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McKinsey & Company this week released a report on energy efficiency opportunities in the United States -- not solutions, which the report authors say will be up to policy makers, businesses and academia.
The report outlines widespread barriers to energy efficiency potential over the last several decades, including:
* substantial upfront investment in exchange for long-term savings
* fragmented potential -- across millions of locations and billions of devices in varied sectors inherent challenge of measuring and verifying energy not used
There are also opportunity-specific barriers relating to structural barriers, behavioral barriers and barriers of simple availability.
If we can overcome some of these barriers, how much energy efficiency potential are we talking?
At the press briefing, McKinsey Director Ken Ostrowski said, "The United States is the Saudi Arabia of energy effiicency." You get the idea.
More specifically, the full energy efficiency potential of the United States is greater than Canada's current non-transporation energy consumption, than either Mexico or South Korea's entire energy consumption and equal to "shutting down the world for two weeks." Wow.
Wondering how McKinsey came to such grand conclusions?
The team modeled more than 650 technologies and analyzed more than 20,000 micro-segments of energy consumption. They also benefited from the expertise and participation of PG&E, along with other government, non-government and private entities.
