I was recently pushed over the edge again by multiple opinion pieces declaring that energy efficiency is a waste of time and money because of rebound effect. Rebound basically means that if consumers buy an efficient appliance, car, or light bulb, they will simply use it more and therefore save less, or even use more energy at the proverbial “end of the day”. First in this series was an opinion piece from a Cal State Fullerton professor published in The Wall Street Journal. Below is my response to the journal: Robert J. Michaels’ commentary on August 20th suggests energy efficiency…
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A couple weeks ago, I wrote about nationalizing pieces of energy efficiency programs, namely technical resource manuals from which energy impacts (savings) and measure costs are derived. The post explained why this is a bad idea for a number of reasons. This week features chaos at the state level. It seems states with their energy efficiency policies are parallel to people who go to Washington DC and operate in the alternate universe inside the beltway. The longer they exist, the more schizophrenic and/or demented and/or dysfunctional they become. Utilities are forced, for lack of a better term, by regulators to meet…
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Jeff Erickson of Navigant Consulting presented an interesting paper at last week’s American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE) Summer Study for Buildings. The title was, “Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party Battle over Energy Efficiency.” I thought it was just clever (aka bait and switch) advertising, but the presentation featured, almost exclusively, how the free market, small government tea party and the profit-bad, regulation-good occupiers might view energy efficiency. The tea party would favor consumer choice for incandescent light bulbs and gas guzzlers over government regulation of these common, and other uncommon for that matter, consumer goods. …
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Rant fans are getting a break this week. This post exemplifies a smashing success in energy efficiency and is a bit of a spinoff on capitalizing energy efficiency as I discussed in Facility Management, Taliban Style and Better than Doritos. The story begins with a board meeting for the Iowa Association for Energy Efficiency. BTW, this is the least expensive, far and away, greatest-benefit-per-dollar-invested energy efficiency organization in the country. The board meeting was at an apartment complex, Sun Prairie, in West Des Moines or thereabouts. As I pulled in with 134F heat at 9:30 AM, I was thinking, “Is…
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It has been a while since I’ve written anything about programs, so here it goes. Program evaluation provides about half our business, and much of that is verifying gross savings estimates, which are simply the original program-claimed savings. Verifying custom projects, those that don’t fall into mass categories like light bulbs and air conditioners, are generally more interesting, at least from an energy analysis perspective. Findings from the field can be follical (new word derived from folly) for any type of measure. Implementers of custom efficiency programs, especially implementers not accustomed to the evaluation process, can be especially entertaining. In…
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Here is some good news in my view. Despite nearly 40 years of political claptrap to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, technology from the private sector, not cockamamie pie in the sky, physics-defying dumb ideas will deliver it. That is, unless of course Washington snatches defeat from the jaws of victory, which it is 100% capable of doing. I went looking for data on our dependence on foreign oil since the first oil shocks of the 1970s. There is one significant dip in the import percentage Figure 1 and that is due to (1) a deep recession in the early…
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I was becoming concerned this week at rant time, Sunday morning, 9:00 AM. We had our company picnic the day before on an overcast and nearly perfect day in cheese land. Sunday was similar. There were orioles, grosbeaks, yellow finches, house finches, ruby throated hummingbirds, downy woodpeckers, red breasted woodpeckers, cardinals, nuthatches, chickadees and other customers freeloading on our smorgasbord of bird offerings. But then while reviewing my sources, one of which is the Google energy efficiency updates, emailed promptly at 4:51 PM CDT everyday, I came across this cheery piece. There’s the topic of the week. It started out…
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As blasted in this blog many times, most recently in Widgetman, humans almost always have their priorities far out of whack. With EE for example, facility owners should probably establish marshal law to ensure lights are shut off overnight in their office buildings before they start adding photovoltaic panels. But then, I guess, to the casual observer (schlep) one can see how green the building is during the day, but at night when the building is lit like the headlamp of an oncoming train when no one is there, the wonderful PV panels cannot be seen and nobody pays attention…
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Last week ACEEE produced a webinar, “Intelligent Efficiency”. I was late to the party but as I came online, an ACEEE guy, Neal Elliott was talking and the topic was intriguing – system-wide, holistic, intelligent efficiency. I thought, hmm, maybe somebody read this entire series of rants and was possibly preaching from the gospels of the obvious. Next up was a guy from Schneider Electric and he gave a boring advertisement of – Schneider Electric. Next was a guy from Johnson Controls to talk about what else – the Empire State building. The Empire State Building EE overhaul has been…
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This week’s feature presentation is one of my favorites for saving energy: automobiles. Let’s take this recent post from Fuel Fix and dive right in. The first one I read is “make sure your gas cap is broken or missing.” That’s right. You can save 3 cents per gallon if it is broken or missing. I think they need some proofreading. I suggest using a well-oiled and fully functional gas cap. Where they get the 3 cents per gallon savings, I have no idea. That’s like saying a 20 minute power walk will reduce the energy content of a milkshake…
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