POWER HUNGRY: A special report.; U.S. Splurging on Energy After Falling Off Its Diet 

By ALLEN R. MYERSON 
The New York Times, 22 October 1998

Twenty-five years after an oil embargo proved that fuel supplies were neither reliable nor endlessly cheap, the United States has given up almost all the gains it made in conserving energy. On average, Americans have returned to consuming nearly as much energy as ever before.

From 1973, when Arab oil producers choked off their shipments to the United States, through 1983, the nation reduced its energy consumption even as the population and economy expanded. Prodded by higher costs and led on conservation crusades by Presidents Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter, Americans learned to do more with less.

That effort is still yielding great benefits. Owners of older buildings and homes installed thicker insulation and tighter windows. As technology improved, every new home, factory and car came with far more efficient appliances, machines and engines than in the 1970's. But energy demand has risen so much since the mid-1980's that, next year, the Energy Department predicts, consumption per person will come to within 2 percent of the peak in 1973, before any of these energy-saving advances had begun.

Declining energy prices -- now lower in real terms than before the first embargo -- have made the difference. In the dollar-a-gallon era, why spend much time or money saving a gallon or a watt?

Evidence of the more energy-intensive life style is everywhere. Since the early 1970's, as the average household has shrunk by a sixth, the average new home has grown by a third. Even moderately priced homes are now stuffed with energy-hungry features, from central air-conditioning to Jacuzzis and security systems.

Look at families like T. C. and Michael McCracken and their year-old daughter, Lydia. The McCrackens, avid hikers, are far more willing than most Americans to shop for energy-saving appliances or ride the bus to work. But here in Arvada, outside Denver, standard features of their nearly completed tract home include ceilings so high that overhead fans, finding a new season and purpose, are required in winter to blow rising heat back down. With 2,600 square feet to fill, Mr. McCracken plans to install a home office, a home theater and a home brewery fed by its own gas line. What Mrs. McCracken calls a ''killer kitchen'' has all the standard appliances and the electrical capacity for more than a dozen others, plus room to seat a family of 10.

Energy use is rising even faster on the roads. Next year, Americans are expected to burn more fuel per person than in 1973, before the Government set mileage standards. More families have two earners, and the suburbs continue to sprawl, so Americans are driving more than ever. As for fuel economy, the growing popularity of light trucks -- minivans, sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks -- has begun to reverse two decades of gains.

The daily hour to hour and a half that Mrs. McCracken, a personnel manager, has spent commuting and running errands in her Dodge Caravan minivan will stretch by another half-hour once she moves. And Mr. McCracken will put more miles on his sport utility vehicle, an Isuzu Rodeo.

Corporate habits are going the same way. Businesses saved more energy than individuals did through the mid-1980's but have used the most extra energy ever since. Chemical producers, among the heaviest energy users, say that in the 1990's they have all but quit making improvements solely to save energy. Electric utilities are cutting reimbursements for installing more efficient heating, cooling, lighting and other equipment at work and at home.

Cheap, abundant energy has in fact produced great benefits, fueling an era of rising standards of living and dormant inflation. Lower demand from Asia has pushed oil prices down even further lately, with shortages unlikely for years.

Growing energy demand is a natural result. But it conflicts with the nation's declared goals of reducing dependence on imported oil and lowering carbon dioxide emissions, thought to cause global warming. It also requires the nation and its oil companies to spend billions of dollars laying pipelines through unstable regions, building drilling platforms in deep seas and defending foreign supplies.

Clearly, the nation relies more than ever on overseas oil. Imports account for a record 50 percent of consumption, up from 35 percent in 1973. Though a rising share comes from secure neighbors like Mexico and Venezuela, the United States still gets about 10 percent of its oil from the Persian Gulf, twice the level in 1973.

The rising use of fossil fuels has also raised the atmosphere's level of carbon dioxide. The Clinton Administration pledged at a conference in Kyoto, Japan, last December to cut these emissions. That is not a simple task, said Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates. ''Environmental concerns point one way and prices point the other way,'' he said.

President Clinton is now striving to put energy efficiency back on the nation's agenda. He asked Congress for $6.3 billion over five years, including $3.6 billion in tax incentives and $2.7 billion for research. Accelerating the introduction of electric cars and other technologies would make energy savings nearly painless, he argues. Administration officials note that improving technology has already allowed Americans to live better with far less energy than they would otherwise use. Since the mid-1980's, however, these advances have slowed.

