The South is positioned to become the “Saudi Arabia” for a vast untapped energy source, a renowned Georgia Tech energy expert told an audience of executives, entrepreneurs and advocates Wednesday.
Instead, Public Policy Professor Marilyn Brown lamented, the region is lagging the nation in developing that resource.
What energy source was she talking about? Efficiency.
“The lifestyles we enjoy in the South are highly energy and carbon intensive,” Brown told an audience of about 200 Wednesday at Tech’s Advanced Technology Research Center. And those very inefficiencies, she said, create more opportunities for saving energy.
Brown has been working with researchers at Tech, Duke University and the Oak Ridge National Research Laboratory on a major study of energy efficiency in the South slated for release this month. Even after economic and technological limitations are taken into account, a working paper from the study released in August said, the South in general and Georgia in particular could “entirely offset the need to expand electric generation capacity … through the year 2020″ with “full deployment” of efficiency measures.

Brown’s conclusion: Energy efficiency — not coal, not nuclear power, not even renewables — should be considered the region’s “first fuel.”

But her esearch also shoew how far behind the rest of the nation the South is in moving toward efficiency. Among other shortcomings:
• Fewer Energy Star appliances are bought here than in other regions;
• The efficiency incentives in the South average one-fifth the value of incentives in other states;
• And Southerners themselves are less enthusiastic about efficiency and are bigger advocates for drilling our way out of our energy problems than are people in other regions.
In many ways, however, the makeup of Brown’s audience was as revealing as her data. Lots of dark suits, conservative ties and polished business shoes. Not a pair Birkenstocks to be seen. Once merely a pipe-dream for environmentalists, efficiency has become a key focus both for startups and established businesses, said ATDC’s Ben Hill, who organized Brown’s appearance Wednesday as one member in a panel discussion in Tech’s Clean Energy Speaker Series.
Brown’s own points were echoed by a source whose mere title underscores how “establishment” energy efficiency has become. Atlanta-based Ken Ostrowski leads the North America Electric Power and Natural Gas Practice at McKinsey & Co., the world’s largest management consulting firm.
Ostrowski and his colleagues issued a report last year that arrived at many of the same conclusions: Because the region uses so much energy, economically viable steps toward efficiency in the South would represent 29 percent of the nation’s potential energy savings. The McKinsey report also found that a $520 billion investment in energy efficiency could yield $1.2 trillion in savings to the economy.

Ostrowski also discussed what he called “the puzzle of energy efficiency”: If it makes so much economic sense, why aren’t more companies investing in efficiency? His answer, put simply: Energy efficiency requires upfront investments and is difficult to measure; it also requires changing “100 million locations and literally billions of devices,” so it won’t happen overnight. Brown added that in the South, at least, policies have followed a culture that’s skeptical of efficiency.

Both Brown’s working paper and the McKinsey report make for interesting reading. And Brown’s work on this subject is likely to yield even more specific results soon. I’ll be following it.

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