Another good article from the ACEEE.
http://aceee.org/pubs/e094.pdf?CFID=3710536&CFTOKEN=49469457
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Stay Tuned for the Publication of My Book
I have decided to rename it. It is with the publisher. I will post as soon as it is released.
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
Electrotherapy and the Early Uses of Electricity
The public had to be convinced of the safety and reliability of electricity. They worried about the physical repercussions of this unproved technology. They read about electrocutions in the papers, worried about the effects of electricity on their bodies, and the effect of electric light on their eyesight. They wondered if they were upsetting nature by harnessing electricity for the purpose of their own material gain and if they were being foolhardy to invite such a powerful force into their homes. They also had trouble finding electricians.
Edison and other inventors of that time struggled to find purposes or uses for their inventions. For example, they wondered what one would do with a telephone. It is so seamlessly integrated into our lives today that this seems a strange question; but shortly after its original invention, people couldn’t imagine needing one. They already had the telegraph for communicating with others over long distances. Why would they need a phone? For some time, it failed to capture the public’s imagination. Some people believed that the phone would work like the telegraph with operators forwarding voice messages, receiving them back, and then passing them on to the customer. Some saw them as a kind of intercom system with which to summon the servants. But, generally, a phone in the home seemed frivolous and potentially invasive. By the time the first 50,000 phones were installed they were mostly located in businesses.
Edison had a similar dilemma imagining uses for the phonograph. He struggled to think of occasions for which people would need one. Of course, he was near deaf; so it might have been harder for him to imagine than most. And as for electricity, if its purpose was simply to provide people with a replacement for gas lighting, many people wondered, why they should bother. Throughout the late nineteenth century, electric stoves and sewing machines were simply futuristic visions. Without a purpose for electricity, the public was slow to adopt it. More than thirty years after Edison invented the incandescent light bulb in 1879 and soon after installed a lighting system in a business section of Lower Manhattan, barely 10 percent of American homes were wired. Even after World War One, that percentage rose to only 20 percent.
Mostly, the press led public thought regarding these new inventions. For the newspapers, electricity and light were ways to draw readers to their pages, a curiosity about which they would want to read; but for the readers, electricity was not for everyday life. Stoking these misgivings, newspapers frequently reported electric fires and accidental electrocutions. They also published long lists of precautions for people who tried to install electricity. The journal Science wrote about a disease called photo-electric opthalmia, a disease of the eye that people got from the action of electric lights on the eyes.
Oddly, for all that it was feared as a source of energy and light, the application of electricity as a medical therapy spread rapidly, embraced enthusiastically by physicians and patients alike. They accepted electricity as a positive force in healing. “Is Electricity Life?” asked Henry Lake in the Popular Science Monthly in 1873. The question was hardly new and neither was his answer—an enthusiastic and lyrical yes. Like generations of writers who claimed that electricity was the essential animating force, Lake characterized electricity as nurturing, benign, generous, and protective. “It is the very soul of the universe,” he declared. “It permeates all space, surrounds the earth, and is found in every part of it.... It is naturally the most peaceful element in creation. It is eminently social, and nestles around the form it inhabits. Unlike many human specimens, it never desires to keep all its good to itself, but is every ready to diffuse its beneficence.”
Electrotherapy was a popular treatment for various human maladies in the 1800s. Skeptical of drugs, patients were eager to find other ways to cure illness and feel better. Physicians looking to build their practices positioned themselves as being the best professional option for administering electrotherapy, which was claimed to replenish depleted nervous systems and to cure neurasthenia, which appeared to be their terminology for depression and anxiety. One form of electrotherapy was the “electric hand” by which the physician administered electricity that flowed through his body into the patient’s body via the physician’s hand. The patient’s feet rested on a piece of copper attached to a negative electrode; the physician held the positive electrode in a sponge and moved the sponge over the patient’s body, squeezing water out of the sponge periodically to vary the current. Other treatments included baths that involved submerging patients in electrified water, after which patients attested to increased appetites, decreased digestive problems, and a feeling of tranquility. Since the physician controlled the levels of electricity, patients rarely were “cured” in one session and usually had to visit the physician frequently over a prolonged period of time to garner the results sought.
