Have you had your fill of Occupy Wall Street, (OWS) which has spilled over into dinky, surrounding, wannabe towns including one nearby with a population of a whopping 4,000? Apparently, these in-duh-viduals are protesting rich people and the fact that the rich keep getting richer and the poor, well, are the poor. My response: that’s life. Life isn’t fair. I don’t like the word “fair”. Rather, I like “not cheating”. “Fair” is too often used by whiners. Some of these OWSers are self described anarchists and communists. Oh yeah, there you go. That’s what we need is communism. There’s a…
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Natural gas utilities tend to howl about making EE goals because it is much more difficult to capture savings for natural gas than it is for electricity. With one giant exception, lighting, this isn’t really true and I do not agree. Lighting retrofit/replacement is indeed easy for a number of reasons: Utility DSM product managers and account managers understand it. Customers understand it. Lighting upgrades improve lighting brightness and color rendering. Some level of investigative analytical study is NOT required. With the exception of early T8 electronic ballast technologies, maintenance is reduced, at minimum because the customer has new equipment…
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State and federal budgets are headed for the cliff to varying degrees with few exceptions. Here in Wisconsin, we’ve had the Battle Royale fight to the death cage match with the repubs on one side and the unions on the other while the dems were hiding out in a witness protection plan. Meanwhile at the federal level, we are on a dangerous trajectory unseen in my lifetime. People have whined about the deficit and debt since my adolescence – the Miracle on Ice days against the Soviet Union. I kept saying, “It’s not a problem. It’s not a problem.” Why? …
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I know next to nothing, no, make that nothing about anthropology. However, on several occasions I have read that throughout the animal kingdom, every social group, pack, pod, litter, colony, team, board of supervisors, has an alpha that leads the bunch. This holds true for humans although the outward authority of the alpha differs a lot from one group to another. Take for example a board of directors for a non-profit, a school board, and for-profit enterprises. The alpha may simply guide discussions at meetings, keep things on track and moving along and assist the group in coming to a…
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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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If there’s one thing that most people painfully realized over the past couple years, it’s that there is risk in putting your money in anything in hopes of earning a return on investment. Riding a company into bankruptcy is an obvious one. I’ve done that several times by investing in fast-growing start-ups, initial public offerings (IPO) and stock options. Invest $3,000 for 100 shares of common stock and a few years later the company emerges from bankruptcy (isn’t that a cute phrase – it sounds like a daffodil blooming in spring but it’s more like rummaging for your charred silverware…
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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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