Many corporate executives and members of Congress call global warming a distant peril with uncertain causes. They portray the Administration's plans as a costly threat to the nation's prosperity. They also discount the danger of rising imports, saying that free markets will relieve high prices or tight supplies by promoting increased output and efficiency. In a compromise, Congress allowed $202 million of the $473 million for research this year but nothing for tax incentives.

It was 25 years ago this month, and again in late 1978, that vengeful Middle Eastern oil exporters squeezed their supplies to the United States and raised prices worldwide. A nation that was virtually self-sufficient into the 1950's had become a petroleum captive. Gasoline prices soared, lines at the pump stretched beyond frustration and the economy fell into repeated recessions.

Americans turned down their thermostats and bought fuel-efficient Hondas, Datsuns and Toyotas. At work, they replaced millions of inefficient motors, lighting fixtures and generators. President Nixon called for a national effort on the scale of the making of the atomic bomb.

''Let us set as our national goal,'' he said, ''with the determination of the Manhattan Project, that by the end of this decade we will have developed the potential to meet our own energy needs without depending on any foreign energy source.''

President Carter, wearing a sweater in a televised speech to drive home his point, termed energy conservation the equivalent of fighting a war.

But traumatic memories of oil shocks have long been soothed by plentiful, low-cost supplies. At about $1 a gallon -- compared with $1.10, adjusting for inflation, in 1973 -- fuel is as cheap as ever. United States gasoline prices remain less than half those in Europe and Japan, where energy is heavily taxed. Americans consume more than twice as much energy per person as Europeans or the Japanese.

The Energy Information Administration predicts that, in the absence of efforts to curb growing energy use, carbon emissions from burning fuel will rise 33 percent from 1990 to 2010, while the President has pledged to lower them by 7 percent. The agency's experts scoff at the prospects of meeting that goal unless prices rise significantly.

''If you look at our actions rather than words, it's evident we don't care,'' said Dwight K. French, a specialist on consumption trends. ''Only the next crisis will again make conservation a priority. End of discussion.''

On the Home Front
More Square Feet And 'Vampires'

Here in Arvada, in the subdivisions carved into the sagebrush hills of Denver's suburbs, the McCrackens' new home will have far more efficient heating, air-conditioning and major appliances than the homes of 25 years ago. Modern weatherstripping and vinyl-sealed windows will help keep the Colorado cold out and the heat in. In energy consumption per square foot, the home of the late 1990's is the winner.

But not the overall champion. Since the early 1970's, the average size of a new home has risen to 2,100 square feet from 1,600, even as the average household has shrunk to 3 people from 3.6. ''It's almost like the trend to sport utility vehicles,'' said Donn D. Eley, chief financial officer of Village Homes, the McCrackens' builder. ''They can't build them big enough.''

Home builders are also bringing to tract homes the expansive features once reserved for mansions. ''Wow factors,'' they are called in the trade. In the $150,000-to-$300,000 range, the confined quarters of yesteryear just won't do.

Larger homes with fewer people but more things to plug in have pushed home energy consumption back to the levels of the 1970's. Residential energy consumption per person fell by a tenth from 1973 to 1983 but has since risen about as much.

Tighter Federal standards for homes and major appliances promise to save enough energy over the coming years to offset what goes to heat and cool larger homes. But then come the computers, videocassette recorders, dishwashers, clothes washers and dryers that have been using about 5 percent more energy a year since 1990. Early in the next decade, the Energy Department predicts, such appliances will consume even more energy than heating.

Many of these devices are always on, ready at the push of a button. Razors and electric toothbrushes have chargers, fax machines are poised to send and receive, televisions and videocassette recorders merely go dormant, not off.

Together, these items use more power than a refrigerator. ''They're called vampires,'' said Arthur H. Rosenfeld, a senior adviser for efficiency at the Energy Department. ''They suck electricity.''

Central air-conditioning, in less than 40 percent of new homes in 1971, is now in more than 80 percent. Dishwashers have gone from luxuries, found in 19 percent of households in 1970, toward necessities, found in 57 percent as of 1996.

The standard ceiling height has risen to nine feet from eight, meaning more space to heat and cool. ''Even though the efficiency of larger homes has improved,'' said Gopal Ahluwalia, research director for the National Association of Home Builders, ''the total volume, the use of glass, the fireplaces and the appliances lead to higher energy consumption. They will not buy a home without these energy-inefficient features.''

