Los retos de la eficiencia energética

Un gran artículo en Science sobre los retos de la eficiencia energética. Incluyendo referencias al caso de California:

But not everyone views California’s success story as so
clear-cut. Alan Sanstad, an LBNL researcher who also
worked with Rosenfeld, looks at the same data and concludes
that California’s efficiency offensive wasn’t nearly
effective enough. He points out that California’s total energy use over
the past 3 decades grew at almost the same rate as it did in the rest of the
country, while the state’s population soared. Anant Sudarshan and
James Sweeney of Stanford University’s Precourt Energy Efficiency
Center (PEEC) recently calculated that the state’s energy policies can
take credit for only a quarter of California’s lower per capita electricity
use. The rest is due to “structural factors” such as mild weather, increasing
urbanization, larger numbers of people in each household, and high
prices for energy and land that drove heavy industry out of the state.

For Sanstad, there’s a clear lesson: Meeting the more ambitious goal
of reducing greenhouse gas emissions will require more aggressive
measures that cause some economic pain. “The real potential of energy
efficiency is not going to be realized until we get away from the idea that
it has to pay for itself,” he says.

Lo cual nos lleva a otra cuestión: la necesidad de evaluar adecuadamente los efectos de las políticas. En todo caso, un artículo muy completo y muy centrado.