As prepared for delivery.
Chief Engineer Wang, thank you for the introduction. Vice Minister Qiu, thank you for inviting me. I'm delighted to be here today and believe I have an important message of optimism for this conference and gathering. It's that we can be extraordinarily confident in the energy intensity agenda established by Premier Wen Jiabao in his remarks to the National People's Congress just completed. As he said, "We should leave green mountains and clear water to our offspring." I believe we can, and we will.
Could I add a few words to Chief Engineer Wang's introduction to make our company's operations and agenda relevant to this group and your environmental commitments and plans? First, China is extraordinarily important to United Technologies Corporation, and we are committed to responsible operations here to support your twin goals of increasing GDP and reducing energy intensity. Our history here dates from more than a century ago. Otis installed its first elevator in Hong Kong in 1888, and in Shanghai in 1907. Carrier's first installation was in Shanghai in 1911 and was a dehumidification system in a silk spinning factory.
We employ today 220,000 people worldwide, 70 percent of them outside the United States including 17,000 in China. We account for more than a quarter of the elevators installed in China annually and comparably 20 percent of the commercial air conditioning. More than half of the jet engines for your large widebody aircraft are built by our subsidiary, Pratt & Whitney.
Relevant for our conference is that UTC's most basic product mission is to convert energy into useful work. Our products overcome two essential forces in our world: gravity and weather. The first for flight and for vertical transportation in buildings, and the second to make our buildings comfortable and clean in all seasons.
Because our products are long lived and we operate all over the globe, they account for as much as 2 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions worldwide every year. So we are right on top of the conservation agenda, and I believe passionately in the opportunities for energy efficiency gains already achieved and still in front of us.
New aircraft today operate with three times higher fuel efficiency per passenger as compared with airplanes built 40 years ago. The fuel consumption rate today is about 100 miles per passenger per gallon, which compares favorably indeed to cars and trucks. It's not only the scale benefit of larger airplanes and better designs reducing drag, it's engines that burn half the fuel per pound of thrust (or power) than four decades ago. We're also improving and integrating aircraft systems like electric power generation and distribution and cabin pressure and temperature to account for about a quarter of the 20 percent increase in fuel efficiency of the new Boeing 787 airplane.
Elevators consume electric power when lifting loads. They can also give this power back with descending loads, and we have started broadening this capability across the product line in just the last three years. It's physics that in a perfect system without friction or other losses there would be no electric power consumption at all, because what goes up comes down and we're dealing with gravity in both instances. We won't get all the way to 100 percent efficiency, or zero energy consumption, but these new regenerative systems use 75 percent less power than comparable models a decade ago.
We can build more efficient air conditioning systems. With Carrier's leadership, our government raised the minimum electrical efficiency for residential systems sold in the United States by 30 percent, effective just a few months ago.
Of greatest potential of all, we believe, are on-site electric generation systems capturing otherwise waste heat. For perspective, more than 90 percent of energy extracted from the ground is wasted before it becomes useful work. Half of this loss comes from waste heat vented to the atmosphere in central generating plants. Although we lose 7 percent in transmitting electricity, we lose all of the energy in the heat which can't be transmitted over any significant distance at all. The solution is to generate the power on-site where the heat can be captured. We build products like this today, with energy conversion efficiencies of over 80 percent. The heat powers air conditioning via an absorption chiller cycle and comparably can power refrigeration, de-humidification and hot water.
Supermarkets are the highest energy intensity buildings in the world. We have prototype installations in the United States, at Wal-Mart and A&P stores, and we anticipate a large launch order later this year.
The prime mover in these on-site systems is typically 200 to 400 kilowatts in capacity and can be either a microturbine or fuel cell. Fuel cells powered with hydrogen have the further benefit of absolutely no emissions at all. In passing we can note that UTC's fuel cells are the most advanced technically in the world. Our origins in this business date from the American manned space program in the 1960s, with every American manned space launch since then having carried our fuel cells. The combustion-free oxidation of hydrogen in a fuel cell produces the benign and useful outputs of water (which astronauts drink) and electricity and heat powering the shuttle's systems.
A last and significant opportunity is energy efficiency within a company's operations rather than with its products. For one example, United Technologies has achieved an 18 percent absolute reduction in energy consumption, measured in kilowatts and British thermal units, since 1997 on a company twice the size. Stated differently, our energy intensity normalized for volume is down 59 percent. This is to me the most significant statistic in these remarks, for it shows what can be done with energy intensity with a focused effort and without deprivation or any lessening in the company's efficiency or operations worldwide. Financial returns on investments to achieve this have been good for us. Indeed, less is more.
We have comparably reduced water consumption by 44 percent over the same period, wastes of all kinds by 24 percent, and chemical releases to air by 42 percent. Normalizing for volume, our water intensity is down by 72 percent, wastes intensity by 62 percent, and chemical releases intensity by 71 percent. These are all remarkable numbers.
Your government's commitment to reducing energy intensity in GDP by 20 percent over the 11th Five Year Plan period is remarkable. Differences in such energy intensity worldwide are great and demonstrate the enormous potential in front of us. Although an emerging economy such as yours lags efficiencies in advanced economies, the fact is our own country as the largest economy in the world lags others by a significant margin. France leads the world in minimizing its CO2 per capita because of its nuclear generation program and is three times less hydrocarbon intense than the United States. Comparably, Japan and Germany have half the hydrocarbon intensity of the United States and are evidently advanced economies. I believe the potential for energy intensity reduction in the United States is great indeed and that we can do far more.
With this perspective of differences among economies, your 20 percent goal is achievable. Reaching the current world benchmark intensities in Japan or Germany, for example, would take a 45 percent reduction. Reaching the higher intensity of the United States would take a 33 percent reduction. Most significant is your stated intensity goal and the nationally organized commitments to achieve it. I believe our country should follow yours in such a program and at a comparably elevated priority.
A private effort to advance the intensity agenda is the one we as UTC are launching jointly with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and other corporate sponsors to evaluate and propose solutions to energy intensities in the entire buildings cycle from construction to operation to ultimate demolition. This project recognizes that buildings worldwide consume more than a third of our planet's energy annually, and that UTC is the world's largest supplier of capital equipment to buildings. Funded at about $13 million over three years, the project will seek innovative solutions to reduce this consumption ultimately by more than a third. We're optimistic about the results and will start shortly.
As Premier Wen noted at the People's Congress, "First of all, we should focus not only on economic growth, we should also pay attention to energy conservation and environmental protection." This conference and we could not agree more enthusiastically and confidently. Thank you.