As Coloradans who believe weekends were made for hiking and cross-country skiing, the McCrackens, trim 31-year-olds, say they would like to live greener. To save water and energy, they plan to pay about $300 extra for a high-efficiency washer and dryer. Mr. McCracken has even joined the declining 5 percent of Americans who ride mass transit -- for him a bus -- to his job as a consultant and programmer for I.B.M.

But their new house, like many today, is another story. Join the McCrackens in the Wyndham Park subdivision as they open the door to a 2,600-square-foot model home like the one they are buying nearby for $270,000. A towering entryway and its clerestory windows tilt their gazes upward. The two-story, 21-foot spaces continue on into the living room and the family room.

''What I love about this is the high ceilings,'' Mrs. McCracken volunteered. ''I know they are terribly inefficient. But it does make it seem so spacious.''

Her husband was nodding as Jack Zelkin, a senior marketing executive with the builder, listed the features. Mr. McCracken was already making plans to take advantage of the upgraded phone, cable and data wiring, for internal video and computer networks, that became standard a year ago, even in homes costing less than $150,000.

Saving energy has become a dormant issue, said Mr. Zelkin, who was once an energy-efficiency expert for the local utility.

''I'm a tree-hugging, granola-eating, environmental zealot,'' he said. ''But if you give these buyers a choice between a Jacuzzi tub or extra insulation, they'll take the Jacuzzi tub every time.''

On the Road
Traveling Farther, And Less Efficiently

Americans are not only living in spacious new homes. They're also living in their cars.

From her home in Lakewood, another Denver suburb, Mrs. McCracken has driven her minivan about 20 minutes to Golden to drop off her daughter at day care. Then it is 10 minutes back to her office in Lakewood, at Harveys Wagon Wheel Hotel/Casino. Or, a couple of times a week, she drives 20 minutes to the casino itself in Central City.

After work, Mrs. McCracken reverses the pattern, often adding a stop at the King Soopers grocery store, the Blockbuster video store or the cleaner's.

From her new house, it will be 15 minutes more each way, meaning that she will spend up to two hours in the car every day.

Tens of millions of T. C. McCrackens who have entered the work force have become a prime factor pushing energy use for travel up 12 percent for each American since 1983, back to the previous peak in 1978. In 1975, only 47 percent of American women with children younger than 18 were working or looking for work. By 1997, it was 72 percent.

Many households have almost enough cars to create their own traffic jams. Nearly one in five households has three or more cars, up from about one in 25 in 1969.

Commuters of both sexes also live farther from work. The average commuting distance grew by more than a third from 1983 to 1995, to 11.6 miles, even as car-pooling and the use of mass transit declined.

While covering more miles, Americans are getting fewer miles per gallon now that they are buying nearly equal numbers of cars and light trucks. Back in 1975, light trucks accounted for only a fifth of sales.

Cars are meanwhile becoming more powerful. Auto makers that once concentrated on building leaner, more efficient models have instead been adding the muscle that customers crave. Average horsepower has risen to 156 in 1996 from 99 in 1982 -- and the time needed to zoom from zero to 60 has fallen to 10.7 seconds from 14.4. And as speed limits have increased, those cars are using still more energy.

As vice president for operations at A.A.A. Colorado, Vickie W. Stark's job is to encourage travel. But even she decided she was spending too much time behind the wheel.

Her husband, a computer network manager, had followed her in assignments from Washington to Florida to Cheyenne, Wyo., where they bought a home north of town. When Ms. Stark got a job in Denver in 1995, he refused to budge.

And so Ms. Stark began driving more than two hours each way, or 127 miles, not counting her monthly one-day round trips to each of six offices elsewhere around the state.

A few months after she began the long haul from Cheyenne, Ms. Stark made a habit of calling her husband and two children on her car phone just as she was passing the exit for Windsor, Colo., the halfway point. ''If we lived here, I'd be home,'' she always said.

In September 1996, they moved again -- to Windsor. As a family, they did not save any driving, but they did redistribute it. Her husband now has a 52-mile trip north, and Ms. Stark a 63-mile trip south.

All Ms. Stark has sacrificed by moving are bragging rights to the longest trip to work. Her neighbors next door and just across the street also work in Denver.

In the Factory
Energy Conservation A Lower Priority

Three times a week, 100-car trains more than a mile long arrive brimming with coal at the Celanese Ltd. chemical plant near Pampa in the Texas Panhandle. The trains dump their contents into chutes that form a pile 10 stories high. Coal dust dances in the flatland winds.

