Five Percent: Conserve Energy

I have spent a lot of time and thought on how to save electricity, but not as much on how to save natural gas. I got a lot of information right from the bills, but I used a cool measuring device to get to some important details.

I have a gas furnace and water heater, and also a gas stove. Sure, I can see how much gas I use from the bill. But what do I do with that information (other than pay the bill?)

I wonder how our gas and electrical usage compare? They are both in dollars, but how does that translate to energy? To get that I need to read the bills and convert to a single unit of energy. Following the excellent model of WattzOn … sort of — they measure power, in Watts — how much power you are using now, and at every moment (watts measures power, which has the time factor, or rate built in).

But here I am looking at the energy that I use over some period of time, like a day, or a month or an hour. So I have decided to measure energy. And so we can compare, I can convert to a standard measure: kilowatt-hours (think: 10 old-fashioned 100W light-bulbs, all on for one hour). When you’re talking about things that use energy like water heaters, furnaces, lights, refrigerators, and so on it’s more important to think of how much you use them in a given day (or week, or moth, or year). I’ll pick “day”.

Read Your Gas and Oil Bills

According to our utility bills from the most recent billing cycle:

• Electricity: 616 kWh in the 33 day billing cycle, or 18.6 kWh/day
• Gas: 180 therms in the 25 day billing cycle, or 7.2 therms/day, and 1 therm = 29.3 kWh, so 5274 kWh, or 211 kWh/day

Wow! I used more than 11 times more energy in gas than in electricity. (Maybe I should spend more time focusing on that, especially in the winter!). Ok, how about relative price? (more…)

No guarantees. No certainty. No proscriptions. A nice little stock market plunge in response. Nope — hope is not something you can take to the bank. But maybe it’s something we can work with.

The stimulus bill is a messy, ugly, sloppy, horrendous thing of beauty.

For in all of its compromise, and stupidity, and waste, the core of the really important things survived. It’s pretty much a sure thing that you know there’s a lot of pork stimulus for green jobs, green energy, and environmental … whatever, when the virulent, progressive community is shouting loudly at how it was us who made all these great green giveaways stimuli happen. And the shouting is loud. Man, the Republicans must be stewing in their own formaldehyde plotting how to undermine any progress we might actually make indignant.

I wrote a few months back that Bush’s legacy might indeed be a novel way to solve global warming … by throwing our country into a massive recession. As it turns out, the recession has indeed been a rather effective and immediate way to mitigate our climate change and energy security issues. We’ll see if Obama’s more … conventional, progressive, liberal methods for solving the issues are equally effective (and who knows, perhaps without all the pesky side effects). No guarantees, of course.

Obama won this round, and it was a big, big, big one. Sure, the press had nearly written him off last week, but as the magnitude of this victory has become evident … and as Obama has taken back control of the message, we’re seeing what we voted for. Damn, he’s good. Heck, he might be as good as Bush was, and what’s more, using an almost entirely different way to manipulate the message. Who knew we could be manipulated in so many different ways. I’ll take mine this way, thanks.

This is not an issue about the economy. This isn’t an issue about education. Or science. Or health care. Or, dare I say it, about the environment. This is an issue of who is best able to direct the message, and how pragmatism makes it all work quickly (if not purely). Why even bi-partisanship isn’t dead!

Next stop: the banks. God help him.

I have hope.

I came across this excellent, straightforward, and compelling page describing how cap and trade works in the Green Room blog of the Environmental Defense Fund. If anyone knows of such a clear explanation of how a carbon tax would work, please let me know and I’ll post it.

Update, 3/17/09, Here’s another article with a good explanation of cap and trade, in particular with a good contrast with carbon tax.

I have spent the last several weeks testing the HighSierra FCS-200 water saving shower head; it costs about $25, provides a great shower experience, uses only 1.5 gallons per minute (GPM) and I highly recommend it.

I have now done five low flow shower head reviews so far (sorry, no nude shower scenes in this one) and the HighSierra wins hands down on price and is a strong contender for the best feeling shower of those we have tried.

A water saving shower head can help you conserve water, and in particular hot water which means you’re also save energy.

The other very good water saving shower heads I tested are larger, and considerably more expensive. Don’t be deceived — the HighSierra model might look like those really cheapo, painful shower heads that they put in locker room showers. But HighSierra’s clever low flow design makes it really a totally different beast. Simple is good; the manufacturer claims that it is less likely to become clogged with mineral deposits, it’s very small, and solidly built.

