Five Percent: Conserve a Little Energy

The Facts of Cap-and-Trade from Clean Energy Works on Vimeo.

Yep. It’s that simple.

A while back, I had started a project of insulating the heating pipes that run through my basement — we have an old house that was designed for a gravity-fed hot water heating system — iron pipes and big old radiators.

Unlike a modern system, using copper pipe that run through baseboard radiators, we have a system that appears to be one step beyond the old steam-heat systems: big, heavy cast-iron radiators that take up a lot of space; and big, heavy cast-iron piping that runs through the basement and upon which I regularly knock my noggin.

Insulating my pipes was, to use an indelicate expression, like pissing in the wind. Or at least it was then. Today, I finished that job. But it took 13 years — insulating my heating pipes was probably the only thing I did that I should have done last. But I am getting ahead of myself. (more…)

Can I, personally, make a difference in our attempts to reduce or mitigate climate change impacts? Or is this instead a problem that needs to be addressed through policy changes?

At a party last weekend, my friend Mike said he had just bought an electricity monitor based on my recommendation, and admitted it was a gift for his wife — he said that all of our little individual efforts add up to nothing significant. He didn’t really believe that personal action will affect things; his wife does.

I have written down my personal attempts to make change here in this blog, now in my fifth year. Much of what I have done involves making small changes that have indeed added up, so perhaps you might guess that I disagree with Mike’s view. Is it really true that all of the little things I have done add up to nothing?

Yes: the changes I have made add up to nothing.

Even our personal reduction of our energy consumption by almost one half of its former levels (probably more) over these years has resulted in a dramatic reduction of our impact, it means very little. The problem is that we need is to get the other several billions of people living in industrialized countries to make even modest changes. And our governments to concur and set in motion a new set of policies that lead us back to sustainable occupation of the planet.

So why bother making personal changes when a wasteful neighbor (not Mike) undoes our efforts five times over?

The answer lies in how big changes tend to happen. I see myself as part of a movement. I do what I can to make the movement progress.

Mike bought an electricity meter because I had one. Theresa and I have Prius’s now — we bought them to replace our older less efficient cars. We were the first on our street to have a Prius. But we told several neighbors and friends how much we like them (and that they really do get good mileage and are big enough for almost everything). Now our street has nine Prius drivers. Did I cause this — maybe not all of them.

But my personal efforts matter because:

• By making changes, I learn what works and what doesn’t
• My purchases and support of products that enable green choices help make their companies viable
• People see and hear about what I do and a few might start doing things on their own
• I have learned enough to participate in the debates with actual knowledge and facts
• As more people come to see various realities, and understand, they influence their leaders

In short, my personal efforts affect others’. And their actions also affect others. It doesn’t take long to get to billions of people, actually.

I am actively participating in a movement that was underway long before I was part of it. Buying an electricity monitor is just one way that my actions affect others.

Oh, and I pay about $250/month less for energy than I would otherwise.

I expected nothing less of Google PowerMeter — week by week, it continues to improve. Now the graph displays my usage compared to expected use, and includes a visual and numeric accounting of my baseline, “Always On” usage compared to total usage. Here’s what my graph for today looks like:

Three Great Things

The expected usage gives you a nice target, and the comparison to others provides a helpful benchmark.

But the new “Always On” measure provides two very helpful bits of information.

First, the darker bar helps isolate the spikes above. For example, the most obvious repeating spike above is the refrigerator — it cycles on about once per hour and runs for perhaps 25 minutes each time, running at a bit over 200W — it’s easy to see that pattern. (more…)

Google announced today that the TED 5000 (The Energy Detective) will link directly with Google PowerMeter — the TED 5000 scores big!

Update: Tuesday Sept 6^th — TED Firmware page reports that Google PowerMeter software will be available this Friday afternoon.

Who cares? Well, I know that real-time energy monitoring devices make a huge difference in behavior, or at least they can.

And I know utilities are going to get to that smart grid “real soon now” (just as soon as they stop hand-typing my electricity bill). Look, there’s a reason that The Electric Company is the worst property in the game Monopoly®.

But seriously, allowing real people to get themselves hooked in to a larger network of data that Google can collect, analyze and do their usual greatness with should offer a few early-adopter types the chance to show the true power of data aggregation again, this time with electrical power.

The Google Power Meter blog says the functionality is enabled in the latest TED 5000 firmware, so I downloaded it … but I cannot see anything different. I already had the 1.0.214 gateway firmware installed, and now have Footprints 1.0.103 installed (the latest as of 11pm EDT, 10/5/09). But I see nothing. The TED 5000 site says little (although there’s now a screenshot of PowerMeter). The Google Power Meter site says little, and the newsgroup has nothing new posted.

