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energy users

Nov 19
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Carbon tax – avoid the slow-mo sucker punch

By Energy Rant One Comment
If polling managers were competent, we would have election day rather than the election playoffs. For several days they were finding ballots in the usual places anyone normal would stash them, like elementary school classrooms, rental car trunks, vans, and the bottoms of bird cages. Most of the results are in, and the one that facilitates this post, the Washington state carbon tax, went down hard by about 10 percentage points. That is about as big as it gets for a statewide election. In February, I laid out the only carbon tax plan I would get behind, and that is…
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Nov 06
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Why Energy Efficiency? – Five Findings

By Energy Rant No Comments
This year ACEEE published a three-part series on why people and companies invest in energy efficiency. First, they provide some guesstimates of energy efficiency investment in the United States. Their researched estimates vary from $60 billion to about $120 billion, annually. Is this a reasonable guesstimate? According to their State Scorecard, program spending on natural gas and electric demand-side management programs held steady at about $7.5 billion in 2016. Check. The International Energy Agency pegs worldwide investment at $231 billion and about $40 billion in the U.S. Check. As a laugh test, $100 billion is a measly 0.5% of the…
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Mar 27
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Climate Change – Surveys and Truth Telling

By Energy Rant No Comments
I have written rather popular articles on critical thinking and climate change in greenhouse gas basics, tribal views (non-critical thinking) on climate change, and others.  This week, I am going to bring the two together, with this article from the New York Times supplying the data/ammunition for this post. Survey Development Survey development is difficult for getting facts, such as doing phone surveys to assess what types of equipment, appliances, lighting, and so forth energy users have in their homes.  The questions need to be carefully considered, including whether customers will have a clue regarding the equipment in question.  For…
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Aug 01
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performance contracting

Performance Contracting – Getting it Right; Avoiding #1 Matches

By Energy Rant 2 Comments
Per the Energy Services Coalition, energy service companies (ESCOs) that deliver energy savings performance contracts do the following: Identify and evaluate energy-saving opportunities Develop designs and specifications for construction Manage the project to installation and monitoring Arrange financing Train staff and provide ongoing services Guarantee savings will cover all project costs What’s not to like?A band of demons staked out in the contract details. I was reminded of this by this noteworthy article published in Buildings magazine. After discussing the author’s points, I will add plenty of my own guardrails to protect energy users from derailing over the cliff into…
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Nov 30
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Smart Grid Segmentation – Taking on the Dumb Meter Activists

By Energy Rant No Comments
I have written several times about smart grid hype; in particular about a year ago in Deaf and Mute Smart Meter. In that post, I described how utilities could truly treat demand response as a resource by using smart meter data, predictive consumption, and giving customers the power of their smart phone or tablet to participate in the infamous “utility of the future”. Customers want engagement, and they want control. Touché. A recent edition of Public Utilities Fortnightly (subscription) explained that indeed the smart grid is in a coma (my term). The title of the article is Smart Grid Isn’t Dead, but upon reading…
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