Society also saw a link between electricity, magnetism, and sexuality. The language of electricity became a rich source of metaphor for sexual prowess and erotic feelings. It was believed that electricity animated the body and the mind—that emotions, thought, and will were all somehow driven or affected by electrical energy. All the new inventions of the time, particularly electricity, threatened society’s beliefs, causing people to turn to them more fervently. Spiritualism in the later 1800s in the U.S. was strong, many believe, as a way for people to deal with the grief from losses they experienced in the aftermath of the Civil War. In their spiritual zeal, people rejected science and its discoveries.
Edison and other inventors of that time struggled to find purposes or uses for their inventions. For example, they wondered what one would do with a telephone. It is so seamlessly integrated into our lives today that this seems a strange question; but shortly after its original invention, people couldn’t imagine needing one. They already had the telegraph for communicating with others over long distances. Why would they need a phone? For some time, it failed to capture the public’s imagination. Some people believed that the phone would work like the telegraph with operators forwarding voice messages, receiving them back, and then passing them on to the customer. Some saw them as a kind of intercom system with which to summon the servants. But, generally, a phone in the home seemed frivolous and potentially invasive. By the time the first 50,000 phones were installed they were mostly located in businesses.
Edison had a similar dilemma imagining uses for the phonograph. He struggled to think of occasions for which people would need one. Of course, he was near deaf; so it might have been harder for him to imagine than most. And as for electricity, if its purpose was simply to provide people with a replacement for gas lighting, many people wondered, why they should bother. Throughout the late nineteenth century, electric stoves and sewing machines were simply futuristic visions. Without a purpose for electricity, the public was slow to adopt it. More than thirty years after Edison invented the incandescent light bulb in 1879 and soon after installed a lighting system in a business section of Lower Manhattan, barely 10 percent of American homes were wired. Even after World War One, that percentage rose to only 20 percent.
Mostly, the press led public thought regarding these new inventions. For the newspapers, electricity and light were ways to draw readers to their pages, a curiosity about which they would want to read; but for the readers, electricity was not for everyday life. Stoking these misgivings, newspapers frequently reported electric fires and accidental electrocutions. They also published long lists of precautions for people who tried to install electricity. The journal Science wrote about a disease called photo-electric opthalmia, a disease of the eye that people got from the action of electric lights on the eyes.
Oddly, for all that it was feared as a source of energy and light, the application of electricity as a medical therapy spread rapidly, embraced enthusiastically by physicians and patients alike. They accepted electricity as a positive force in healing. “Is Electricity Life?” asked Henry Lake in the Popular Science Monthly in 1873. The question was hardly new and neither was his answer—an enthusiastic and lyrical yes. Like generations of writers who claimed that electricity was the essential animating force, Lake characterized electricity as nurturing, benign, generous, and protective. “It is the very soul of the universe,” he declared. “It permeates all space, surrounds the earth, and is found in every part of it.... It is naturally the most peaceful element in creation. It is eminently social, and nestles around the form it inhabits. Unlike many human specimens, it never desires to keep all its good to itself, but is every ready to diffuse its beneficence.”
Electrotherapy was a popular treatment for various human maladies in the 1800s. Skeptical of drugs, patients were eager to find other ways to cure illness and feel better. Physicians looking to build their practices positioned themselves as being the best professional option for administering electrotherapy, which was claimed to replenish depleted nervous systems and to cure neurasthenia, which appeared to be their terminology for depression and anxiety. One form of electrotherapy was the “electric hand” by which the physician administered electricity that flowed through his body into the patient’s body via the physician’s hand. The patient’s feet rested on a piece of copper attached to a negative electrode; the physician held the positive electrode in a sponge and moved the sponge over the patient’s body, squeezing water out of the sponge periodically to vary the current. Other treatments included baths that involved submerging patients in electrified water, after which patients attested to increased appetites, decreased digestive problems, and a feeling of tranquility. Since the physician controlled the levels of electricity, patients rarely were “cured” in one session and usually had to visit the physician frequently over a prolonged period of time to garner the results sought.
