Archive for May, 2010

As posted to Cleantechblog.com

The concept of an “audit” is something that is inherently, well, unsettling. The word itself implies that you might have done something wrong, and someone is coming to catch you and punish you. For sure, no one wants to face the prospect of an IRS audit.Of course, that’s not the sole or even main reason that I’ve never undertaken an energy audit for my house. It’s not an excuse, but an explanation to say that I’ve simply been too preoccupied with other matters to go through the effort of finding a qualified firm to perform an energy audit. And frankly, I had no idea whether an audit would cost $100 (easily acceptable) or $1,000 (too much!).

So it was with a bit of relief actually when a firm called GreenStreet Solutions sent me a mailer offering an energy audit for $199. No longer burdened with finding a firm to do the work, and knowing that the price was one I could afford, I gave them a call to schedule a visit.

I was very pleased. A two-man team from GreenStreet came to my 1978-era house for a three-hour tour (sing along: “a three-hour tour”), and they found some pretty interesting results. I wasn’t surprised to discover that certain of the walls and ceilings were underinsulated. However, I was shocked to see that the biggest source of thermal leakage was out of my basement, through the front stoop.

Armed with a host of data collected from the building envelope, thermal images from scanning, and my prior year’s gas and electric bills, the GreenStreet team went off to prepare an assessment. A couple weeks later, the lead analyst returned for an evening debrief with me and my wife, handing us a bound report summarizing the findings and suggesting measures to implement.

The results: at 50 Pascals of pressure, 5,135 cubic feet of air per minute was leaking through the building shell of my home, relative to a target of 2,299 for a reference home of comparable size. To combat this, GreenStreet proposed three packages of solutions – bronze, silver, and gold – to reduce the leaks. To my wife and me, the Silver package looked the best (the most bang for the buck), entailing $9,738 of outlays to save an estimated $2,288 annual heating costs, for a projected average payback of 4.3 years. Surprisingly, savings on air conditioning expenses are not calculated.

In addition, GreenStreet provided a bag full of goodies to further help reduce energy. For instance, we were given a Kill-A-Watt meter to measure appliance consumption rates and phantom loads. Though I haven’t yet gone around the house to develop a list, it sounds like a pretty fun project some rainy afternoon.

Also, GreenStreet gave us a bunch of thermal insulating gaskets for outlets and light switches. I installed these the other day, and in removing the covers, it’s really amazing to see how much thermal leakage is likely to occur through these huge uninsulated gaps. Parents: Installing these gaskets would be an excellent project to give to your teenager to undertake.

As for implementing the audit results, we were prepared to authorize a go-ahead until the GreenStreet salesperson noted that a bill was winding its way through Congress to reimburse up to $8,000 (with no ceiling on income levels) for weatherization efforts. And since the bill wouldn’t be retroactive, we would be better off waiting for the bill to pass, which is expected this summer. We thanked him for divulging this important opportunity and asked him to have GreenStreet call us when the bill passed.

He further noted that a bill was moving through the Ohio legislature to reimburse the $199 we paid for the energy audit, too, and informed us that we would be notified if this were to pass as well.

I was really impressed with the audit by GreenStreet: very professional and not pushy. The GreenStreet agent noted that their parent company was Vectren, a gas and electric utility based in Southern Indiana, which leads me to wonder if all energy audits should be performed by companies that have a corporate parent that is a utility possessing sufficient financial wherewithal and expertise on energy-related issues.

However, unless the utility has revenue-/profit-decoupling mechanisms in place, it’s clear in my mind that an audit can’t effectively be done by the local utility, which may be subject to conflicts of interest by threatening to cannibalize their core business by reducing energy consumption.

In all respects, my wife and I actually enjoyed this audit, and we recommend a similar type of audit for anyone who wants to make their personal contribution to the cleantech challenge.

As posted to CleanTechBlog.com

While it is increasingly recognized that subsidies for corn-based ethanol are bad policy, a nod must be given to C. Ford Runge, a professor at the University of Minnesota, for his pithy and merciless analysis in his note “Biofuel Backlash,” published in the May/June issue of Technology Review.

In the space of just a few short paragraphs, Prof. Runge cites the work of Earth Track (a firm dedicated to exposing subsidies detrimental to the environment) projecting $400 billion of U.S. subsidies to ethanol from 2008 to 2022, notes a recent estimate by the Earth Policy Institute that the 2008 U.S. corn crop diverted for ethanol production would have been sufficient to feed 330 million people for a year, and provides a reference to modelling that indicates a near doubling of greenhouse gas emissions because of changes in land-use patterns associated with corn-for-ethanol production.

