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Jeff Ihnen

Jul 20
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Utility Investors: Chillax and Find a Mirror

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant, Utility Stuff No Comments
The Energy Rant blog, in general, could be considered the sausage factory of energy efficiency; exploring the inner workings and realities of the business.  Everyone else writing about energy efficiency is talking about the delicious bratwurst and hotdogs one might get at the ballpark.  This week, however, we will explore EE from the utility shareholder perspective, in the sausage room, rather than the ballpark frank of conventional wisdom. To further define the sausage room of energy efficiency, this time I begin with a white paper by ACEEE,Policies Matter: Creating a Foundation for an Energy-Efficient Utility of the Future.  One gist…
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Jul 13
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Evaluation, Measurement and Verification; From a Neander Cave

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant No Comments
A title like Lies, Damned Lies and Modeling: Energy Efficiency’s Problem With Tracking Savings sounds like a natural fit for The Energy Rant, and in this regard, it did not disappoint.  Contributions to the article can be summarized as follows: professionals serving the evaluation, measurement and verification (EM&V) business are Neanderthals.  Having just discovered the open flame, these grunting upright creatures appear to be working on their next great discovery: rolling objects. Okay smarty pants.  The challenges for EM&V professionals can be boiled down to two words: Money Access  Little Money The article describes the fact that too much EM&V…
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Jul 06
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Low-Income Programs; Kool Aid and Happy Face Rugs

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant 2 Comments
Last week, we learned about lost revenue adjustment mechanisms, also known as LRAM.  I said, “Many people don’t seem to be that interested in the right answer in many jurisdictions.”  This week, I investigated another paper posted to the University of Chicago’s website, authored by two University of California-Berkeley economics professors and one University of Chicago professor.  Collectively, these flunkies have PhDs in economics from MIT, UC-Berkeley, and Princeton.  The paper drew hellfire from some in our industry, because, uh, they don’t like anyone messing with the Kool Aid punch bowl. The paper investigates the claimed savings for the Federal…
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Jun 29
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Lost Revenue Adjustment; One Patch in the Quilt

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant One Comment
This week, I dive into something I have wanted to know more about for some time: efficiency program funding mechanisms.  This post is based on a recent paper released by ACEEE, Valuing Efficiency: A Review of Lost Revenue Adjustment Mechanisms. Utilities must be allowed to make enough money to draw required investor capital, debt and equity, to fund their operations.  Energy efficiency programs are funded by ratepayers, one way or another – not out of shareholder charity.  All states with programs have some sort of transparent, although usually incomprehensibly confusing, means for cost recovery or lost revenue recovery. Although the ACEEE…
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Jun 22
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Code Barriers to Efficiency; Sticking Customers with the Bee Gees

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant No Comments
Our industry really needs to call timeout; take a look around and ask, “what the hell are we doing?”  Build it and they will come?  No.  Build it, and they will be alienated and give it the middle digit. As noted most recently in a post on condensing boilers, I have written extensively about energy codes outstripping the reality of human flaws; specifically, complex design and control sequences that require a 10-year industry expert and a licensed professional engineer to even understand the intent of a vast swath of the code. Another perversion of the incomprehensible mumbo jumbo is the…
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Jun 15
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Relative Humidity, by Socks and Jeans

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant, Sustainability No Comments
It is mid-June, and strangely here in the northern Midwest we have experienced virtually no warm, humid weather yet this year.  The weather can flip like a switch from a pattern of rain and clouds of the past several weeks to one that is hot and humid with little precipitation.  Now is a good time to talk about relative humidity and moisture. Relative humidity is something everyone knows about but hardly anyone understands.  How many times have you heard “It was 100 degrees with 99 percent humidity?”  I guarantee these conditions are 100% impossible, at least in the ambient outdoors,…
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Jun 08
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Tesla Powerwall and the Disruption of Rational Thought

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant 3 Comments
Howitzer Explosion Guy.  That was the nickname Wayne Campbell of Wayne’s World gave to Wolf Blitzer, CNN’s correspondent for the Gulf War in 1991.  “Sheeyeeaaah.  I’m so sure.”  “He just made it up for the war.”  Too bad Wayne isn’t still doing his show from his parents’ basement on community access channel 10 in Aurora, Illinois.  I would like his assessment of Elon Musk.  Pierre GQ Manly – like Larry Ellison, minus the useful products. One thing is for sure, solar panels of the photovoltaic type are certainly sexier than, oh, a fractionally expensive building surgery that provides equal quantity…
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Jun 01
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Condensing Boilers – Test for Show, Ship for Dough

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant 4 Comments
Everyone has probably heard at least one hundred or maybe a thousand light bulb jokes – the ones that disparage a class, gender, group, country, state, generation, etc.  The point is to make fun of the group in question because changing a light bulb is so simple, but it takes several doofuses in the disparaged group to do it.  Unfortunately, changing a light bulb is about the only energy retrofit measure that doesn’t get screwed up, usually.  Is this all we are capable of? In the past couple years, I have posted at least four Rants on energy code non-compliance:…
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May 26
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RFPs, Wind & Participants from Hell; Tales from AESP Spring 2015

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant 2 Comments
Last week’s AESP Spring Conference was the best that I can recall, in terms of the content delivered, in my opinion.  Perhaps I got lucky and went to the right presentations.  Perhaps it’s because I went to more presentations than usual.  Most likely it is for another reason, and readers will have to call me for that because it’s an advantage I want to hold among die-hard rant fans. I attended an Espresso Learning Shots discussion led by Laura Orfanedes from Fiveworx.  The topic was requests for proposals (RFPs) from both sides of the fence – from the buyer (utility)…
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May 18
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Electric Water Heater is to Battery as Heating Fuel is to Furniture

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant No Comments
Recently, I’ve snagged a number of articles, blogs, and news feeds about the great idea for using electric water heaters as energy storage devices.  E Source even goes so far as to insinuate water heaters are like batteries: “How the Water Heater Just Became a Lean, Mean, Battery-Killin’ Machine”.When I was an impressionable young lad (and much better looking), I recall watching a drama on television.  I am guessing it was Little House on the Prairie.  This particular episode featured a severe winter storm and blizzard.  Around that time we lived through the Great Storm of 1975, aka, Minnesota’s Storm…
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All things energy. That’s our jam.

We talk a lot about energy – from the serious to the satirical.

All things energy. That’s our jam.

We talk a lot about energy – from the serious to the satirical.

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