The coal is burned to boil water, providing the heat for producing chemicals like acetic acid, which is used in clothing fibers and plastic parts. The plant also uses enough electricity to power a city of more than 50,000. In one of the most energy-hungry industries, Pampa makes chemicals that are twice as energy intensive per pound as the Celanese average.

The plant, which opened in 1952, initially treated energy as if it were as cheap and plentiful as the air. Steam and heat were simply vented.

The oil embargoes of the 1970's brought a new outlook. Steam used in one process was rerouted to other processes. As a result, Pampa and other Celanese plants raised their energy efficiency 2 percent to 3 percent a year through the 1980's.

But in the 1990's, with lower energy prices reducing the payoffs, they have improved at less than half those rates, if at all. ''The emphasis is simply elsewhere these days,'' said Thomas Parker Jr., managing director for tax policy and energy at the Chemical Manufacturers Association.

Across all businesses, industrial and commercial energy use fell 18 percent from 1973 to 1983, then jumped 37 percent by 1997. The growing corporate appetite for energy comes despite the economy's shift from smokestack industries like steelmaking to software and entertainment.

Managers in many industries say they achieved the easiest savings long ago. ''We picked the low-hanging fruit first, in the 70's and 80's,'' emphasized Edward E. Quick, the environmental manager for Celanese. ''As we move into the 1990's, we're finding the available technology much more costly.''

Amory B. Lovins, whose Rocky Mountain Institute promotes energy efficiency, will hear none of it. He rattles off a half-dozen technologies like computerized controls that he says the chemical plants have failed to adequately exploit. ''When the Celanese guys say you're running out of low-hanging fruit, the only thing I can say, based on the experience of people in this industry, is that the fruit is bushing up around our ankles.''

Riley R. Kothmann, who runs the Pampa plant, has some ready answers. His tour includes a room where walls of dials and meters have been succeeded by banks of computer screens and controls.

But at times, it seems, fruit from higher branches drops on plant supervisors' heads. Even without reaching for energy savings, they find, the savings often land on them.

Compelled by law to contain emissions, Pampa's technicians found that those emissions could go back through a turbine to raise the plant's electricity production by nearly 10 percent. Or there was the time three or four years ago when managers began wrapping insulation around the joints where pipes are bolted together. ''Pampa just had a tradition of not doing it,'' Mr. Kothmann said. ''It's so much easier to continue doing things the way you used to.''

To meet the goals of the Kyoto treaty for reducing emissions, Celanese executives say they would have to improve their energy efficiency by 3 percent a year through 2010, or as rapidly as in the 70's and 80's. All the technology they know of cannot meet that goal unless they cut production, said R. David Damron, the company's director for Government affairs. If Washington insists, he said, ''you're going to stifle growth.''

Celanese is still hedging. In early June, a company energy committee was assigned to find ways of meeting the goals, whatever the costs. The next step will probably be to find ways of doing the suggested projects at manageable costs. Mr. Kothmann, a member of the committee, recalls that environmental controls expected to cost $800 million a few years ago were delivered for less than $300 million. ''Our experience has shown that we can achieve much more for much less than we anticipated it costing us,'' he said.

Energy use is rising in corporate offices as well as plants. Like homes, they have far more efficient heating, lighting and cooling, but also far more electronics.

Electric utilities have cut their support for installing more efficient equipment to $1.9 billion in 1996 from $2.7 billion in 1994. They say they cannot afford these programs in the competitive new era of deregulation.

Consolidated Edison, which serves New York City and most of Westchester County, cut its efficiency program to $31 million last year from $125 million in 1993 and has now eliminated it. Customers had been rewarded for deeds like installing more efficient appliances and compact fluorescent light bulbs instead of standard incandescents.

In its place, Con Ed, with state backing, plans to spend $25 million to $30 million a year on programs including low-cost loans for companies to develop more efficient electrical products and incentives to help them sell these products more cheaply.

''For less of an incentive per light bulb, appliance or motor, you can get a lot more in energy savings,'' contended Stephen Pertusiello, the company's program manager for market transformation.

But Peter A. Bradford, the chairman of the New York State Public Service Commission from 1987 to 1995, said Con Ed's case was at best uncertain. ''You are replacing a known and proven set of programs with speculation,'' he said.

In the Political Arena
Calls for Action Face Challenges

Presidents going back to Richard Nixon have tried to arrest the nation's growing energy use. In the face of the 1973 oil embargo, he urged the nation to turn down its thermostats, form car pools and more. He announced that December that the lights on the national Christmas tree would be kept off. The next month, he signed the Emergency Highway Conservation Act, setting a speed limit of 55 miles an hour.