Society also saw a link between electricity, magnetism, and sexuality. The language of electricity became a rich source of metaphor for sexual prowess and erotic feelings. It was believed that electricity animated the body and the mind—that emotions, thought, and will were all somehow driven or affected by electrical energy. All the new inventions of the time, particularly electricity, threatened society’s beliefs, causing people to turn to them more fervently. Spiritualism in the later 1800s in the U.S. was strong, many believe, as a way for people to deal with the grief from losses they experienced in the aftermath of the Civil War. In their spiritual zeal, people rejected science and its discoveries.
One of the First Uses for Electricity
I am really interested in how energy and particularly electricity use was adopted early on in the US. Here is one early example of electricity as a disruptive innovation.
"One notable early use of electricity was the electrocution of criminals. It was chosen as a humane substitute for beheading and hanging, which were both considered barbaric, cruel, and, in the case of the guillotine, too French. The American public preferred a method that would lead to a quicker death. When hanged, bodies would often gasp, twitch, and convulse with pain for some time after the platform was removed from under the criminal’s feet.
Electrocution was proposed to be much quicker and painless. Physicians for the most part were not in favor of this solution because they worried it would taint the popularity of electrotherapy. (More on this topic later) Electricians also objected to this use as they didn’t want electricity to be associated with death. But Edison and other promoters of electricity persevered, and after much experimentation on all types and sizes of live animals, the first criminal electrocution in the U.S. took place on August 4, 1890.
Witnesses, including the jurors who convicted him for murdering his lover, attended the execution of William Kemmler in Auburn, New York. Although the current was supposed to stay on for twenty seconds, the witnesses were so horrified that they screamed for the proceedings to stop after seventeen seconds. As it turns out, it wasn’t certain that Kemmler was dead. A physician thought his heart was still beating, and others heard his throat gurgling and thought they could see him breathing. They screamed again to restart the current, but the dynamo that powered it needed to warm up first. What was touted as a painless, humane solution turned out to be horrifying and painful for both the criminal and the witnesses. In the ultimate irony, the electrocution took place in a building with no electricity save for that which powered the execution. Nonetheless, criminal execution—and electrification—continued."
"One notable early use of electricity was the electrocution of criminals. It was chosen as a humane substitute for beheading and hanging, which were both considered barbaric, cruel, and, in the case of the guillotine, too French. The American public preferred a method that would lead to a quicker death. When hanged, bodies would often gasp, twitch, and convulse with pain for some time after the platform was removed from under the criminal’s feet.
Electrocution was proposed to be much quicker and painless. Physicians for the most part were not in favor of this solution because they worried it would taint the popularity of electrotherapy. (More on this topic later) Electricians also objected to this use as they didn’t want electricity to be associated with death. But Edison and other promoters of electricity persevered, and after much experimentation on all types and sizes of live animals, the first criminal electrocution in the U.S. took place on August 4, 1890.
Witnesses, including the jurors who convicted him for murdering his lover, attended the execution of William Kemmler in Auburn, New York. Although the current was supposed to stay on for twenty seconds, the witnesses were so horrified that they screamed for the proceedings to stop after seventeen seconds. As it turns out, it wasn’t certain that Kemmler was dead. A physician thought his heart was still beating, and others heard his throat gurgling and thought they could see him breathing. They screamed again to restart the current, but the dynamo that powered it needed to warm up first. What was touted as a painless, humane solution turned out to be horrifying and painful for both the criminal and the witnesses. In the ultimate irony, the electrocution took place in a building with no electricity save for that which powered the execution. Nonetheless, criminal execution—and electrification—continued."
Sunday, April 05, 2009
Infinite Resources
Then shouldn’t houses get smaller, closer together, and more efficient as our population grows?
The U.S. population, at about 300 million, has doubled since 1950.
There are now 120 million homes in the U.S., up from sixteen million in 1900 and forty-three million in 1950.
These homes account for about 22 percent of the energy used in the U.S. and 74 percent of the water.
Blue Devil's Explanation of Disruptive Innovation
That's Matt Christensen, Clayton's son, in the lower right hand corner.
Thursday, April 02, 2009
Smart Living Conference Preparation
I am giving a talk Saturday at the first annual Smart Living Conference (www.smarthome.duke.edu) to be held at
“About 20 percent of the energy used in the
The amount of energy we use at home is usually proportionate to the size of it. It takes more energy to heat and cool a big house and even more to pay for the cost of transportation and energy to get from that big house in the suburbs to work in the city. As the size of our homes has grown the amount of energy we used has grown.
