Five Percent: Conserve Energy

0.0 kW by Candle Light

Last year, we hit the main breaker in the house and enjoyed the silence and darkness. This year, we tried something a little different.

This year we searched, and found the 200 Watts that our house uses every hour of every day, even when it’s night and all the lights, fridge, dishwasher, dryer and anything we are actually using is off.

If you have followed my blog, you’ll know that we have rather effectively reduced our electricity usage — less than 1/2 what we used a couple years ago. After making all of the obvious changes, and some of the less obvious ones, we had made some great progress.

Then, last summer, we bought a PowerCost Meter, which gives you a real-time readout of your electrical use. We found a lot of other small culprits. In the end, we are regularly able to go to bed using a mere 200 Watts.

But 200 Watts of … what?

So tonight instead of flipping the power main, we started unplugging things. (more…)

News like yesterday’s is welcome amidst a sea of recent bad tidings — there was a lot of good news, but the most important for the world was an announcement by the EPA.

Sure, the stock market rose 500 points. But that’s only the mercurial stock market.

Yes, some of AIG’s lucky lottery winners bonus recipients have relinquished their ill-gotten gains. But that’s a (mere) $80M or so.

Yes, another $75M of Madoff’s ill-gotten gains have been identified, bringing the total to near $1B. But that’s less that 2% of the ultimate charlatan’s loot.

Yes, Mr. Geithner, recently down on his luck seems to have struck the proper nerve to stimulate our flagging banking system. But that’s … ok, well, if it sticks, this one’s pretty significant. But only in the context of, as my Mom calls it “The Winter of Our Discontent”. All in all, a pretty good news day.

But of all the news I read today, by far the most important bit was that Greenhouse Gasses (GHGs) will (finally once again) be considered a pollutant by our Environmental Protection Agency.
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Black is back at Shell. Black gold. Texas tea. Green is out.

Oh yes, it’s the same Royal Dutch Shell that was so committed to renewable energy sources a few months ago. But they have had a change of heart. The Guardian reports:

The company said that many alternative technologies did not offer attractive investment opportunities. Linda Cook, Shell’s executive director of gas and power, said: “If there aren’t investment opportunities which compete with other projects we won’t put money into it. We are businessmen and women. If there were renewables [which made money] we would put money into it.”

I can think of three possible explanations for this change of heart.

1. Shell doesn’t believe that climate change, or carbon trading is a significant enough concern for their bottom line to factor them into any projections. Perhaps this is because recent polls show the number of people thinking climate change is “exaggerated” has risen rapidly. In short, without enough popular support, they are betting that their business will continue as usual for the foreseeable future. Or…
2. They never really meant to do anything in the first place, and it was all a big marketing gambit. Or…
3. As renewable sources grow, Shell sees them now as a competitive threat to their core business.

Perhaps you’ll note that one of my possible explanations for their actions does not include their explanation, namely that renewables are not cost effective. They report that some of their investment is being aimed at carbon sequestration. I do believe that there’s an important role in sequestration, but whereas renewables are getting close to grid parity, carbon sequestration cannot possibly have any immediate revenue potential — it’s almost purely R&D and cost today. One would have to have a rather dismal view of renewables to fail to see how they could be at least as good an investment as carbon sequestration.

Maybe there are other explanations. These were just the ones that occurred to me. But I think some combination of these explanations accounts for the lion’s share of their decision. So how could a company be so … simplistic?

Maybe they’re just suffering the myopia that comes from being a leading, profitable company? After reading projections by BP of energy use in the future (which predict that in 20 years, only 7% of our energy will come from renewable resources), I have come to understand that the oil companies really have a very limited ability to see into the future. They seem to be constrained by their view of the past. Historically, corporations have not be particularly willing or good at predicting the demise (or major change) of the character their business. The ones that did survived (for example: IBM and Smith-Corona both made typewriters). Few people remember the names of the companies that sold candles and whale oil … before the electric light smote them out of existence.

Indeed, the survivors of major change are the ones who not just accept, but embrace the change as an opportunity. To be honest, I have little faith in just about any of the oil companies, at this point. It’s almost moot now to point out how badly GM and Chrysler have failed to recognize their demise, and I give a slight credit to Ford, only because it was clear three years ago that Bill Ford understood why sustainability was a goal worth pursuing.

I do think it’s curious to wonder if indeed my third explanation, that Shell sees renewables as a competitive threat, has any merit. Wind power has been growing very fast. Solar is making technical and scaling breakthroughs that change the equation a little. Obama isn’t equivocating about climate change, cap-and-trade, energy independence, or any other issue that tend to favor renewables and hurt fossil fuel companies. The science is not getting any less clear on climate change, and the regulatory landscape is solidifying.

Perhaps if I were Shell, I might realized that I had better damned well figure out if there’s any way in hell that carbon sequestration will work, and meanwhile, clean up my act a little and save some money doing it … but by no means cut into my core business. I think this is a (classic) short-sited, reactive, self-protectionist business response that has been the death knell of many former large enterprises. It makes sense, but only in the most narrow, unintelligent was of looking at the world. But then again, we’re not talking about people, who have capacity for intelligence — we’re talking about corporations. The two are different.