The first fuel-efficiency standards for cars took effect in 1975, requiring the average to double, to 27.5 miles a gallon, over a decade. By 1977, Jimmy Carter was promoting the search for renewable sources of energy like sunlight, wind, wood and wastes. He called his conservation campaign ''the moral equivalent of war.''

Then, in 1978 and 1979, another round of production cuts by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, compounding shortages caused by American price controls and regional allocations, brought the gas lines back. More than half the nation's gas stations were closed during the first summer weekend in 1979.

As gasoline climbed by 1981 to $2.05 a gallon in today's dollars, the nation began its most successful peacetime conservation effort. Americans used 43 percent less energy for every dollar of gross domestic product in 1986 than at the peak in 1972. From 1987 through last year, energy use per dollar of output declined by only an additional 8 percent.

By the mid-1980's, OPEC was in disarray and energy prices had declined. President Ronald Reagan cut back conservation and renewable-energy programs. The rural speed limit was raised to 65 miles an hour.

This decade brought a reminder that foreign oilfields have their risks. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 provoked a stock market selloff and a run-up in energy costs that contributed to the decade's only recession, the third in a row that came after oil supplies were pinched.

President Clinton, taking office in 1993, asked Congress to raise taxes on all fuels, including coal, by the equivalent of a dime a gallon. He got 4.3 cents on motor fuels only. In 1995, Congress repealed the national speed limits, and most states set their own at 65, 70 or even 75.

Over the last year, President Clinton has sought to make energy efficiency a renewed national priority. But to keep down the costs of reducing emissions, the United States plans to achieve only about a quarter of the required reductions itself. The trading of emissions rights would allow America to pay other nations to achieve the rest.

At home, the White House wants to promote advances in electric cars, renewable energy and the like. ''My gut is, we will see the introduction of these new technologies very quickly,'' said Ernest Moniz, the Under Secretary of Energy, whose responsibilities include the efficiency programs. With much of the technology already available, he said, ''We're not waiting for some magic bullet.''

Republicans in Congress have portrayed the Kyoto accord as a dangerous effort to shape energy policy by raising false environmental fears. It leaves out developing nations, they say, and by requiring drastic energy savings, it threatens the United States with job losses resulting from much higher costs than the Administration acknowledges. Chuck Hagel, the Nebraska Republican who led the Senate's delegation to Kyoto, says that for all the risks of growing dependence on imported oil, ''The answer is not just to say we're going to lower everybody's standard of living.''

In the face of such opposition, President Clinton has not yet sought Senate ratification, saying that he, too, wants to include developing nations. But Europe and Japan are clamoring for the United States to take action, and the Administration has promised to submit the treaty next year.

Conservation is now so unpopular that its advocates shun the label. ''Use the term efficiency,'' said Mr. Lovins at his Rocky Mountain Institute headquarters in Old Snowmass, Colo. ''Conservation to a third of Americans means doing less, worse or without. It means privation, discomfort and curtailment.''

If the cause of energy conservation has a last, remote redoubt, it is his stone-and-glass compound 7,100 feet high on the western flanks of the Continental Divide. There, he shows off an indoor tropical forest, luxriant with pink and yellow bougainvillea and a banana tree that has yielded 26 crops. Despite temperatures as low as 47 degrees below zero, he has no heating bills and no furnace. Instead, he has triple weatherstripping and heat-trapping windows and walls.

Technological efficiencies, or what Mr. Lovins calls negawatts, can capture energy far more cheaply, in his view, than spending billions to build more power plants or produce more oil from remote or politically volatile regions.

With energy prices so low, however, some in Washington say that high demand is only a sign that free markets are working in everyone's best interests. ''Those who have an energy fetish argue that saving energy is more important than saving money or time,'' said Fred L. Smith, president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute there. Low energy prices allow more people to afford air-conditioning and cars, he says. ''If we raise the price of energy, we will push some people back onto the buses.''

But just as open-heart surgery is far more traumatic than regular exercise and a low-fat diet, other experts say that an abrupt response to another oil shock or environmental crisis could make the earlier discipline of gradual energy savings seem mild.

For Joseph J. Romm, who until recently ran the Energy Department's efficiency programs, it is only a question of when the nation will return to conservation, not if. Contending that the world's oil supplies will eventually tighten and temperatures rise, he said, ''Ten years or 15 years from now, people will be desperate to take action.''


copyright 1998 The New York Times Company