For instance, in 1900 the average new house size ranged from 700 to 1,200 square feet with two or more bedrooms and one or no bathroom and consisted of two stories.[1] Well over 20 percent of the nation’s population lived in crowded units, with entire families often sharing just one or two rooms. Most existing houses were small rural farmhouses that lacked the basic amenities, such as complete plumbing and central heat, standard in housing today. In fact, even in 1950 more than 35 percent of the nation’s homes lacked complete plumbing facilities (hot and cold piped water, a bathtub or shower, and a flush toilet), according to the Census Bureau.[2]
In the past thirty years, the size of the average house has increased 33 percent and the number of people living in those houses has decreased almost 20 percent, from 3.1 to 2.6 persons (one fewer person for every two households). Now, nearly 40 percent of new single-family houses are over 2,400 square feet in size, double the percentage in 1987.
It costs more to build, furnish, operate and maintain a large home. The growth of electricity use is a result of the increased use and variety of electrical appliances and systems. In 1997, a total of 99 percent of
On average we use more natural gas at home than we do electricity—47 percent versus 39 percent, with the remaining 14 percent coming from fuel oil, propane, and wood. When you look overall at how we use energy at home, the largest use is for space heating (47 percent), followed by appliances (29 percent), water heating (17 percent), and air conditioning (6 percent). The bulk of the natural gas is burned for space heating. It is also used for cooking and water heating.
We have many uses for electricity. Almost 13 percent of the electricity we now expend at home keeps the food in our refrigerators cold, 12 percent keeps us cool running our air conditioners, 12 percent fires up the coils in our space heaters, 11 percent warms our water, 9 percent lights up our rooms, 3 percent cooks our food, 3 percent energizes the tube in our color television, 4 percent freezes our food, 4 percent dries our clothes, and the remaining 28 percent we use for everything from running our PCs, Playstations, X-Boxes, and rotisseries to blending drinks, ironing clothes, charging cell phones, and running fans.”
Next up, the energy we use for driving.
[1] A Century of Progress:
[2] A Century of Progress:
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Andy, KBR, and My Godfather Moment
Andy had an epiploic foramen entrapment which resulted in emergency abdominal surgery. It has been over two weeks since his surgery so I am encouraged. The probabilities of survival for these sorts of things are not good.
I bought Andy last year. My friend, the horse trainer Chris Hitchcock, explained to me one day when Andy was being particularly rude that Andy was a Republican. I was needless to say horrified. I worked on him for several months and convinced him of the error of his ways. He endorsed Barack Obama in the early fall of 2008.
As it always happens, Andy's emergency came on very suddenly.
Earlier that week, I discovered that the company my husband's employer was competing against for a major project at Duke Hospital was none other than KBR. Given KBR's track record in Iraq 7 pm one evening and at around 9:30 pm the same evening I heard back from Erskine saying he would look into it. He didn't make any promises, but he did respond. I could write further here about why Erskine might have made an excellent president for Duke or US
After I sent the email to the president of Duke I also sent it to a couple of the development people I know there. I wanted them to know where my head was and also to tell them if they heard of my untimely demise, they would know why. With all I have read about KBR and Halliburton and torture and Iraq
A couple of hours later after the horses, dogs, and cats had been fed for the evening, I settled in for a dull Friday night watching an episode of the second season of Damages downloaded from iTunes when I got a funny feeling about something going on behind the house towards the barn. Of course, this feeling was amplified by Cato who was madly barking and Halle Beary our German Shepherd watch puppy who was cowering.
When I went to the barn, Andy was writhing in pain on the floor of his stall. A 1500 pound horse in desperate pain is a sad and scary sight. I had to get him on his feet because the danger of this type of situation is that it is compounded if he rolls and twists his intestines creating an obstruction. I managed to get him up and out of the stall, called the vet and several friends, and eventually got him to the hospital where surgery was performed.
This type of colic could not have been caused by chicanery but there was a moment there when I was afraid that by expressing my opinion I had caused the potential death of my horse like that scene in The Godfather when the producer finds his prized horse's head in his bed after he refused to give Johnny Fontaine a part in his movie.
