Callahan’s Cleveland Diary

(An edited version of this article appeared in the Cleveland Free Times for April 5-11, 2006 under the title “Electric slide: Cleveland needs the power of negative thinking”. It’s no longer available on line.)

Want to build a power plant in your house? Here’s how:

Step 1: Buy half a dozen 23-watt compact fluorescent (CF) light bulbs. I just bought a three-pack of major-brand CF bulbs at Lowe’s for less than $15. They go in an ordinary light socket and provide nearly the same light as conventional 100-watt bulbs. They’re rated for 8,000 hours of use.

Step 2: Use your new CF bulbs to replace the six busiest incandescent light bulbs in your home.

If those six ordinary bulbs average 75 watts, you’ve just replaced 450 watts of electric load with 138 watts — getting more light and a lot more useful bulb life into the bargain. In effect, you’ve installed a 312-watt power plant in your house.

Assuming those bulbs are lit for an average five hours a day, you’ve just cut your monthly electric bill by 47 kilowatt-hours, saving you more than $5 a month. You’ll get back your $30 investment in just six months, after which the savings is pure net. By the time your six CF bulbs reach the end of their lives, they’ll have saved you about $250 more than they cost… an 800% return on your investment!

Impressed? Here’s an even more thought-provoking number: If all 200,000 households in Cleveland took the steps described above, our collective investment of $6 million in light bulbs could reduce the city’s power load by as much as sixty megawatts.

Building a sixty-megawatt coal or natural gas power plant would probably cost fifteen times that much. Of course, a power plant might last 25 years, during which we’d have to replace our light bulbs five or six times — but the power plant would also have fuel, labor and maintenance costs. Add it all up and our “light bulb power plant” looks like a pretty sweet deal.

A few years back, “soft energy” guru Amory Lovins coined the term negawatt (with an n) to describe this kind of addition-by-subtraction energy supply. Lovins, who heads the Rocky Mountain Institute, argues that investment in negawatts — in highly efficient lighting, refrigerators, motors, building insulation, vehicles, etc. — is a consistently better buy than its equivalent in centralized generating capacity and fossil fuels. Lovins claims it’s almost always more profitable for utilities, and better for their customers, to manage energy demand with investments in energy efficiency rather than new power plants, mines and wells. A number of utilities have hired RMI to help them do just that.

I bring this all up because Cleveland Public Power is about to hire a consultant for its first-ever strategic planning process. The seven-month study is supposed to help the City’s electric utility evaluate “its current organization and the environment in which it operates” and “viable options for its future” Among the “viable options” to be evaluated: system expansion, adding new products or services, partnerships with other agencies, franchising, outsourcing, even becoming the city’s exclusive electricity provider. (Privatization or divestiture is explicitly ruled out.)

Many people think that Public Power is still a cheap competitor to First Energy. Unfortunately, this hasn’t been the case for years. CPP’s residential bills now closely track First Energy’s, averaging nearly eleven cents per kilowatt-hour in the Winter and more than twelve cents in the Summer. This makes our old friend Muny Light one of the most expensive electric utilities in the whole state. And with wholesale power costs still rising (CPP generates virtually none of its own power) and little customer growth, the City has no strategy to bring those rates down.

So a plan for CPP’s future is sorely needed. But while no one at City Hall is saying it out loud, CPP needs more than “viable options” — it needs to re-think its core mission. If our municipal utility can’t deliver cheaper electric bills than First Energy, what exactly is it for?

Here’s one good answer: Even if CPP can no longer deliver cheaper electricity to Clevelanders, it can still offer lower electric bills by helping us to reduce the kilowatt-hours we need. It can start selling efficiency rather than electricity — negawatts instead of megawatts.

CPP already has a program to put free CF light bulbs in many of the city’s lowest-income homes. How about pushing that service to all of CPP’s customers? And how about subsidizing the replacement of old energy-hog refrigerators with new, high-efficiency models? Document each customer’s savings, take back a percentage through a “negawatt-hour” charge on the monthly bill, and you get a win-win-win situation: the customer’s bill goes down, CPP recovers its investment while cutting back on its wholesale power requirements, and we all throw less CO2 into the air.

The opportunities for negawatt generation aren’t limited to lights and refrigerators. CPP could partner with business customers to invest in cogeneration of heat and power. It could jump-start the local market for home wind, solar and fuel cell applications (a megawatt generated by consumers on their own rooftops is the same as a negawatt of efficiency, from the utility’s point of view.) It could even imitate a pilot program in Chicago that lets 1,500 Con Ed customers meter their electric demand hour-by-hour, with cheaper rates for off-peak times when the company’s own power costs are lowest.

These are all “viable options”. Will CPP’s chosen consultant take a hard look at them? That remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, buy a few CF bulbs and build your own negawatt plant at home. At these rates, it.s the surest thing you’ll ever invest in.