A senior sales director for MXEnergy, “the fastest growing natural gas and electricity retail provider” states, “As we observe the unrest in Egypt and other parts of the world, we recognize the volatility of the natural gas market.” What? He like many others “on both sides of the aisle” use the Middle East and our real dependence on foreign to twang the audience’s emotional strings. The goings on in Egypt will have nearly zero affect on natural gas prices here in the mainland, U.S. Why? Because nearly all of our natural gas is produced here and we import from hostile…
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You know what torques me off, or make that torques us off more than anything else? I’m saving it for a future rant. Stay tuned. No really, it’s “prospective” clients, many times end users that have screwed up buildings beyond reproach or wasting energy as though they just want to release all the carbon locked up in fossil fuels and get it over with. They ask for help but in no way intend to pay for it or take action for anything substantial. We may have even demonstrated, clearly by benchmarking or other means with specific measures that they could…
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A couple weeks ago, the National Academy of Sciences released a study that summarized the findings of the general public’s perceptions of energy consumption and potential savings from various end-uses in their daily lives. You can check out the curves in the linked article above and take my word for it or risk brain damage reading the thing. To me there are several significant findings, none of which surprise me. These are in no particular order and are only a subset of the findings. Finding #1 – When asked open ended questions about ways to save energy, people overwhelmingly selected…
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As you may have heard, this year China powered past (cheesy pun warning) the United States in total energy consumption. Apparently, back in 2007, they surpassed the US in carbon emissions. This makes sense as almost 70% of China’s electricity is derived from coal as compared to just under 50% in the United States. In the U.S., nuclear and natural gas make up most of the other 50%, roughly split evenly with renewable energy rounding out the 100%. In recent years, or especially since President Obama moved into the White House, there have been multiple verbose incomprehensible cap and trade…
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For this week’s publication, I was trying to think of an expensive, short-lived, duplicative, inconvenient, limited use, frivolous novelty. Did I mention expensive? After a half-hour of wonderment, the best I could do is a Homer Simpson bottle opener. But really the Homer Simpson bottle opener will last longer and at least be useful (note, I didn’t say serve it’s purpose, which is to make people laugh) probably for a far longer period than the electric car. Twenty years ago “they” were talking about developing electric cars, I guess to save us from carbon dioxide, but I don’t recall the…
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One way the utility business works like the rest of the economy is that it sells its products/commodities at a price that is higher than the cost of production, on average. The more utilities sell, the greater their gross profit. This is at odds with utilities’ incentive to save energy with energy efficiency programs. As a result, some utility executives are opposed to energy efficiency programs. That is a short-sighted view but that’s a story for a different day. As a result of this dichotomy, a pricing mechanism known as decoupling has been developed. This NREL paper gives a pretty…
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Yay! I’m outside working on my computer for the first time this year. Alright, who cares? Every week I plow through news-clipping services to see what is going on, to build my topic list, which is piling up faster than the weeks pass. This week I had to shelve 4-5 great topics to again take on the recently arisen climate bill. Many huge utilities and other giant energy users and associations are lauding the Kerry-Lieberman-Graham bill. These institutions include the American Wind Association, Duke Energy, Dow Chemical, Florida Power and Light, T. Boone Pickens, National Resources Defense Council, Steelworkers Union,…
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I hate electricity. I love what it allows me to do but I just don’t understand it. I sat through an in-house safety training session on arc flash, which I actually understood – there is a huge burst of energy through a “fault” that melts and actually vaporizes the copper conductor, which expands 7,000 times at Mach 2 and 1 million degrees F (made up numbers but the premise is correct). It’s one heck of an explosion. During a break I was asking our electrical engineers what the difference between a neutral and ground was, the flow of electrons, the…
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Thousands, make that millions of people, including some smart people and congress people, when talking solutions for our energy efficiency low-carbon future are continuously babbling about “technology” that will save us all. Bill Gates says we need Miracles. Whadahyou talking about man? The White House announces $130 million for a new building energy efficiency effort - “a multi-agency initiative to spur regional economic growth while making buildings more energy efficient.” It will be “an Energy Innovation Hub focused on developing new technologies to improve the design of energy-efficient building systems”. Get ready for cold fusion to reemerge. Let me tell…
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This week – a little diversion into engineering. Go ahead. Shake those goose bumps out. There are three universal laws of thermodynamics but I’m not going to explain them all now or you might fall asleep and hit your head on the table. I will only cover one of them. A law is essentially a theory of something that has never been disproven. One of these laws indicates the direction of all processes. Heat travels from hot to cold. Water runs downhill. However, heat can travel from cold to hot and water can go up hill if you add energy. …
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