Skip to main content

Energy Rant

This is a satirical and at times humorous but critical commentary on energy efficiency issues of the day.

“Keep up the good work! I like the variety of topics; never boring. It's like a Box of Energy Chocolates.... you never know what you're gonna get!”

Mike MernickSenior Vice President, ICF

The Energy Transition Grind

By Energy Rant No Comments
Longtime Rant readers know I keep both feet on planet Earth, capturing all sides (typically two) and explaining, yes, but (fill in the blank). For the next case study, I was recently presented with a slide deck from the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), The Cleantech Revolution, It's Exponential, Disruptive, and Now. There are many brilliant people at RMI. Amory Lovins, its cofounder, is one such brilliant revolutionary. Amory's famous home in the Rockies can grow bananas in winter. That's great, but is it scalable? It is 4,000 square feet and was completed in 1984 for $500,000, which would be over…
Read More

Fishing for Savants Who Understand Attribution

By Energy Rant No Comments
This week, I'm reporting on themes presented at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) summer camp, also known as the Summer Study for Buildings, from Pacific Grove, California. Here are the themes: Heat pumps (~ 80 papers) Decarbonization (~67 papers) Equity (~75 papers) The end. The ACEEE summer camp covers a stunning number of papers. There are 13 panels or tracks, two sessions per day, each with three papers presented, for five days. Per my math, that's 780 papers. In addition, there are probably 60 posters to make up the total of nearly 850 studies. The papers probably…
Read More

Ranking States for Clean, Reliable, and Affordable Power

By Energy Rant No Comments
This is the third and final post in a series of Energy Rants on rising electricity prices and unreliability. The first post, Rising Price of Less Reliable Electricity, defined and quantified the problem and discussed some reasons and challenges in the future. Last week in Electricity Rates and Reliability, I started with a state-by-state analysis of energy efficiency policy, electricity sources, and prices. My research for those two posts tipped off an avalanche of rich data to analyze. This week, I am polishing it off with a grand finale featuring state rankings for composite clean, reliable, and affordable electricity. Electricity…
Read More

Electricity Rates and Reliability – Access and Policy

By Energy Rant No Comments
For 50 years ending in 2000, electrical loads in the United States expanded at an average of 5.1% per year. For the next 20 years, the growth was essentially zero. Projections for the coming five years are roughly 1% per year (compounded annual growth rate, CAGR). Although that is far from 5% CAGR, it is more than zero, and considering construction of everything from generation to transmission lines is on the decline, something must give. For example, transmission line construction fell from 4,000 miles per year in 2013 to less than 1,000 miles from 2016-2020 to a measly 55 miles…
Read More
Elephant On 3 Legged Stool with Money on his back surrounded by powerlines

Rising Price of Less-Reliable Electricity

By Energy Rant No Comments
“Americans used to spend little energy worrying about whether the lights would come on at the flick of a switch, or how much that electricity cost. For a growing number of people, those days are over.” Those are the first two sentences of an article published in The Wall Street Journal last week, Get Ready to Pay More for Less-Reliable Electricity. Other nuggets from the article: Customers of the largest 17 utilities in the country are bound to see electricity prices outpace the consumer price index through 2030. Over the ten years ending in 2022, outages increased by 20%. The…
Read More

Portfolio Plateaus, Levitating Golf Balls, and Code Zombies

By Energy Rant No Comments
This is the third and final edition of the history of energy efficiency and Michaels Energy over the last 40 years. The first edition, covering the Early Years Through Deregulation, spanned 1984 into the Great Depression of Energy Efficiency. The second edition described the resurgence of energy efficiency and the birth of Portfolio Blowouts in the Great Lake States and beyond. This edition covers the efficiency program plateau of the last decade and projects for the future. Lighting Technology Evolutions During the boom and plateau years from 2000 through today, lighting retrofits cycled through every sector – residential, commercial, and…
Read More

Michaels Energy and The Boom Years of Energy Efficiency

By Energy Rant No Comments
This week, we are continuing with 40 years of Michaels Energy and energy efficiency history, focusing on the years of growth. As alluded to in the last post, The Great Depression of energy efficiency hit in 1999, or to be a bit more precise, 1998. Data from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy’s most recent state efficiency scorecard confirm my case. While The Great Depression of energy efficiency raged, utilities got caught up in the dot.com stock market bubble. They bought telecom companies, home security, resort properties, and power generation overseas. Those ventures ended poorly, taking some to the…
Read More

Michaels Energy – The Early Years Through Deregulation

By Energy Rant No Comments
1984 This year is our company's 40th anniversary. Michaels Engineering launched on Friday, March 23, 1984. What else was going on in 1984? Apple launched the Macintosh, the first computer on sale with a mouse and a graphical user interface; sale price: $2500, which has the purchasing power of $7,700 today. I'm surprised Steve Jobs allowed that ugly disk drive slot in the front of the machine. C'mon, Steve. Jobs produced the greatest television ad of all time to promote Macintosh in a one-minute Super Bowl ad. "You'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984." Soviet bloc nations boycotted the…
Read More

Reporting from the Mid-America Regulatory Conference

By Energy Rant No Comments
I attended the Mid-America Regulator Conference in Minneapolis last week. This post features issues of the day presented by utilities, commissioners, intervenors, technology providers, and sundry stakeholders. Load Growth Back in the day, we canoed the rivers and streams of Northern Virginia, especially after significant rainfall, when the water was high and running fast, which made it interesting. Let's just say my canoeing skills would be the equivalent of graduating from the bunny slope on a ski resort. For the latter, I learned to snowplow to slow down, and for the former, don't take the paddle out of the water…
Read More

A Twofer: Syncing Power Generation With Soaring Loads

By Energy Rant No Comments
One of many sources of information that fuel my brain to write this blog is the American Energy Society’s Energy Matters newsletter. The newsletter features many items I don’t find elsewhere, and impressively, they seem unbiased – it is what it is. Power Generation According to a linked New York Times article, 200 coal-fired power plants have closed in the last decade, with 200 remaining and 50 slated for shutdown in the next five years. They also linked to this informative, interactive map showing power generation from the Energy Information Administration. The black dots represent the remaining coal-fired power plants,…
Read More