New York Times: Russia Struggles to Curb Energy Waste

Russia, the world’s top oil and natural gas producer, may be watching its energy riches blow away in the wind. In 2008, for example, the country was wasting enough energy to power Britain for an entire year.

It was then that President Dmitri A. Medvedev set a target to reduce energy intensity, a measure of the rate of waste, 40 percent by 2020. Russian companies were 10 to 20 times less energy efficient than their foreign rivals, he said.

Not enough has changed since Soviet times, critics say, and wide-open windows remain a typical way of cooling overheated housing blocks. Even today around one-fifth of Russian boilers date back to the era of cosmonaut Yuri A. Gagarin’s orbital space flight in 1961, or earlier.  MORE