This 'give and take' between utility and customer is becoming more common. Industries generate electricity from steam, putting any surplus into the national grid, and using the hot water condensate to provide heat for production processes. The industry pays for the difference between the electricity it supplies to, and draws from, the grid. Australian utilities have found it hard to accept that their customers should sell them electricity as well as buy it or that they should help customers to use less energy not more. Slowly both are beginning to happen.
Energy efficiency is just the cutting edge for renewable energy systems.
We need to start now to phase in an ecologically sustainable energy structure to run the world economy next century. Some nuclear proponents grasp the logic of improving energy efficiency in the short term. They see the folly of crash programs building thousands of nuclear reactors. Nonetheless they foresee a 'second nuclear era', using 'safer' reactors, when nuclear electricity will play its part in the halting of global warming. Breeder reactors have failed to produced plutonium in the way promised.