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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
Jeff Ihnen
By In Energy Rant

Are You Serious About the Climate Apocalypse?

Washington Post headline last week: “World is on brink of catastrophic warming, U.N. climate change report says.” Wolf! Wolf! People…
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Oct 04
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Clean Power Plan – The Corpse Phase

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Last week I cracked open the most recent edition of Public Utilities Fortnightly and discovered an interesting topic worth sharing. It is an attorney’s commentary on the Supreme Court’s 6-3 opinion, West Virginia v EPA. You may not have heard of this directional case because the Dobbs case released a week before West Virginia dominated the news cycle. Upon reading the SCOTUS opinion, I learned that it references the Obama-era Clean Power Plan (CPP). I wrote about the CPP three times, most recently in February of 2016, Clean Power Plan, The Coma Phase. There, I predicted Mitch McConnell would not…
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Sep 27
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Nuclear Power over White Rabbits for a Reliable, Affordable, Zero-Carbon Future

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I update my electrification slides for the Wisconsin Public Utilities Institute’s Utility Basics course every year with the latest technologies, sales data, and energy, commodity, and equipment/vehicle prices. Year over year, electricity prices at my home have increased 15%, for now, based on fuel alone. That is minuscule compared to what is proposed in the Northeast. EnergyCentral.com linked to a Patch article that said Eversource Massachusetts is filing for a 38% hike on top of a 22% jump last winter. National Grid is filing for an unprecedented (in my world) “increase from last winter's 14.82 cents per kilowatt-hour rate to…
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Sep 20
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Decarbonization Strategies for Manufacturing

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Last week a Yahoo News reporter headlined an article, Biden Administration Seeks to Lower Industrial Greenhouse Gas Emissions-and-That-Won't Be Easy. My first reaction: It won’t be easy to decarbonize any sector: residential, commercial, industrial, and transportation, although I did see that, like wind energy, the passenger blimp is making a comeback (say whaaat?). Will it replace passenger jets? I don’t think so. I focus on the above-linked article and industrial electrification and decarbonization in this post. The Yahoo author references the chart below for shares of GHG emissions. I assume that emissions from electricity generation are not double counted into…
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Sep 13
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Strategic Energy Planning

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I don’t think my mom played football, but she thought she knew how to take down a ball carrier. “Hit them low! Take out their legs.” This was her solution to arm tackling up high where the defender grabs on around the shoulder pads and goes for a ride – like a weakling trying to take down a steer. Bulldoggin, I think it’s called. Why would you bulldog rather than say, use a lariat? Boys will be boys, I suppose. Come to think of it - I don’t think bull riding accomplished anything useful down on the ranch either. I…
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Sep 06
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Channeling Patton for Energy Policy

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Of 34 personality characteristics, my top strength, according to Gallup CliftonStrengths®, is “context.” What does context mean, according to Gallup? History. Gallup describes the history strength: “You look back. You look back because that is where the answers lie. You look back to understand the present. From your vantage point, the present is unstable, a confusing clamor of competing voices. It is only by casting your mind back to an earlier time when the plans were being drawn up that the present regains its stability. The earlier time was a simpler time. It was a time of blueprints.” Hmm. This…
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Aug 30
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Champion Elements for Energy and Demand Management Programs

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This is the finale of better than best commercial and industrial program practices – including a summary cheat sheet for program administrators. Energy Analyses Utilities want to build efficiency businesses in their service territories, which is very important. However, few service providers, designers, or contractors are proficient with energy calculations, especially for complex measures. Moreover, they don’t live in our goofy world of arbitrary baselines and will likely determine actual savings or some other goalposts to give their project a better shine. If you have reviewed papers, articles, or maybe some reports, you know what I mean when I say,…
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Aug 23
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Program Secrets for Large Commercial and Industrial

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Maybe it’s the Implementation Contractor Classic golden opportunities in retro-commissioning include fixing the root cause of the problem rather than trying to treat the symptoms. For example, it may be too cold in a space, so what should be done? Turn up the hot water temperature, of course! No. The problem could be any number of things like a new partition (wall) being installed, isolating one space with a diffuser from another space that has the thermostat. Or my favorite – parking a 1 kW printer under the temperature sensor. We were RCx geniuses in ha school. When our room…
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Aug 16
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Better than Best Programs with Market Transformation

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Last week I couldn’t resist responding to the ISO New England’s report, 2021 Economic Study: Future Grid Reliability Study Phase 1 because it paralleled what I wrote a couple of weeks earlier in Electrification At Scale. This week, we’re back to better than best practices in efficiency programs. Last time I described how downstream rebates are often wealth transfers because they are downstream of key decision points and barriers. As I replied to a job candidate who asked me how I would approach a utility to try to persuade them of this, I described how our purpose for being in…
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Aug 09
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Profiles in Decarb – I Call Ham

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When I started at Michaels millennia ago, we had a brilliant walking encyclopedia of knowledge and engineering know-how. His name was Dave Hamilton, or Ham for short. He was probably 30 years older than me. My boss at the time said Ham knew the answer to any problem. Younger engineers would spend a few weeks to prove he was right. Scaling Electrification A couple of weeks ago, in the final of a series on electrification prompted by the EPRI conference in Charlotte, I wrote in Electrification at Scale that decarb fans need to 1) brace for consequences such as 9,000…
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Aug 02
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Better than Best Program Practices

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When Val Jenson talks, I listen. When he writes, I read. His recent article in Energy Central triggered an avalanche of ideas for a program, portfolio, and industry overhaul needed to get us there, which is the next level of savings equal to the last 25 years of lighting replacements and retrofits. Those days are gone, and unfortunately, the line of thinking that got us here (light bulbs) won’t get us there. Downstream Days are Numbered Let’s start with my favorite need for an overhaul, which is my greatest peeve – rebates and cash incentives to customers, known as a…
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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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