There was a chance, briefly, that the new Harold Washington Library would do more than hold books and serve as a monument to the late mayor. It could have been part of the wave of the future in energy technology. By using the waste energy of its gas heating and cooling systems to power generators for its electrical needs, it could have demonstrated how cogeneration is efficient, economical, and relatively kind to the environment.
So the SEBUS Group assigned the cost of the internal wiring for the library’s heating system to Com Ed. But in comparing the cost of the two systems, it charged the full cost of the hot-water pipes–the counterpart to the wiring–to the cogeneration system. Thus Com Ed’s subsidies skewed the results to favor electric heat.
Amory Lovins, the Rocky Mountain Institute guru of energy efficiency, estimates that the U.S. could reduce electricity use by three-fourths with existing commercially available technology. Charles Komanoff, who’s a consultant for the city on the franchise renewal, calculated that “by the year 2009, pursuing efficiency opportunities aggressively and comprehensively, rather than letting the market determine the rate of conservation investments, could lead to 15 to 20 percent smaller electric bills for Chicago homes and businesses.”
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Over the past decade many state regulators and even utility executives realized that it was cheaper to give away energy-efficient technologies than build new generating plants. In a recent national poll 86 percent of the respondents wanted regulators to provide utilities incentives to invest in efficiency improvements for their customers. Like many states, Illinois now mandates that utilities provide the least costly alternative to customers.
“When you’ve got 30 to 40 percent overcapacity, it’s pretty hard to practice demand-side management [an industry term for improving efficiency and regulating use patterns] and satisfy the stockholders,” says James Hartnett, director the the Energy Resources Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “You’re posing a difficult problem–you’re going to ask shareholders to decrease their return on investment to satisfy customers.”
There are other inequities. Since a utility’s peak demand determines how much capacity it must own (or be prepared to buy from other utilities), it makes sense to charge a premium in the summer. But Com Ed’s summer rates have typically penalized everyone, not just those whose air-conditioning creates the peak.
