Skip to main content
search
Tag

electricity

Jun 17
Love0

Prestige, Not Pain – Efficiency at Home

By Energy Rant 2 Comments
I call your attention to the brilliant marvel of engineering shown in the image below. This model was developed before most of you were born. It is the little diesel engine that could – get 60 mpg, in my second car – a 1984 Ford Escort Diesel. Most people didn’t even know they existed, but as a college sophomore, when I got tired of my crappy, rattling, vibrating, chintzy Mustang, I snapped up this baby for a deep discount from the Billion auto empire in Sioux Falls, SD.There was no air conditioning or power anything, including no power steering. It…
Read More
Jun 10
Love0

Energy Policy – Stay in Your Lane, Bro

By Energy Rant One Comment
Ohio lawmakers are again at the beck and call of deregulated power producing titans as they pass a nuclear and coal plant bailout at the expense of energy efficiency. They also dumped mandates for renewable resources. Almost simultaneously, the Institute for Energy Research (IER) published this brand new report, which compares levelized cost of electricity from existing nuclear plants to that of new wind and solar generation, transmission, and required backup resources. It may explain why Ohio lawmakers did what they did. The word “may” is used because I am firmly convinced the political class is mostly clueless regarding regulated…
Read More
Dec 10
Love0

Why Would Wind Turbines Warm the Planet? Find Out Here

By Energy Rant No Comments
Last week we started to learn how wind turbines impact the environment from a global warming perspective. As an engineer, I have to understand the physics behind that, and in the meantime, I chased one rabbit and found that even though the wind dies down at night, more wind energy is generated at night. It’s amazing. It’s cool. Check it out. Let us refer back to the paper that started all this, Climatic Impacts of Wind Power. Results of analysis published in the paper indicate the warming effect is “approximately equivalent to the reduced warming achieved by decarbonizing global electricity…
Read More
Dec 03
Love0

Dig Some Wind – Blown Away by Inversions

By Energy Rant 2 Comments
As children, some engineers liked to take things apart to see how they worked – and maybe even put them back together. That was too much work for me, but I was curious. I would intently watch my Mom as she accelerated the 1970s Ford Galaxy 500 down the road. What was she doing to make it shift gears? I had to know! Of course, it was an automatic transmission. Today, I see some scientific claims, and I can’t help myself but to dig in and find the big lie, er, the big why. This week’s adventure started two months…
Read More
Oct 15
Love0

ENERGY STAR Gets it Right – Owners Complain

By Energy Rant No Comments
Show me the money, Jerry! That is what I have to say about building energy performance. I don’t care for bling and doohickeys. What is the bottom line at the meter? I surmise that ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager was conceived and developed with the best of intentions to score and rank buildings, at the meter level, for energy performance considering vast factors including building type, hours of use, climate zone and so on. However, as noted in the Lake Wobegon post a few years ago, not all, but most buildings are above average . In that case, the average building…
Read More
Sep 24
Love0

Electricity Subscriptions For Trouble – A Baker’s Dozen

By Energy Rant 4 Comments
The recent edition of Public Utilities Fortnightly features an article that showers virtues of subscribed energy – an all-you-can-eat energy bonanza. There is a reason I’ve grown to crinkle my nose at buffets! Consumers subscribe to Amazon, Netflix, SiriusXM, and per the article, even Lyft is offering a new subscription service for all the rides you want in a month. In the1990s, one token would allow me to ride the New York subway all day – forever actually. Now there is a subscription for you – all the toe fungus, gout, and hair implant remedy ads you can stand for…
Read More
May 21
Love0

A PSA for EMPs

By Energy Rant 2 Comments
Choose a political tribe, and I will tell you their concerns, doubts, fears, and enemies. Those threats I could categorize include climate change, tyrannical government, terrorism, big corporate, national debt, financial collapse, and so forth. Some of those threats are more serious than others and most of them, when mixed with others, produce a much more potent threat. For instance, terrorists with nukes, or corporations using puppets to make bad law that hits everyone else. When you consider a threat, you must consider what you can control, whether it can be prevented or mitigated, at what cost, and what is…
Read More
Apr 23
Love0

The Kilowatt-Hour is Dead, Eh?

By Energy Rant One Comment
The subject line is a response to a recent article in Public Utilities Fortnightly, written by Mark Gabriel, the Administrator and CEO of the Western Area Power Administration. Mr. Gabriel discusses what he sees coming for the utility industry. I am sure he is far more qualified to predict the future than I am, but I can provide my Lilliputian commentary in response to his projections. I may be playing a little loose with Mark’s article, but he seems to indicate the utility industry is on the verge of upheaval. He states the stalwart concerns of utilities, including the strength…
Read More
Mar 06
Love0

Power Factor Cures for Toenail Fungus

By Energy Rant One Comment
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 their faces in their smartphones, which did not yet exist. Instead, choices included looking at the floor or the ceiling, like riding an elevator. God knows you don’t want to make eye contact with the person sitting across from you. At the ceiling were ads for the most socially undesirable products imaginable: cures…
Read More
Feb 27
Love0

Grid Power Generation – Stories Untold

By Energy Rant 2 Comments
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 reader comments. At AESP National, a young gentleman approached me to say the Rant provides good information that is easy to understand and read. He referenced a Greentech Media Energy Gang podcast, which explained as much. At the ~50 minute mark of the podcast, they explain that learning how things work, and being able…
Read More

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.

Subscribe for Expert Insights
Close Menu