Is Economic Recession a Good Energy Efficiency Strategy?
I have been busy with a sick horse and various other problems. Here is an excerpt from my book:
According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), crude oil accounts for about 73 percent of the price of gasoline, while distribution and taxes make up the remaining 27 percent. That percentage varies depending on the cost of the crude oil. Usually, distribution and taxes are stable, so that the daily fluctuations in the price of gasoline reflect the market price of oil. Occasionally, however, distribution lines are disrupted, as during hurricanes, or they are down for maintenance, which can increase the price of gasoline even when oil prices are down. This drawing from the EIA illustrates how gasoline prices break down. You might be wondering where the profit is in this picture, and my answer is that it is embedded in every component of the price except taxes. In this diagram, crude oil averaged about $68 per barrel in 2007. From 2000 to 2007 the average crude oil price was about $39 per barrel, and the crude oil cost share of the retail gasoline prices averaged 48 percent. In 2008, the price of crude oil has been significantly higher, which is why it is a larger percentage of the overall price of gasoline.
Oil or gasoline prices are the ones that we are most aware of. Our other main sources of energy in the
There is a lot of talk that speculation is what drives the price of our energy, particularly gasoline. Proving or disproving that argument is probably beyond my intellectual capabilities—and of the people who are arguing it—and, I think, is mostly a smokescreen to divert us from the real issue we have with energy. That said, I believe that speculation and chicanery must impact the price of our energy. My opinion is based on the events that took place in the
Certainly speculation should not be permitted to drive up our energy prices and our regulators should take steps to prevent this. However, the most important step for us to take as a country, and for each of us as consumers, is to consider our energy supply and demand situation. Unfortunately, it seems as though we put most of our emphasis on the supply side of the equation and not the demand side. We worry about where the next barrel of oil is coming from, where the next power plant will be built, or when the next alternative energy fad will emerge. But each of those choices leaves us yet again beholden to the energy markets.
While worrying about our own energy needs, we should not forget that there are many growing economies in the world that are also worrying about their needs and competing with us for resources.
If we as consumers continue simply to adjust our spending to maintain consumption as prices rise, economic theory suggests that eventually more supply will be created and prices should go back down. But we don’t really know how long it will take for those supplies to develop or what the cost of waiting will be to us. A more reasonable approach is to manage our demand for energy more efficiently. For one thing, we will feel better. Managing energy unwisely and using it inefficiently leaves us feeling beholden to the bad guy of the day whether that is OPEC or energy traders and hedge funds or the local gas station owner, power company, or oil company. Managing demand is probably our biggest, most powerful and durable strategic weapon to reduce our energy risk exposure; yet we and our country’s leaders often give it short shrift. While this book could explore why that is the case, it will instead focus on how we use energy and where our energy efforts could be applied more effectively to reduce our energy costs and dependence.
It’s easy. If we don’t want to pay high prices, we should have a big supply and lots of inventory. That would make it possible for us consumers to be able to budget our energy needs relatively predictably every month. But, that isn’t the case. Whenever a tropical storm or hurricane hits the Gulf of Mexico, prices go up; or when Iran or Israel start rumbling with the threat of war, prices go up. Prices are down today because the world is in the midst of a deep recession and thus demand is down. It’s good for oil prices but bad for everything else.
To me, these are all signs that our collective gas tanks are running on empty. I am not the only one who believes this. Many experts in oil supply believe that the world is close to reaching the peak of its ability to produce oil. They call this theory “peaking oil.”
The argument behind peaking oil is simple. As demand for oil continues to increase, there will come a point at which the world’s conventional oil supply will no longer be able to meet it. That is the point at which conventional oil supply will have peaked and start to decline. Peak oil is not the end, nor even the beginning of the end, of the Oil Age. At the peak, the world will have more oil available than it has ever had before. No one knows how rapidly oil production rates will fall once they have peaked. They could plateau for many years and the decline in global production could be less dramatic than the rise. But eventually oil production will fall. A 2 percent annual reduction in global oil supply would be equivalent to losing the energy provided by eighty nuclear power plants a year. That is a lot of energy and will beset us and future generations with enormous challenges to try to replace it.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Energy Conservation Bonds
Here is the language in the stimulus package increasing the national limitation on energy conservation bonds.
http://feingold.senate.gov/e4/bill_energy_crec09.pdf
http://feingold.senate.gov/e4/bill_energy_crec09.pdf
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Cato versus Save the Watts Guy
Before I start, here is a cool quote I found. In 1998, Microsoft’s Bill Gates said about the Wright brothers’ invention in a speech he gave at Time Magazine’s 75th anniversary celebration of the airplane that, “We have to understand that engineering breakthroughs are not just mechanical or scientific, they are liberating forces that can continually improve people’s lives.”
