Remember the old kooks who thought they knew better, gave you stupid rules, and warned you about things you would come to regret because you ignored them? They were your parents. If you are old enough, maybe a parent yourself, or maybe not, you should realize that OMG! I’ve turned into my parents! It’s wisdom through experience and in particular from making mistakes and failure. As a supervisor, one thing I learned, and is unfortunately a fact of life, is that you have to let staff make their own mistakes because no matter how many times you tell people not…
Read More
True or false: It’s easier to teach Pablo Picasso how to paint a house than it is to make a house painter into a Picasso-grade painter/artist. For the answer, keep reading. I was sitting in a session at last week’s AESP conference sipping my weak overpriced Starbucks when I almost sprayed a mouthful on the bystanders sitting in front of me. Not one, but two guys opined that it is easier to teach, for example, a refrigeration expert retrocommissioning than it is to teach a retrocommissioning/energy expert efficient refrigeration. Allow me to demonstrate with an example, a true story. A…
Read More
The best thing about working in our industry is the potential for continuous learning, unlike nearly any other field. There are enough things to learn about buildings, manufacturing, systems, how they are built, as in design, construction and commissioning to fill a 45 year engineering career. One always finds something “new” even in old buildings – bizarre design concepts for example. Have you ever seen how Fig Newtons are made? It isn’t easy. Engineers might think, what else is there to programs besides determining energy savings, simple payback and possibly ROI? About 75%, if not, more. There are market assessments,…
Read More
In Stalin Lives, I mentioned our plan for securing an ENERGY STAR® clothes washer and dryer for our house. What I did not mention was that the local appliance stores do not even stock gas-heated dryers. Think about how stupid it is to generate electricity with maybe 35% thermal efficiency, lose 10% of it to line losses, as discussed last week, in it’s transport to the home and then use this high-value energy as a toaster coil to dry clothes. We, as well as I am sure millions of households, use “gas”, natural gas in our case and propane in…
Read More
Before I get to this week’s rant, or I should say, this week’s primary rant, I need to share this with you. Just before the holidays in Strange Magic,I tore into hands-free energy audit software. All you need is an address and billing information and voila, there it is; an energy audit that tells you everything you need to know to cut your energy bills by a certain guesstimate. This week I came across an apparent competitor to the one discussed in Strange Magic, so I viewed their online charting and graphics. They present analysis via bar chart for various…
Read More
The race is on to develop and deliver next generation successful energy efficiency programs. There is indeed innovation in the marketplace. The days of what I call “hamburger selling” will end, probably in the next decade. Selling EE in these cases is like selling hamburgers – who can sell the most and the cheapest hamburgers that people will eat. The product is unsophisticated – lighting, primarily. The market is huge and opportunities ubiquitous. Marketing and selling the burger is the name of the game and will be for a few more years. In the past five years, energy efficiency has…
Read More
Various areas of the country have various weird oddities. When we moved to the La Crosse area last decade, or the one before that, we found that apartments come with laundry hookups but no washer and dryer. What the? How about a friggin wash machine and dryer to fill that hole and plug into those pipes and wall socket? So we went to a now defunct appliance joint and picked up an Amana washer and dryer – electric of course because a rental joint isn’t going to provide natural gas. I think I’ve finally talked my wife into getting the…
Read More
Back in August I wrote about our “non-energy policy” and that our federal administrations since Nixon have vowed to reduce or eliminate our dependence on foreign oil, especially from hostile regions - and exactly the opposite has occurred. We are better positioned to control our energy destiny right now, for decades, more so than any time in my life. Technology for tapping conventional fossil fuels has vastly outstripped and expanded the gap between inexpensive fossil fuel supply and alternative energy sources. Unfortunately or fortunately, this is reality. Two major energy sources being tapped of course include natural gas from shale…
Read More
There’s only one thing worse than listening to the Beach Boys. Give up? Listening to the Beach Boys doing Christmas songs. Scarface, which I just watched recently, better puts me in the holiday spirit than listing to a Beach Boys ditty. “Greedy little cockroaches. Goodbye. You wanna play games? Ok. I play with you. You wanna play rough? Ok. Say hello to my LITTLE FRIEND!” – Tony Montana. Deck the halls with boughs of holly falalalalala la la la la. Ratatatatatat. If you hate year in review reports just quit right here because that’s what this is. Our industry is…
Read More
A few weeks back I came across an energy blogger that referenced a software developer who would do an energy audit via address and energy bills. Period. Really? As my roommate and I used to say, “C’mon dude,” as in give me a big fat (or favorite expletive here) break. We have done the address / energy consumption analysis many times but at MOST, we can do a decent job of benchmarking the facility against comparable ones but even this is difficult. We can measure the building footprint with satellite images. Easy. The challenge is multi-story facilities, and I mean…
Read More
