Sure... and the savings would amount to what?

For most people, saving electricity is more of a moral thing.

There are certainly places people can cut back. But once a person has bought all the expensive new electronic toys, electricity seems such a minor part of the total that the first thought is to just not buy another electronic toy (and use the others a little longer) rather than cut back on electricity use.

Getting a person's house sealed tighter, or adding insulation requires some thought and an additional expenditure, so people tend to put it off. Changing light bulbs could help too, but the light bulbs look more expensive.

One's person cost increase is indeed another's revenue. But the argument was that cost and revenue would merely be reshuffled so that a third party would lose revenue.
Whether this is a realistic assumption or not depends on a lot of things, the chief of which is indeed public policy. I don't think it's reasonable to expect a redistributive, high employment policy in most countries at this juncture. So I would not expect much additional employment in the electricity sector without offsetting job losses elsewhere.

Efficiency is a different issue because physical productive potential and money are linked but separate.
There's no policy solution to lower physical efficiency. It isn't necessarily a big deal however as long as the limiting resources aren't too scarce. And if there's lots of productive capacity laying around idle, throwing money at the problem can keep output up without hurting other sectors too much. But hurt it will, one way or another. The thing is, pollution would hurt too.
Notice the lack of numbers. Even if I was knowledgeable and skilled enough, coming up with good numbers would be hard work.

Where does the extra cost of higher electricity rates go to?

I don't think anyone is talking a carbon tax, and returning the money to the taxpayer. If that was what was being done, then at least the majority would get back to the people, and it would be fairly transparent.

One issue is that you are often substituting higher cost generation for current lower cost generation, so just because of the higher costs, rates will be higher.

Another issue is that unless electricity demand is really ramping up, very often what you are doing is not a substitution of a higher cost product for a lower cost product, but something like an "add on" of a higher cost product to the existing lower cost product. (See the blockquote in my post.) If you are building a new wind facility, or a new solar facility, you generally have to have natural gas as backup. In most cases, you already have a gas-fired facility that provides that capacity, you will just use it a little less. Building the new wind or solar facility will cut down on the amount of natural gas you will use, but will leave the utility with debt payments on two sets of facilities, instead of one. There will probably be two sets of staffing costs. The big savings will be in the purchase of natural gas, but that won't be very big in relationship to the cost of the new wind or solar facility.

A third issue arises if there is a cap and trade program, which is more likely what will be passed than a carbon tax. This has big (?) middle men costs, and these affect whatever might come back. Also, the amounts collected tend to go to someone else, for reducing carbon use, rather than coming back to the electricity purchaser payer. I think it is the availability of all of these payments to middlemen and to folks reducing carbon use that is one reason many back the plan. If there weren't $$ in it for them, they would forget it.

Austin is planning to conserve an extra 700 MW to reduce the per capita (but not absolute) consumption (Austin is still planning on rapid population growth).

www.austinsmartenergy.com/downloads/THSlides10-28.pdf

Look particularly at slides 6 & 7. Gail, the entire story of Austin Energy is worth studying to expand your range of "what is possible & practical".

Austin looks for lower electric bills, NOT lower rates/kWh.

Austin is a clear success story for conservation being cheaper than new generation. A message that should be repeated 300 fold across the USA & Canada.

Alan

Austin Energy was a leader in sealing air ducts to reduce leaks. Save energy & money at relatively low cost. The techniques developed in Austin should be mandatory throughout the USA.

On both inner liner and outer covering do the following. Tie wrap to sheet metal nipple, then use approved ($9/roll) duct tape to seal and then cover seal with approved mastic. IMHO, this will not leak for a century.

The electric bill on a 2br apartment cost about $40-42. Swapping CFLs for everything dropped it by about $8. Either way, it's a pretty small expense. We did certainly have rationing by capacity.

The rolling blackouts were summer of 2000. Even before the rolling blackouts, we had a big blackout in summer of '96 during a heatwave. The utilities have been running conservation campaigns for a long time: buybacks of extra refrigerators, encouraging us to limit use of appliances at peak summer hours, and subsidizing CFLs (as low as $0.33 each). In the latest incarnation since 2001, it's called Flex Your Power.

I am skeptical that we can replicate that success with GHG.

I don't see anything from you that supports that skepticism.

I'll expand on this point a bit. By 'success' I mean reduction in GHGs at a moderate cost. In the case of emissions trading for SOx and NOx, technical solutions to reduce emissions had been available and commercially deployed well in advance of the cap and trade programs. These programs incentivized cost-effective implementation of the technology.

