Water boilers, space heaters and air conditioners have been notoriously inefficient. The heat pump has altered that equation. It removes heat from the air outside or the ground below and uses it to supply heat to a building or its water supply. In the summer, the system can be reversed to cool buildings as well.
Most new residential buildings in Sweden are already heated with ground-source heat pumps. Such systems consume almost no conventional fuel at all. Several countries have used subsidies to jump-start the market, including Japan, where almost I million heat pumps have been installed in the past two years to heat water for showers and hot tubs.
Remake Factories
From steel mills to paper factories, industry eats up about a third of the world s energy. The opportunities to save are vast. In Ludwigshafen, German chemicals giant BASF runs an interconnected complex of more than 200 chemical factories, where heat produced by one chemical process is used to power the next. At the Ludwigshafen site site alone, such recycling of heat and energy saves the company £200 million a year and almost half its CO2 emissions. Now BASF is doing the same for new plants in China. Optimizing energy efficiency is a decisive competitive advantage, says BASF CEO Jurgen Hambrecht.
Green Driving
A quarter of the world s energy---including two thirds of the annual production of oil is used for transportation. Some savings come free of charge: you can boost fuel efficiency by 6 percent simply by keeping your car s tires properly inflated . Gasoline-electric hybrid models like the Toyota Prius improve mileage by a further 20 percent over conventional models.
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