Comments on: Industrial efficiency plan for Ontario, finally

By: kl

kl — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:29:12 +0000

Good story. Saving power through efficiency is always dramatically cheaper. Its akin to the climate change problem, dealing with it in advance will prove to be much cheaper than managing the consequences.

By: Andrew Bogart

Andrew Bogart — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 23:13:01 +0000

I think that there are huge increases in efficiency to be made in the industrial sector. Having worked in an industrial setting myself I have seen first-hand how much heat goes through the roof and how many Kilowatts (sometimes Megawatts) are wasted to pointless inefficiencies.

By: Remi

Remi — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:00:54 +0000

Unlike Tyler, I find this news discouraging for two reasons:
1. Energy paybacks in the 1-2 year range, represent opportunities for these industries to achieve annual returns on their investments of 50% to 100% if they finance it completely themselves, and greater annaul returns if they borrow (leverage) to do some of the work. If companies are not willing to invest on their own to achieve these rates of return while becoming more competitive, then it seems that our economic systems is misguided indeed. The only thing that I could imagine that is stopping them from investing in energy efficiency themselves it that they are strictly focused on immediate quarterly profits and how they impact their short-term perfmance (i.e. executive bonuses).
2. It shows that we give untold subsidies to industry to waste energy. Without subsidy, industry would pay an energy cost that should more then pay for maintaining existing and building new power generation facilities.