An overarching theme of the Energy Rant is that much energy policy has a feel-good foundation of fluff. Last week I ranted about the feel-good dream of having plentiful, inexpensive renewable energy. This will take a miracle because conventional sources are still huge and growing. We have enough coal, natural gas, tar sands, oil shale, and offshore energy to last beyond our kids’ great grandchildren. Of course most readers of this are champions of energy efficiency, but energy efficiency also has too much feel-good fluff. Consider compact fluorescent lights, which despite my rant about it’s mandate a few weeks ago…
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The Wall Street Journal this week weighed in on the ban on incandescent from the energy bill of 2007 signed by Bush to phase out the incandescent light bulb by 2014. Naturally, their opinion is that banning products that are essentially harmless and in demand from citizens is bad policy. As usual, I have multiple points of view on this issue as well. First, I agree with the WSJ that ramming things like this down peoples’ throats is never a good idea. It appears that next month we are going to see the political fallout of such lawmaking processes. In…
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Many posts ago, I wrote “The More You Spend, The More You Save” explaining how poor system control wastes energy but results in even greater energy savings for efficient equipment. For example, consider an air handling system that wastes heating energy provided by an efficient boiler. The boiler saves x% versus a conventional model, so x% multiplied by greater use (wasted energy) results in “more” savings. Recently I picked up on buzz that argues greater efficiency results in greater energy consumption. At one point I recall reading in the Wall Street Journal an editorial that argued more efficient vehicles just…
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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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In many states, energy efficiency programs are meeting annual savings goals and their incentive cash is depleted in a fraction of the year. States where energy efficiency programs are a new offering are especially quick to meet goals. These states include Ohio, Michigan and Illinois. These states rely heavily on lighting, which accounts for somewhere in the range of 90% of the total savings. Even mature states like Wisconsin and California still get well over half their savings from lighting and other prescriptive measures (rebates). Wisconsin surpassed goals and ran out of incentives last program year. There are many ways…
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Automobiles have really changed over the past 30 years, and in some ways for the worse. Back in the 1970s before hardly anyone purchased imports, imports were small and domestic vehicles were hulking behemoths. Then it was the second, or was it the third or fourth – doesn’t matter – energy crisis hit in the late 1970s and domestic cars shrunk in a big way. The Ford Mustang went from a muscle car to feeble runt. A 1982 Mustang was the first car I owned. It was also by far the crappiest car I ever owned. This was the first…
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Jenny Craig customers do it all the time – pay money to consume less. This may make perfect sense to people who understand customers’ needs, but to others it seems really stupid to pay somebody to help use less of something. This is a bit like utility programs that spend money for customers to use less of their product. The vast majority of our energy work comes from referrals and repeat clients. On numerous occasions, we seemed to have customers at the tipping point, only to have them bail out at the last minute. Why? The utility introduced us to…
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I read this article http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2010-01-05-home-energy-efficiency-demand_N.htm and the thought came to mind, “are energy efficiency incentives really incentives pushing people to implement energy efficiency - or coupons offering a discount for energy efficiency measures?” What’s the difference? I would say it’s huge. Retailers abhor it when the trained shopper waits for deep discounts to buy, obviously at a much lower profit margin. Likewise, there is nothing airlines hate worse than an airfare war. Buyers of “American made” automobiles (GM, Ford, Chrysler) have been trained to wait for huge incentives, which is one of the reasons two of three essentially failed. Again,…
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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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