Suffice it to say that while I may have not gotten the correct explanation of Shell’s failure to adapt to the inevitable future, I am confident that in three years, I’ll be able to link back to this post, and the others I have written, and report how the fortunes of Shell and ExxonMobil have become more clear, and how they failed to do the right thing to evolve their businesses. Even when the facts were as easy to see as the back of your hand.

Check this out. A simple (yep, simple!) explanation of why cap and trade, and another similar program called cap and rebate, both work. From TerraPass.

Also Available in White

Their primary market is commercial real estate, corporate installations, and agriculture, but if your house is in even an ok location, it sounds like ROI could be pretty quick. Ed Begley (Living with Ed) is putting one on his house. Based on what I understand, the cost outlay for a house is pretty modest.

So if you are thinking about something for your house, or business, property (or billboard!) check them out: Arc Renewable Energies. (more…)

Ok, I’m off-topic on this one, but I’m a little ticked off, and I always like to vent my frustration in a public place. AIG has a problem with bonuses. Obama has asked Geitner to see what legal recourse we have. Andrew Ross Sorkin of the Times is defending AIG‘s right to give bonuses because they are contracts. I am as mad as the next guy about 400 people getting $165M in bonuses ($412K each, on average). But I accept that their contract may require payment.

What I don’t accept is that the top leaders of AIG and other companies who failed to identify and stop the problem, and wrote bonus contracts like this are so precious that any manager in their right mind would believe there’s a need to retain them. The main defense for propping up companies that played this game seems to be that they are the experts.

But experts at what? (more…)

I may have just had the tri-fecta of appliance repair.

Our fridge has been leaking water on the kitchen floor at seemingly times for several, um, a-hem, years now and after my wife nearly killed herself slipping on the water (and me with her subsequent “look”), it seemed like the appropriate waiting period for self-resolution/miracle had expired.

So I pulled out the fridge from its nook and started poking around the back. What I found was huge masses of dust. I have one of those brushes on a long, bendy wire and vacuumed and brushed my way around until things were clear.

Then I started looking for the cause of the problem (more…)

Funding for Federal and State highway maintenance mostly comes from gas taxes today. But this started posing a problem last summer when gas prices were high and fewer people were driving, and continues now when fewer people are driving because of other economic reasons. And the average fuel efficiency of vehicles used has improved.

The problem is that less gas purchased means less revenues to maintain roads.

So both states and federal agencies are considering a new way of raising revenues, based on miles driven. Some are even adding factors like the weight of the vehicle and where the vehicle is driven to the formula. (more…)

Black is Beautiful

We did it last year, and it was fun. I flipped the main breaker and we did our thing as a family for an hour. Last year we noticed several of our neighbors’ houses were also dark and thought they were participating, but then realized it was a Friday evening, and those neighbors were Jews observing Shabbat. Hey, whatever works :-)

This year, I have a new idea for EarthHour. With out power monitor, we now can see how much electrical power we’re using at a given moment. We have found that our “baseline” usage — the electricity we use when the lights are out, the fridge isn’t running, and everything is “off” — is still 200 Watts. I can account for some from: the TiVo (45W), the router (12W), the cable modem (?) and the aquarium filter (?), but 200 Watts seems like more than those things should draw.

So, this year, after all the lights go out, we’re going to leave the main power on and then start unplugging things, one by one, and find out where that 200 Watts is actually going. I’ll bet most of it is going to standby power. And once we know that, we should be able to either get SmartStrip power strips or maybe put some stuff that doesn’t really need to run all the time on a timer-switch. I’ll bet we can get down to less than 100W.

And if we reduce our full-time usage by 100 Watts, we’ll save about $190 a year.

Seems like a pretty good way to spend an hour to me. But then some of the things the Jews do on Shabbat is enjoy family, eat good food, and have marital relations.

John from my office asked a good question the other day: why are paper cups so bad?

Actually, no paper cup is particularly bad. Certainly not as bad as a Hummer, or a gallon of corn ethanol to power it, or even the hamburger you eat while driving in the hummer and drinking your Coke.

And actually, probably not as bad as the Coke itself. But why are lowly paper cups so bad?

The first thought is that they are not easily recycled. This is only sort of true; good recycling processes can deal with food and with coatings like wax and plastic added to paper cups. However, most local recycling programs exclude items with food residue because of issues with animals as the recyclables are sitting on the curb, or waiting for processing. So even though most paper cups end up in landfills, let’s assume that the paper is recycled.

The real issue here is with one-time use, or disposable products. In the US, we use 130,000,000,000 (yes 130 Billion) disposable cups every year (260B in the world) — yikes! We use them once. They provide value for perhaps 15 minutes, yet they require significant resources to produce, transport, store, and then back again to add to our landfills (or if we’re assuming they can be recycled, back to the recycling plant.) (more…)