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Jun 03
Love1

Turbulence, Tribes, and Climate Change

By Energy Rant No Comments
The topic of climate change is fascinating to me because I love to learn why people believe what they believe. I wrote last week that climate change policy is firmly and forever intertwined in political warfare. Does anyone stand alone on an island isolated from their tribe on anything?  Maybe five out of one hundred on an issue or two, but for the most part, no. This is where I come in – I love stirring the pot. A few months back, a friend forwarded a link to Global Warming for the Two Cultures, by Richard LIndzen, Professor of Meteorology,…
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May 13
Love0

NMEC Hedgehogs and Straw Dogs

By Energy Rant No Comments
As the third in a series, we are going to wrap up the normalized metered energy consumption (NMEC) protocol groundwork this week. See the first and second posts to catch up in case you missed those. The first post covered new construction programs for which NMEC doesn’t apply because a baseline of normalized energy use is needed for NMEC. The first post introduced non-routine events (NREs), which are random and not accounted for in any model. The second post explained that NMEC is ideal for residential behavior and weatherization programs. The second post explained that because of several specific NRE…
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Apr 29
Love0

NMEC and Routine Monkey Wrenches

By Energy Rant 2 Comments
Normalized metered energy consumption, or NMEC, is another name for the nerdy term, EM&V 2.0. Why the switch? Maybe en-meck spills out of the mouth a little easier. Maybe EM&V 2.0 got the bad rap it deserved as I explained a couple years ago in Whale Bus or Airbus and Automated M&V in Your Dreams. We need not only the user's manuals for how to deploy NMEC; we need protocols for how to apply NMEC, where it works well, and where it doesn’t. NMEC Explained The following would never happen, but I need a way to explain how NMEC works…
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Apr 15
Love0

The PG&E Bankruptcy – Scorched Earth

By Energy Rant No Comments
This blog features dozens of posts regarding the nuances, obscurities, and upside down world of the public utility industry. To wit, every other industry provides things people need or want at the lowest possible price in competition with dozens or even hundreds of competitors or alternatives. Conversely, electric utilities with transmission and distribution systems are fully regulated with an obligation to serve all customers. Those customers have no other choice. The show must go on. To financially destroy a utility serves no one but attorneys. This post is about the bankruptcy and viability of the nation’s largest investor-owned utility, Pacific…
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Jan 21
Love0

Pay 4-Performance Sequel

By Energy Rant 3 Comments
For some strange reason, I’ve learned a lot about pay for performance in recent weeks. To spare tongues everywhere, let’s call it P4P. P4P efficiency programs are on the move once again. It is interesting to note that the last time P4P was the rage was during the deregulation gambit, almost 20 years ago. Like denim preferences, what goes around comes around with efficiency fads. The Original One of the most popular programs during the prior faddy P4P era was called a “Standard Offer” program. What marketing genius(es) coined that brand? I like metaphors, but I can’t think of any…
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Jan 07
Love0
Percent GHG Savings

Ethanol – Where Physics, Politics, and Emission Limits Collide

By Energy Rant One Comment
I recently researched many attributes and market effects for liquid fuels for a project we are working on, and like my digging into the wind and climate studies, this research results in several findings. This post covers ethanol and gasoline blends. A future post will cover fuel cost and impacts on electric vehicles and utilities. My journey began with the ethanol market. We produce a lot of corn-derived ethanol here in the northern plains. By 2020 there may be a big demand for Midwest ethanol as California caps the carbon intensity of its liquid fuels. The cap, part of their…
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Jan 02
Love0
energy history

Lessons from a Smart Thermostat Assessment

By Energy Rant No Comments
Many of us at Michaels are gluttons for data and accompanying analysis. Our homes are test beds. In this post, we look at impacts from smart thermostats, the dangers of wrong assumptions, and extrapolating findings for impact evaluation. Every smart thermostat evaluation I’ve seen uses billing regression models to estimate savings. Unfortunately, this provides an answer and typically not one smart thermostat makers like. The evaluations typically provide no “why” to the results, and therefore, smart thermostat programs go unimproved. Test Bed Description My single family home was built in 1934, has crumby, double-pane, double-hung windows, and unknown amounts of…
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Dec 10
Love0

Why Would Wind Turbines Warm the Planet? Find Out Here

By Energy Rant No Comments
Last week we started to learn how wind turbines impact the environment from a global warming perspective. As an engineer, I have to understand the physics behind that, and in the meantime, I chased one rabbit and found that even though the wind dies down at night, more wind energy is generated at night. It’s amazing. It’s cool. Check it out. Let us refer back to the paper that started all this, Climatic Impacts of Wind Power. Results of analysis published in the paper indicate the warming effect is “approximately equivalent to the reduced warming achieved by decarbonizing global electricity…
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Nov 05
Love0

Goals – Think Big or Step Aside

By Energy Rant One Comment
Featured Micro-Rant: Anyone who thinks or says, “We’re all efficient. The candy is gone. The cow is dry. The turkey is cooked. The apple tree died. It’s time to quit.” IS WRONG. (yes, that was me yelling) I believe, as demonstrated last week, that the greater savings and more cost-effective savings are waiting to be harvested through engagement and dispersion of timely, relevant information to energy users. Let us continue from last week with discussions of how to arm building operators to slay their own drift of energy hogs. Information, inspiration, a little direction, and a destination are very powerful…
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Sep 10
Love0

Tooling Pay for Performance

By Energy Rant 3 Comments
A blog post from OpenEE with a title M&V Adjustments Create a Bias Towards Savings Inflation is a good troll for a guy like me – a cynic who can’t stop writing the Rant even when I tried to quit a dozen times.Anyone with a pulse needs a relief valve, and the Rant does the job for me. Products designed to reduce stress, like stress balls or foam bricks, would never work. For instance, if I want to get even with a computer, do I want to grab one of these things and start squeezing? No. I want to take…
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All things energy. That’s our jam.

We talk a lot about energy – from the serious to the satirical.

All things energy. That’s our jam.

We talk a lot about energy – from the serious to the satirical.

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