I don't see similar technical fixes for GHGs (or more precisely CO2), which makes me skeptical that a trading system can be as successful as for SOx/NOx. The only big 'get' is in reducing energy i.e, via conservation and DSM. It is maybe a little early to judge the European ETS, but I believe that politics has so far played a much bigger role in that market than have substantive fixes for CO2.

Given your passion for and knowledge of end-use efficiency, you are probably ok with a carbon tax (or cap/trade) even if all it did was incentivize a variety of conservation strategies. And I would hasten to agree. But I'll caution that the resulting conservation will tend to undercut the cost effectiveness of putting new generation sources on the grid -- and getting well rid of the old ones. IMHO, if we don't pay attention to the cross-currents we could end up frustrated with the results.

One problem with the smart grid and appliances using power opportunistically to compensate for rapid changes in the supply is the need to retrofit old appliances. If only new appliances can be made to work with a smart grid, then there will be a problem. If the system is based around dynamic adjustment of electricity prices which are available from the internet in real time, and the system is open enough to allow 3rd party and/or open source apps to interface with it and control devices in the home, then this could be quite a big deal.

Based on quick research, a fridge takes around 2kwh of electricity per day. If the fridge has a 10% duty cycle, this implies 2 kwh / 2.4 h = 833 watts per home which can be used to smooth spikes out. Depending on the frequency/size of the spikes, thermal masses (water) could be added to fridges to allow the fridge to go longer without requiring cooling. In addition, heat storage heaters are even better than fridges at this because their power consumption can be very high without significantly increasing the cost of the unit. I never thought I would say on a peak oil site that increasing the ability of an appliance to consume electricity is a good thing.

However, PHEVs and BEVs aside, the present system has no native ability to actually supply power, there is just a few energy-intensive appliances that have small duty cycles and can therefore be used to turn spikes of excess electricity into useful work.

Will Stewert says,
"Wind power never has and likely never will be dispatchable; that's not a goal."

I would differ strongly with your contention "that's not a goal". Dispatchable renewable power is to many in the renewable industry the absolute holy grail of advanced renewable energy. The only powerful player that seems to have overlooked the effort toward dispatchable renewable energy seems to be the U.S. government, which to this day treats energy storage as the ugly stepchild of the energy industry.

The problem is simple. Almost all electricity must be produced as it is used. This means that the utility grid must be built to sustain the highest consumption hour of the highest consumption day of the year or 100% maximum consumption:

http://www.baihp.org/pubs/pre2000/moisture/305_1.gif

For much of the day, however, consumption is barely 70% of maximum consumption for most of the day all of the night. There is also a large seasonable variation in demand, meaning that if longer term storage can be developed (seasonal ice chilling or heat storage for example) even greater efficiencies could be acheived. One of the reasons that hydrogen fuel production and ethanol are still supported, despite thier obvious flaws, is because they offer the hope of truly dispatchable energy.

So not only is renewable energy intermittant in production, energy consumers are intermittent in demand. Energy storage is also intermittent in being supported, and in fact, support for research and development of energy storage systems has all but collapsed, as is shown in a slide by the now moribound organization Energy Storage Council (pdf file, but not all that large and very interesting):
http://www.energystoragecouncil.org/EESAT%202005%20presentation.pdf

An advanced arrangement combining energy storage, distributed energy http://www.distributedenergy.com and methane recapture from sewer, agricultural and biomass waste could reduce electricity by easily a third or more in the advanced nations, thus making wind, solar and tidal renewable energy all the more scalable and dispatchable, while also reducing the critical problem or methane release and water pollution by way of manures from agriculture. Each year that we wait we waste away more of our precious store of natural gas, a natural endowment that can never be replaced.

Several years ago, Matthew Simmons said that the natural gas supply crisis may be a greater threat to modern world economies than the problem of peak oil. That should send chills up our spine.

RC

Then the Texas electrical island of ERCOT meets your criteria.

In 2007, the PUC announced its approval for additional transmission lines that could deliver 10,000 more megawatts of renewable power by 2012. New transmission infrastructure will allow all Texans to access the the state's vast wind resources.

http://www.seco.cpa.state.tx.us/re_wind-transmission.htm

Cost, from memory, $4+ billion for new transmission.

Since Texas uses large amounts of natural gas for generating electricity, and coal can ramp up and down, the existing grid can accept this level of wind generation

Austin Energy is about to invest in a $2.3 billion wood waste generation plant to give it dispatchable renewable energy.

Alan