The dog in the photo on my blog is Cato. He is a Jack Russell terrier. For those who aren't familiar with Jack Russell's, they are killing machines (click to see video). I didn't know that when we got him. He was just this adorable little puppy. He is still adorable but must be kept under close control.
I guess Cato symbolizes my philosophy of how we should approach the need and opportunity for energy efficiency because he is focused, ferocious, and relentless. That's the kind of symbol that we need for the energy efficiency fight, not some dufus like Save the Watt Guy. Do you know Save the Watt guy? He is Progress Energy's spokesperson for energy efficiency. They run commercials in the Raleigh-Durham market with him talking about saving energy. Did I say dufus? I am being kind. Here he is: http://www.progress-energy.com/shared/stw/car/main.html See what you think.
To me, what Save a Watt guy symbolizes is why utilities should not be in charge of this country's energy efficiency efforts. There have been some utilities that have been pretty good at promoting energy efficiency but most are culturally unable to adapt and grow the skill sets necessary to achieve the broad scale energy efficiency market penetration we need. Lets face it, their regulatory incentives are to build power plants and produce power. Their skill sets are to manage those power plant and electricity distribution assets and manage the regulators.
I know this because I consulted for many years with utilities looking to transform themselves into 21st century retail energy services providers. But it was like trying to turn the Titanic. These companies have been built a certain way for a certain purpose and have operated in this way for probably 75 years. As one of my consulting colleagues, a marketing guru, told me, "When it comes to marketing, these companies aren't the brightest bulbs in the box."
When I worked at XENERGY, we referred to the power generating side of the utilities as the "dark side". I am not saying there weren't some very enlightened people in the industry. There were lots of them at New England Electric -- now ?, Irene Stillings at NYSEG -- now ?, etc., but it was a smattering here and there, not a quorum.
Unless something has radically changed in the past couple of years, I very much hope that no one will be looking to the utility industry to take the leadership role in implementing energy efficiency, particularly when it comes to opportunities in the stimulus package. I would like to see some more groups like 1BOG involved.
The dog in the photo on my blog is Cato. He is a Jack Russell terrier. For those who aren't familiar with Jack Russell's, they are killing machines (click to see video). I didn't know that when we got him. He was just this adorable little puppy. He is still adorable but must be kept under close control.
I guess Cato symbolizes my philosophy of how we should approach the need and opportunity for energy efficiency because he is focused, ferocious, and relentless. That's the kind of symbol that we need for the energy efficiency fight, not some dufus like Save the Watt Guy. Do you know Save the Watt guy? He is Progress Energy's spokesperson for energy efficiency. They run commercials in the Raleigh-Durham market with him talking about saving energy. Did I say dufus? I am being kind. Here he is: http://www.progress-energy.com/shared/stw/car/main.html See what you think.
To me, what Save a Watt guy symbolizes is why utilities should not be in charge of this country's energy efficiency efforts. There have been some utilities that have been pretty good at promoting energy efficiency but most are culturally unable to adapt and grow the skill sets necessary to achieve the broad scale energy efficiency market penetration we need. Lets face it, their regulatory incentives are to build power plants and produce power. Their skill sets are to manage those power plant and electricity distribution assets and manage the regulators.
I know this because I consulted for many years with utilities looking to transform themselves into 21st century retail energy services providers. But it was like trying to turn the Titanic. These companies have been built a certain way for a certain purpose and have operated in this way for probably 75 years. As one of my consulting colleagues, a marketing guru, told me, "When it comes to marketing, these companies aren't the brightest bulbs in the box."
When I worked at XENERGY, we referred to the power generating side of the utilities as the "dark side". I am not saying there weren't some very enlightened people in the industry. There were lots of them at New England Electric -- now ?, Irene Stillings at NYSEG -- now ?, etc., but it was a smattering here and there, not a quorum.