It’s amazing that such awful policies, which are so adverse on so many dimensions, can survive. But in the gameboard that is U.S. energy, environmental, and agricultural policy, only grand compromises supported by the big boys can get enacted. These are then extremely difficult to overturn when they are seen to be nothing more than gifts to their well-positioned and deep-pocketed sponsors and supporters.

Reiterating a point I’ve made before: I have nothing against ethanol, per se. Cellulosic ethanol, if it can be accomplished cost effectively, is a promising prospect for reducing greenhouse gases and reliance on Middle East petroleum without chewing up valuable foodstuffs. But corn-based ethanol plainly sucks.  And the notion of using corn-based ethanol as a bridge to cellulosic ethanol is dubious, at best.

The old adage says that a camel is a horse designed by committee. Were it that U.S. biofuels policies were as lovely as a camel.

As posted to CleanTechBlog.com

The oil spill in the Gulf continues to astound. It’s now reported that BP has spent $350 million so far on clean-up, and that the total tab will run from $2 billion to $14 billion.

Maybe BP can make up the billions in lost shareholder value via other dubious means:  Bookmaker.com is running odds on whether the containment strategy being attempted will decrease or increase spill rates.

In this ecological disaster, a lot of dollars and not much sense is involved.

As posted to CleanTechBlog.com

In the past month, we’ve witnessed two major catastrophes associated with U.S. production of fossil fuels: the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion killing 11 workers in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Massey Upper Big Branch coal mine explosion claiming 29 lives in West Virginia.

It’s easy to vilify energy companies like BP and Massey for being reckless at these operations. No doubt, there will be lots of investigation in the months to come, and tighter regulations and legal action in the years to come. Scrutiny is definitely deserved, new requirements may be forthcoming, and severe punishments may well be in the offing.

Rather than focus on the obvious human cost of these tragedies, and the truly frightening ecological disaster currently unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico, I choose to comment herein on the profound implications of our long-followed energy policy, which I term as “cheap energy at any price.”

For the most part, our problems do not lie with fossil fuel producers. Certainly, they must be held to certain safety and environmental standards – and in these two cases, these standards do not appear to have been met. But that does not mean that all oil and coal companies are led by evil people, and that their employees are complicit conspirators in misdeeds against humanity and the planet.

No, it’s far too easy to take that oversimplistic and misguided position.

Pretty much every reader of this post will willingly use fossil fuels today – in the coal burned to generate the electricity to power your computer, in the petroleum burned to move you to your place of work.

Let’s not forget that fossil fuels have been an instrumental factor in the huge leaps in quality of life over the past 100 years. It is this utter reliance by all of us on these fossil fuels that compels companies and people to supply these fuels. And of course, to try to make a profit in doing so. After all, that is the American way.

These two disasters are the exception, not the rule. More fundamentally, the problem is not on the supply side, but on the demand side.

Fossil fuel companies are not the bad guys. They supply a product that will remain vital for years to come.

We have met the enemy, and it is us.

It is time for us to dedicate ourselves to putting virtually all of our incremental attention, money, and efforts toward an energy system not nearly so dependent upon fossil fuels. And we need to accept imposing such a discipline upon ourselves – for instance, by being willing to establish stronger price signals in the energy markets to drive our society in that direction.

In other words, we must stop the “cheap energy at all costs” mentality that has pervaded our thinking for decades.

As Albert Einstein is said to have noted, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” In the case of energy, if we keep putting all of our eggs in the fossil fuel basket, all we can expect are more human and ecological tragedies.

Only a few of these tragedies will be very visible and instantaneous, as in these two explosions. The worse tragedies are long-term and hidden: climate change, depletion of finite and irreplaceable resources, continued reliance on supplies from objectionable sources, and increasing geopolitical conflict leading to resource wars.

Think about the deceased of the Deepwater Horizon and Upper Big Branch, working on an offshore oil rig or underground in a coal mine. Are these the jobs we want to see for the 22nd century? Did these people want their children to be earning a wage in the same way they were?

The best way to honor the dead would be to increase our resolve to move from the fossil fuel past to a new and better future that need not rely so desperately on fossil fuels.

It won’t be easy, quick, or cheap to create a new energy system, but we need to start working much harder to sever the link between fossil fuels and human life. Because escalating reliance on fossil fuels can only be harmful to our long-term social and planetary health.