by James A. Bacon
Virginia is the 43rd most energy efficient state in the country, which is another way of saying that it is the 6th most energy inefficient among the 48 states included in a national ranking by the number crunchers at WalletHub. The finding is based on the publication’s energy efficiency rankings in homes and automobiles, two of the largest categories of energy consumption. The methodology has lots of limitations but it does provide an interesting place to start thinking about measuring energy efficiency.
WalletHub calculates home-related energy efficiency by tabulating the total amount of energy consumed per capita by residential homes and adjusting for degree days. (Degree days are a measure of how much temperatures vary from a base of 65° Fahrenheit.) Houses in a state like Virginia, with a relatively mild climate, might require less energy for heating and cooling than, say, a state like Arizona, which is subject to scorching heat, but that doesn’t mean Virginia houses are more energy efficient. Adjusting for degree days gets closer to an apples-to-apples comparison. By this measure, Virginia ranked 35th among the 48 states.
The calculation for automobile energy efficiency measures what is essentially the average miles per gallon of the state’s automotive fleet — annual vehicle miles driven adjusted by the gallons of gasoline consumed. By this measure, Virginia also ranked 35th in the country.
The most obvious limitation to this data is that miles per gallon measures the energy efficiency of cars, not transportation systems. You could put every Virginia driver in a Toyota Prius (50 miles per gallon), but if every worker drove solo to their job and racked up 20,000 miles per year, you’d still have an energy-guzzling state. Human settlement patterns that enable people to walk, ride bicycles, carpool, take transit and drive shorter distances to their destinations are more energy efficient, all other things being equal, than human settlement patterns that put everyone in a car and requires driving long distances between destinations. Accordingly, gasoline consumption per capita might be a better measure. (And even that is a rough measure that does not take into account the use of electricity and natural gas as transportation fuels.)
WalletHub’s calculation for housing energy-efficiency is more defensible, although it does not tell us everything that would be useful to know. To what extent does energy consumption in Virginia’s residential housing sector simply reflect a stock of bigger houses? Maybe Virginia has more McMansions than other states! I’ll bet a lot of McMansions have state-of-the-art heat pumps, zone heating and Nest thermostats. But no matter how much insulation and no matter how many Energy Star appliances, McMansion won’t be as energy efficient as a Manhattan apartment building, even adjusted for square footage, which limits reduces exposure to the fluctuating temperatures of the outdoors. And that gets us back to human settlement patterns. Some patterns are more energy-efficient than others. Virginia’s housing sector may be energy intensive not because of a failure to adopt Energy Star standards but because people are more likely to abide in single family dwellings, which are inherently less energy efficient.
Bacon’s bottom line: Measuring and ranking energy efficiency is a worthwhile exercise. WalletHub at least prompts people to start thinking about these issues. Its methodology is far too primitive to give us much useful information, much less to suggest meaningful public policy solutions. The experts consulted by WalletHub focused mainly on technology solutions — solar photo-voltaic electricity, LED lights and the like — and what kind of government incentives it might take to get people to adopt them. None of them touched upon the role of human settlement patterns. But that’s where the big savings will come from.
— JAB
