

　　Flexible Payment

　　Who says you have to pay for all your conservation investments? “Energy service contractors” will pay for retrofitting(翻新改造)in return for a share of the client’s annual utility-bill savings. In Beijing, Shenwu Thermal Energy Technology Co. specializes in retrofitting China’s steel furnaces. Shenwu puts up the initial investment to install a heat exchanger that preheats the air going into the furnace, slashing the client’s fuel costs. Shenwu pockets a cut of those savings, so both Shenwu and the client profit.

　　If saving energy is so easy and profitable, why isn’t everyone doing it? It has do with psychology and a lack of information. Most of us tend to look at today’s price tag more than tomorrow’s potential saving. That holds double for the landlord or developer, who won’t actually see a penny of the savings his investment in better insulation or a better heating system might generate. In many people’s minds, conservation is still associated with self-denial. Many environmentalists still push that view.

　　Smart governments can help push the market in the right direction. The EU’s 1994 law on labeling was such a success that it extended the same idea to entire buildings last year. To boost the market value of efficiency, all new buildings are required to have an “energy pass” detailing power and heating consumption. Countries like Japan and Germany have successively tightened building codes, requiring an increase in insulation levels but leaving it up to builders to decide how to meet them.

　　The most powerful incentives, of course, will come from the market itself. Over the past year, sky-high fuel prices have focused minds on efficiency like never before. Ever-increasing pressure to cut costs has finally forced more companies to do some math on their energy use.