Exergy, Easy – Heavy Savings

Exergy, Easy – Heavy Savings

Exergy is a sexy word (maybe only to energy nerds), but it represents a vital class of measures and opportunities as we sprint head-on into the game changer (cliché alert) that will be the post-gravy-train-of-lighting-retrofit-era of energy efficiency. Pay attention!...
Exergy, Easy – Heavy Savings

Climate Change – Surveys and Truth Telling

I have written rather popular articles on critical thinking and climate change in greenhouse gas basics and others.  This week, I am going to bring the two together, with this article from the New York Times supplying the data/ammunition for this post. Survey...
The Roots of our AC Power Grid

The Roots of our AC Power Grid

A while back, a reader asked, “why don’t we switch to at least localized direct current power grids?” The simple answer is it would cost a fortune for both the utility and the consumer to change all distribution and consuming loads to take DC power. As I researched...
The Roots of our AC Power Grid

Power Factor Cures for Toenail Fungus

This post ends with a quiz and more than 49 $5 Starbucks card winners for correct answers. Why the quiz for this post? Because the subject is power factor. Most descriptions of power factor remind me of riding the NYC subway many years ago before passengers buried...
Exergy, Easy – Heavy Savings

Grid Power Generation – Stories Untold

Most of you reading this owe your lives to the phenomenon described in this post. Therefore, it is worth understanding precisely how grid power is generated, and what it looks like. And of course, you will not find this anywhere else. Rant topics are inspired by...
Exergy, Easy – Heavy Savings

Groupthink and the Yes Man

When this post launches, I will be sitting in a critical thinking course as part of AESP’s National Conference. As luck would have it, I also stumbled onto a couple interesting articles while eating my curds and whey last week. The first covers echo chambers from Inc....