Last week a Yahoo News reporter headlined an article, Biden Administration Seeks to Lower Industrial Greenhouse Gas Emissions-and-That-Won't Be Easy. My first reaction: It won’t be easy to decarbonize any sector: residential, commercial, industrial, and transportation, although I did see that, like wind energy, the passenger blimp is making a comeback (say whaaat?). Will it replace passenger jets? I don’t think so. I focus on the above-linked article and industrial electrification and decarbonization in this post. The Yahoo author references the chart below for shares of GHG emissions. I assume that emissions from electricity generation are not double counted into…
Read More
When I stick my neck out, it’s often nice to discover others are on board to slow down the machete. I stash potential topics in an electronic pile, and when something triggers a need, I’m ready to go. This time, a co-presenter triggered me as I was delivering an electrification presentation for the Wisconsin Public Utility Institute’s Utilities Basics Course. The co-presenter was Erin Monroe-Nye, who discussed and provided the essentials of energy efficiency programs. Erin described a scenario in which she wanted to install a cold-weather heat pump. She got resistance and a runaround from her HVAC contractor. I…
Read More
Last week several of us at Michaels bemoaned the hazards of operations and maintenance (O&M), controls, and behavioral programs. The specific discussion was about the ubiquitous rooftop unit, like those shown on the box-store roof below. The discussion could have been about anything other than light bulbs. Measures in a portfolio come with a spectrum of savings risk from baselines, to hours of use, to risks associated with operation once deployed. Next week I think I’ll analyze an entire portfolio of risks and give those risks relative scores. For instance, many measures depend on the baseline – not necessarily the…
Read More