Am I just being impatient? Yes! I want my TED 5000 household electrical use data to be on the web so everyone knows that I don’t line dry my clothes (and they know when, too.) Well, also I want to be an über-energy-geek.

More to come. Soon, I hope!

As I have often mentioned in these pages, we had an energy audit last Spring. The audit was a seminal moment in my understanding of our household energy usage.

Mission Accomplished! (Or Is It?)

I talk to a lot of people about their energy conservation measures. Naturally, not wanting to look uncaring, people talk about how they have changed and are going green. Perhaps a light bulb or two changed to CFL. Perhaps they a jacket on their water heater. Some weatherstripping on their door? A programmable thermostat?

These changes sound fine, and they may actually make a difference. But there are two ways that just making changes alone doesn’t really change things.

Perhaps your two CFL bulbs reduce your electrical use a little, but isn’t it important to know how much? (For example, the oft-repeated water heater jacket is of almost no value if you have a relatively newer one). So it’s possible that your changes haven’t improved anything. And the second way changes alone are bad: you may feel like you have “gone green” … mission accomplished.

So to my great chagrin, I realized recently that I had very little clue what my heating usage was, or for that matter what it should be. I had made lots of great changes. Mission accomplished? Not so fast. (more…)

As I have become aware of my energy use, I have grown more interested in understanding the details. I have used four methods to measure my electrical use:

1. (actually) reading the electrical bill,
2. using a Kill-A-Watt meter to measure usage of things we plug in,
3. installing a PowerCost Monitor to display total house usage right in our kitchen, and
4. installing a TED 5000 monitor that measures and records our usage in great detail

Each of these methods is effective, and each has resulted in incremental changes. For us, the incremental changes have added up: we now use less than half of the electricity we used to. Everyone can do at least the first of these — I hope I’ll show you why it makes sense to go a step further. (more…)

The Repower America campaign (“We Campaign”) has put up a toll free number that you can call to leave a voice message supporting climate change legislation that will be heard by your Senators: call 1-877-973-7693 (1-877-9REPOWER). Punch in your zip code and leave a voice mail message supporting comprehensive climate change legislation.

I think this is a great idea. I am a big believer in the email campaigns, and all the other great grass-roots stuff that progressive and Internet-savvy organizations are doing. But in the end, there’s nothing like the voice of an actual constituent to make Senators do the right thing. I just made my call. Will you?

We know the climate change bill is going to face stiff resistance in the Senate. Every voice counts, and the voices being heard today are mostly just the ones the oil companies are paying to have heard.

Call now, and write a comment when you’re done.

Free, Blue-line PowerCost Monitor For Best Comment

Special promotion, this post only: I will non-randomly select my favorite comment about why we need a climate change law now and send a free Blue Line Powercost Monitor (used) — this is the one I have been using for almost a year now, and have written about — it’s awesome, and has saved us hundreds of dollars (no kidding). But I got a little present in the mail today that I’ll be writing about soon, so I want to pass the PowerCost Monitor along to someone who cares and could take advantage of it.

Please note: this is not a contest, and I am not a lawyer nor do I play one on TV. I make no money from this site. So what I just said is probably filled with the opportunity for me to get in trouble. Look, I just want you to make a call and support climate change legislation. No promises. And no lawsuits, please?

Warren Buffett wrote an op-ed in the Times today — he continues to be one of the few money guys I look at and think, “What a smart man he seems to be.”

His editorial piece, titled Greenback Emissions is about fiscal restraint, or the lack thereof, expressed as inflation — the inevitable outcome of deficit spending. His argument is not that we should stop spending (on the contrary), only that we must be wary … cognizant of the what will happen next. Where many proscribe actions, Buffett instead warns our Congress of the likely future outcome.

What struck me as interesting is that Buffett bracketed his editorial with a parallel to the challenge facing Congress with the pending climate legislation. To be fair, this article was not “about” climate change. But the opening and closing phrases were. (more…)

It has been hot and muggy here in the Boston area for the last week, with more to come, but we’re still not using our air conditioner.

We’re not martyrs, cheap, or holier than thou. OK, maybe cheap, but that’s really not it. We’re quite comfortable in our un-air-conditioned house, in fact.

[Update, August 23rd. We caved. It has been miserably humid, still, and hot and has been for a week or so. We both agreed on Sunday to put in one of our two window AC units. But it was too hot, so I didn't. And then it cooled down a little. We survived.]