Here are some criteria I use for water saving shower head reviews: (more…)

President Obama highlighted the benefits of efficiency in his press conference last night, in several different cases. For example, he said

When people suggest that, “What a waste of money to make federal buildings more energy-efficient.” Why would that be a waste of money?

We’re creating jobs immediately by retrofitting these buildings or weatherizing 2 million Americans’ homes, as was called for in the package, so that right there creates economic stimulus.

And we are saving taxpayers when it comes to federal buildings potentially $2 billion. In the case of homeowners, they will see more money in their pockets. And we’re reducing our dependence on foreign oil in the Middle East. Why wouldn’t we want to make that kind of investment?

Why not indeed?

Even my hero Jon Stewart on The Daily Show showed clips of Obama talking about weatherization as Stewart pretended to nod off. Next, they played a clip of one of Obama’s rousing speeches about grand ideas and asked “Where is that guy?” Weatherization sounds so … boring, I guess. It doesn’t sound grand, or bold.

We continually seek grand “silver bullet” solutions to our problems. Instead we need smart solutions, and lots and lots of them, boring or not. (more…)

There have been a number of news items lately about how coal-fired plant projects are being canceled or deferred (the good news); but so are renewables projects like wind and solar installations (the bad news). But the cause is different. In the case of renewables, the main cause of reduction seems to be the absence of investment capital — last year was great, but now, things are drying up. Coal companies, on the other hand, seem to be responding to the increasing number of roadblocks being encountered in the building of new coal plants.

Two years ago, it was business as usual. But Fred Krupps and Environmental Defense lawyers had a rather major victory last year when they facilitated a reversal in which a planned 11 new coal plants in Texas were scuttled (well 8, actually) in favor of new investments in wind farms. To me, this seemed to be the turning point in the tide; since then a number of coal plant projects have been deferred or scrapped outright … in fact, most of them. During the Presidential campaign, the idea of clean coal was raised by all candidates, but this perhaps clarified the notion that good ol’ regular coal was dirty (which it most definitely is).

Then as “clean coal” kept coming up, some groups started pointing out that clean coal is fantasy. (more…)

How it pains me to say this, but WalMart, indeed corporations as a whole, may not be villainous scalawags. At least not completely.

WalMart has beaten their goal of reducing its internal goals of increasing fleet efficiency by 25% in three years. And with the introduction of a fleet of new hybrid and not-just-diesel fueled trucks, they claim they’re on the way to their goal of doubling fleet efficiency, right through to (drum roll) sustainability.

Well damn, I am as cynical as they get, but even I can see that this is a pretty great thing. And I take credit. No, not full credit, but all of those of us who formerly reviled WalMart for their environmental turpitude guilt-ed them into helped them understand that they were leaders and what they do matters. A lot. Michael Moore and his ilk might have had a little more influence than I, but I am in better shape.

Oh, sure, WalMart still treats their employees like crap (more…)

I have been writing about some pretty cool ways to save electricity in our house. What’s remarkable is that many of the ones that save the most are low-tech and not very obvious. I found them mostly by using two meters: a Kill-a-Watt and a PowerCost Meter; it wouldn’t have been obvious to me without them. So when I read this article, I was pleased to see that UPS has reduced their annual electricity expenses in their data centers by 3 Million kWh. That’s a lot of kWh!

In a data center, where lots of computer servers are running, you need to provide electricity for all the computers … which generates heat … that you have to get rid of my keeping the air cool around the computers. This very web page was served to you from a computer running in a data center somewhere, probably Texas. Big data centers have thousands of computers — it’s amazing to see, and they use a lot of electricity. The EPA reports that data centers use 60 – 70 Billion kWh per year, which is about 5% of the total use of household electricity. Yowza!

So when UPS looked at one of their data centers, they found two things. First, when they kept the cooled air only where it was needed, they needed to cool less air. High-tech solution: put a Plexiglas top over the top of a cabinet to prevent escape of cooled air. It might sound obvious, but they looked, and found huge amounts of pointless waste. And fixed it. I bet you can do the same in your house (or your data center!).

The second thing was that they took advantage of outdoor temperature to provide chilled water to cool the space using a pretty simple device: a heat exchanger. A heat exchanger is just a fancy way of saying cool air (also works with water) is used to cool down something else. It might seem even easier just to pump cool air in from outside, but things like humidity and air cleanliness are important in a data center. But again, a simple solution to a problem reduced waste by a lot.

In the end, UPS is saving about 3M kWh per year from these changes, or about $110M. Not to mention 1,000 tons of CO₂.

They key is, you have to look. Some changes are hard and expensive. But some changes are simple and cheap. Write the most unusual thing you found in your house in comments.