There’s only one thing worse than listening to the Beach Boys. Give up? Listening to the Beach Boys doing Christmas songs. Scarface, which I just watched recently, better puts me in the holiday spirit than listing to a Beach Boys ditty. “Greedy little cockroaches. Goodbye. You wanna play games? Ok. I play with you. You wanna play rough? Ok. Say hello to my LITTLE FRIEND!” – Tony Montana. Deck the halls with boughs of holly falalalalala la la la la. Ratatatatatat. If you hate year in review reports just quit right here because that’s what this is. Our industry is…
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Natural gas utilities tend to howl about making EE goals because it is much more difficult to capture savings for natural gas than it is for electricity. With one giant exception, lighting, this isn’t really true and I do not agree. Lighting retrofit/replacement is indeed easy for a number of reasons: Utility DSM product managers and account managers understand it. Customers understand it. Lighting upgrades improve lighting brightness and color rendering. Some level of investigative analytical study is NOT required. With the exception of early T8 electronic ballast technologies, maintenance is reduced, at minimum because the customer has new equipment…
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This Geography guy really needs to get out of the classroom and the city for that matter once in a while. Modern agriculture is probably demagogued and more poorly understood than energy efficiency, and since this opinion piece addresses both I will dispense with its shredding. I grew up on the farm 30 years ago in southern MN and northern IA, and I stay in touch spending a week each year reliving my childhood farming days. My elder brothers still run the place. They grow maybe 2,500 acres of corn and soybeans and raise and market maybe 25,000 hogs per…
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We interrupt this rant for this special announcement. Our cold spring in the northern plains is wreaking havoc in the form of tornadoes in the southern and middle parts of the country. I think the weather phenomena had a lot to do with my interest in mechanical engineering. Growing up on the farm in the flatlands, I had seen a great many black clouds approaching on the horizon. As they drew closer, they would either brighten to a lighter gray and rain, or they get ugly. If the approach is led by a dark band of clouds followed by blue-green…
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We, as an industry, have our work cut out for us in coming years. Months ago an industrial energy efficiency consortium that puts on training events held a two-day workshop on motors. Motors! Talking about the common Swingline stapler for two days would be more interesting. The efficient motor uses less energy in the amount of the difference in the reciprocals of old minus new. I.e., (1/eff – 1/eff). Multiply by nameplate horsepower then by 0.5 (don’t ask, just do it) then by annual hours of use. Bingo! There are your savings. Two days! There are more complex issues that…
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A senior sales director for MXEnergy, “the fastest growing natural gas and electricity retail provider” states, “As we observe the unrest in Egypt and other parts of the world, we recognize the volatility of the natural gas market.” What? He like many others “on both sides of the aisle” use the Middle East and our real dependence on foreign to twang the audience’s emotional strings. The goings on in Egypt will have nearly zero affect on natural gas prices here in the mainland, U.S. Why? Because nearly all of our natural gas is produced here and we import from hostile…
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I’ve corralled a mishmash of rather preposterous short stories for the year end rant. This will be historic so be sure to pass it on to your enemies. Case 1 comes from Engineered Systems Magazine or ES Magazine. I was catching up on my stack of trade magazines over Christmas weekend (is this sick or what? – but it can be about as entertaining as National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation). September’s “Case in Point” features an energy-saving project for Bangor Maine’s Discovery Museum, delivered by Honeywell. An audit was followed by implementation of cost-effective measures. The audit was completed in 2008…
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I stay in hotels/motels probably 40-50 nights per year, at least it seems so. If lodging facilities were in a league of teams competing to be the greenest facilities, these guys would be the Detroit Lions. Most franchise motels, those not located in downtown high rise buildings, are built with the cheapest, crappiest stuff possible. The only thing that is decent in them is the TV but sometimes even that is a junky 19 inch CRT clunker. Who has spent a night in room with through-wall air conditioner/heater with a temperature control knob that spins round and round like the…
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As you may have heard, this year China powered past (cheesy pun warning) the United States in total energy consumption. Apparently, back in 2007, they surpassed the US in carbon emissions. This makes sense as almost 70% of China’s electricity is derived from coal as compared to just under 50% in the United States. In the U.S., nuclear and natural gas make up most of the other 50%, roughly split evenly with renewable energy rounding out the 100%. In recent years, or especially since President Obama moved into the White House, there have been multiple verbose incomprehensible cap and trade…
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A couple weeks ago I beat up electric automobiles for being overpriced and unpractical due to their short driving ranges and cripplingly long charge times. This week I present a saner approach to substantial energy and emissions reductions. The electric car is the equivalent of installing renewable energy sources before making conventional systems and technologies as efficient as possible in buildings. Like buildings, we can cost effectively cut personal transportation energy consumption substantially, without sacrificing anything with readily available technologies - rather than pouring gobs of money into technologies that are just five years away from prime time; like they…
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