Well, residents of the small Alaskan capital of Juneau are showing us how. Following an April 16 avalanche that severed the city’s main power lines, Juneau found itself forced to cut its energy calories big-time literally overnight. It was that, or face energy bills double or triple or many times more than the month before. The good news: society didn’t collapse.

How did residents do it? Let’s count the ways:

Read more of this story »

In Juneau, Alaska, for example, people are proving it’s possible to change our energy-hogging ways literally overnight and still keep a community up and running. The inspiration in their case: an avalanche that severed the hydroelectric power lines serving the remote Alaska capital, cutting off about 80 percent of the city’s available electricity.

Read more of this story »

Based on data from the Uptime Institute, a technology consulting company based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the McKinsey report finds that, between 2000 and 2006, the amount of energy needed to power data centers doubled, and that consumption is likely to double again by 2012. In the U.S. alone, we would need to build 10 new power plants by 2010 just to meet the growing energy needs of this country’s data centers.

Read more of this story »

While water hasn’t always been factored into energy discussions — or vice versa — the two are “inextricably linked,” according to Sandia National Laboratories. That’s why researchers there are working to develop an advanced modeling tool that will help people better understand their energy and water needs in one neat, if complex, package.

It makes lots of sense, once you think about it. Purifying water for drinking, pumping water into homes and fields, and reclaiming water for reuse all require energy. And generating energy takes lots of water, whether indirectly by coal-burning power plants or nuclear reactors or directly by hydropower. According to Sandia Labs, the U.S. uses about 140 billion gallons of water per day to generate its electricity. Even though most of that water can be immediately reused, as opposed to the water used in agriculture, that still amounts to more than 40 percent of all the fresh water used by the nation every day.

As energy demands continue to rise, water shortages around the globe expand and climate change aggravates both, the complicated interplay between energy and water will become more important than ever for us to understand.

Take, for example, the rush to build desalination plants to turn salt water into drinking water as existing fresh water sources dry up. Desalination is energy-intensive; in fact, one study estimated that it takes 10,000 tons of oil a year to put out 1,000 cubic meters of desalinated water per day. Multiply that by the 13,080 desalination plants currently operating around the world, and the energy costs are clear.

Sandia researchers hope their new interactive energy-water model will give decision-makers across the board access to better information on how to plan for the future. The system, now in its second year of development, will eventually help answer questions about regional shortfalls, the tradeoffs involved for different energy and water sources, environmental and economic costs, and potential consequences. It’s a tall order, but one well worth trying to achieve.

“The challenge will be to have enough data to tell a story,” said Peter Kobos, a Sandia researcher handling energy modeling. “We think we do. If not, we’ll identify gaps and address them as the project progresses.”

If such measures are put in place, the U.S. could see as many as one out of every four workers employed by a renewable-energy or energy-efficiency industry by 2030, according to a new report from the American Solar Energy Society (ASES). That’s promising for both U.S. employees and for anyone concerned about reducing greenhouse gas emissions and our dependence on fossil fuels. But it will happen only, as the ASES report says, under “an aggressive deployment forecast scenario.”

That means we, as citizens and consumers, are going to have to apply strong and steady pressure on legislators — local, state and national — to do the right thing. And that, we all know, isn’t easy.

Still, if — as the saying goes — money walks, green-collar types might see Beltway support grow as green industries expand their economic muscle, which means more dollars for lobbying and campaign financing. And, in that regard, the future looks bright.

In the U.S., renewable-energy and energy-efficiency industries are already generating 8.5 million jobs and nearly $970 billion in annual revenues, according to the ASES report. “To put this in perspective,” the report states, “(t)otal sales for Wal-Mart, Exxon-Mobil and General Motors in 2006 were $905 billion.”

While companies on the energy-efficiency side — things like better windows, efficient appliances and insulation — are making more of the money right now, the renewables side is growing more rapidly.

The ASES predicts the hottest, fastest-growing industries will involve solar power, wind energy, ethanol and fuel-cell technologies. With the right level of public support, it says, we could see up to 40 million people employed — as everything from accountants and biochemists to engineers, mechanics and truck drivers — in the renewable-energy and energy-efficiency sectors by 2030, with annual green-industry revenues of $4.5 trillion.

Getting there, though, will require much more than a business-as-usual approach, the ASES report warns.

“This scenario requires appropriate, aggressive, sustained public policies at the federal and state level during next two decades,” it states. Getting decision-makers to come on board might take oil shortages, fossil-fuel price increases, growing security concerns or a greater awareness of the impact of climate change. The fear of suffering economically at a global level might also be a motivator.

“If we fail to invest in (renewable energy and energy efficiency), the United States runs the risk of losing ground to international … programs and industries,” the report concludes. “For the United States to be competitive in a carbon-constrained world, the (renewable energy and energy efficiency) industry will be a critical economic driver.”

While some people tout better and more energy-efficient technology as one solution to our current fuel and climate challenges, their expectations might be overblown. A new study from the UK Energy Research Centre, for example, finds that improved efficiency sometimes creates a tendency to use more energy, or to engage in other activities that counteract the efficiency gains. It’s called the “rebound effect,” and it can work either directly or indirectly to reduce expected energy savings from improved efficiency.

Rebounds occur, for example, when someone who buys a more fuel-efficient car decides to take the occasional longer day trip because, “Hey, I’m not spending as much on gas anymore.” They can also happen when someone who’s improved his home insulation uses the money saved on heating and cooling to pay for a plane trip to Orlando.

Then there’s “backfire,” also known, somewhat bizarrely, as the Khazzoon-Brookes postulate. That’s the even worse effect that can occur when a new energy-efficient technology actually causes overall energy use to increase. It happened, for instance, after the steam engine came onto the scene. Nineteenth-Century Scotland saw its total coal consumption increase tenfold thanks to the steam engine, which made it possible to mine coal at a lower cost, which made it cheaper to produce iron, when then lowered the cost of steam engines and drove the development of the railway industry.

While backfires are uncommon, rebounds are not. A recent report from the InterAcademy Council noted that technology improvements over the past 20 years have helped drive a small decline in the world’s energy intensity — which compares energy consumption to economic output — but not in its overall energy consumption. And the United National Environmental Programme’s latest “Global Environmental Outlook” (GEO-4) warns that, while technology can help defend against environmental stresses, it’s sometimes important to look beyond the “technology-centred development paradigm.”

The UK rebound report concludes we could be overestimating our savings from improved effiency by anywhere from 10 to 50-plus percent. It adds that policy-makers need to start taking rebounds into effect now if they want to enact energy- and carbon-reducing measures that actually work.

Sure, some companies are doing some things to reduce their carbon footprints or save energy … but, in plenty of cases, those are moves that make sense for them from a cost-cutting perspective. It’s nice that these actions help the environment a bit while helping the bottom line, but do corporations really have to go out of the way to pat themselves so hard on the backs for it … and persuade consumer America that they’re the greenest thing since Kermit the Frog? For Pete’s sake, I’ve even seen a cigarette company ad touting how "natural" its product is because its tobacco is organically grown. Yuck.

I appreciate that airline companies and auto-makers (some of them, anyway) are trying to reduce their fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. But I’m going to go out on a limb here (A hippie in a tree? Someone call Brent Musburger!) and say that no airline or car company is really entitled to call itself a green business yet … not until, say, cellulosic ethanol and zero emissions become standard.

I think the real green companies are the ones spending more time going green and less time talking about it, like these 10 contenders for Co-op America’s 2007 People’s Choice Awards.