The main contributing factors to our comfort are:

• Management of Sun
• Management of Air
• Our Recent Trip to Europe
• Proper Attire

And these things have also worked in our office space. I am proud of my company and of my co-workers for embracing a few changes that make this possible, and seen how much nicer life is without A/C. (more…)

Cap and trade seems incredibly complex, counter-intuitive, unfair, and misguided — if that’s your view, you have it about right, but the funny thing is, it will work — here’s why. The recent passage of the American Clean Energy Security act (ACES) in the House is a big milestone for cap and trade, but it will only pass the Senate if people understand what it is, and why it’s a good thing.

The first thing to know, is that the main part of cap and trade is the cap. The cap says: no more than a certain amount of CO2 can be released in a given year — major polluters are given a limit. Every year the cap gets tightened according to a predictable schedule. We are aiming for a target, and know what we have to do to get there.

The trade part is what makes things seem complicate and strange. So if I am an electricity utility executive, and I have a bunch of coal plants, I may find that I am releasing more CO2 than my limit. What makes trade cool is that if I don’t want to lay off my work force, I can decide to buy credits from another company — I can pay to pollute. Sure, it makes my costs go up, but now I have more incentive to clean up my act.

And no, it doesn’t mean we have more pollution, just more flexibility. My competitor, who had the foresight (more…)

Days over 90° in Boston (click to enlarge)

This is how I summarize the report issued today titled Authoritative Assessment of National, Regional Impacts of Global Climate Change from the United States Global Change Research Program. All regions of the country are discussed, so pick yours and see if you like what’s coming. Here’s a link to the summary of my region, the Northeast US (pdf).

Right now Congress is considering the Waxman-Markey Bill (officially, “American Clean Energy and Security Act”, and the official summary).

Views from the right and left have taken issue with the legislation. In my book, this is a sign of a bill that is about as good as a bill can get. That’s not to say it’s “great”, but it is a start.

To those who would hold out for something more perfect, I encourage you to carefully look at the Assessment report that came out today. (more…)

The Times posted a very thoughtful article explaining why a carbon Cap and Trade policy is now the favored approach making its way through Congress now.

In the end, the merits of the system are mostly that it is expedient, politically and from a management perspective. No one likes a tax, even if it may be the far simpler solution to the problem. But if no one likes a tax, then it’s kind of a tough sell.

Some argue that cap and trade is just a tax wrapped in a politically tolerable icing. They’re pretty much right. (more…)

Uninsulated Ceiling

I’ll write more about the details in another post, but it occurred to me that many, if not most houses could get a payback. If someone like me (obsessive, crazy) failed to take this simple step for at least 5 years, there’s something wrong. Here are some of the things I think need to happen:

• The rapid payback opportunity should be promoted more visibly;
• It should be a lot easier to find the companies that do this kind of service in your area;
• If there’s a tax incentive, I don’t know about it, but there should be;
• Utilities should have an incentive to promote this kind of action, and even do no-cost financing of the audit cost;
• There should be a good, current, easily accessible registry of contractors and “finder” tool on the EnergyStar site;
• There should be some certification for contractors who can do the audits, as well as those who can do mitigation; and
• Everyone should know that it’s easy, quick, low-cost, and has no downsides!

And probably a few others. (more…)

During my obsessive period prior to the latest Presidential Election, I read a lot, but I came to trust one view of the world: FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver’s brilliant blog, started as a vehicle to predict the outcome of the 2008 election. He is a statistician (of the highest order, not an econometrician, but a baseball statistician — they’re the ones that really have to get it right).

Rather than conducting polls, he pumped polling data from numerous sources into his own models that accounted for the bias, trends, methods and other factors the skew polling data, then posted his results with an unapologetic liberal viewpoint. He seemed to correctly predict most outcomes of that election.

For a moment after the election, he wondered aloud what he would do now that the election was over. But it quickly became clear that his work was not done — he called the tight senate race in Minnesota well before others, and has done a lot of other cool stuff since. Nate Silver has a knack for presenting dense statistical data in a clear and useful way.

I read a post of his from several weeks back, in which he analyzed the results of a poll on people’s views of on climate change. Here’s a graph from his results, showing a very, very important result: we don’t think global warming will affect us (even if it will affect everyone else):

His assessment is simple:

Advocates of cap-and-trade may need to find ways to personalize the terms of the debate.

I encourage you to read his post on this topic; his conclusion is appropriately impassive and pragmatic.