Unless something has radically changed in the past couple of years, I very much hope that no one will be looking to the utility industry to take the leadership role in implementing energy efficiency, particularly when it comes to opportunities in the stimulus package. I would like to see some more groups like 1BOG involved.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Opportunities for Energy Efficiency in the Stimulus Package
Here is a summary of the funding and tax cuts for energy efficiency in the package signed by President Obama on February 17th, 2009
Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grants $3.2 billion
Weatherization Assistance Program: $5.0 billion to weatherize over a million homes.
Home Efficiency Retrofit Program: Creates a new $2.25 billion program to upgrade Housing and Urban Development sponsored housing to make it more energy efficient
State Energy Program: $3.1 billion
Energy Efficiency Tax Credits: One-year extension and expands the credit to increase the amount of the tax credit from ten to thirty percent of the amount paid by the taxpayer. (Estimated cost: $4.275 billion)
Federal Buildings Efficiency Improvements: $4.5 billion
Energy Efficient Appliances: $300 million
Native American Housing Block Grants: $510 million
Qualified Energy Conservation Bonds: $3.2 billion in bonding authority
Department of Defense Energy Efficiency Research: $300 million
Department of Defense Energy Conservation Construction: $220 million
Total Energy Efficiency Investment:: $26,855,000,000 investment including the projected investment from tax cuts for energy efficiency tax credits.
More to come.
I got a bit sidetracked in the course of my research. Here are two excellent presentations and a website discussing energy efficiency by a professional society of physicists.
http://www.aps.org/energyefficiencyreport/index.cfm
http://files.eesi.org/lubell_020509.pdf
http://files.eesi.org/laitner_020509.pdf
By the way, Daniel Sperling was on the Daily Show the other night promoting his book Two Billion Cars: Driving towards Sustainability.
Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grants $3.2 billion
Weatherization Assistance Program: $5.0 billion to weatherize over a million homes.
Home Efficiency Retrofit Program: Creates a new $2.25 billion program to upgrade Housing and Urban Development sponsored housing to make it more energy efficient
State Energy Program: $3.1 billion
Energy Efficiency Tax Credits: One-year extension and expands the credit to increase the amount of the tax credit from ten to thirty percent of the amount paid by the taxpayer. (Estimated cost: $4.275 billion)
Federal Buildings Efficiency Improvements: $4.5 billion
Energy Efficient Appliances: $300 million
Native American Housing Block Grants: $510 million
Qualified Energy Conservation Bonds: $3.2 billion in bonding authority
Department of Defense Energy Efficiency Research: $300 million
Department of Defense Energy Conservation Construction: $220 million
Total Energy Efficiency Investment:: $26,855,000,000 investment including the projected investment from tax cuts for energy efficiency tax credits.
More to come.
I got a bit sidetracked in the course of my research. Here are two excellent presentations and a website discussing energy efficiency by a professional society of physicists.
http://www.aps.org/energyefficiencyreport/index.cfm
http://files.eesi.org/lubell_020509.pdf
http://files.eesi.org/laitner_020509.pdf
By the way, Daniel Sperling was on the Daily Show the other night promoting his book Two Billion Cars: Driving towards Sustainability.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Not to Rest on Our Laurels but Progress is Being Made
Energy efficiency measures are already working in the US in our homes, schools, institutions, commercial buildings and factories. It's just that there is so much more that can be done.
Following the oil crises of 1973 and 1979, regulators in a number of states ordered utilities to set up programs to encourage customers to cut electricity use. Demand side management (DSM) programs and integrated resources planning played an important part in curbing the growth of U.S. electricity demand well into the 1990s. But with electricity deregulation, the role of the state regulatory bodies were downsized and many of the DSM programs atrophied.
With or without utility DSM programs, each unit of energy consumed today provides significantly more energy services than the same unit of energy provided in 1970. In fact, energy efficiency has contributed more value to the economy in recent decades than any conventional energy resource, meeting three-fourths of all new demand for energy services since 1970. To all those people who have stuck with the energy efficiency industry through the ups and downs of the last 20 or 30 years, you should give yourself alot of credit.
Following the oil crises of 1973 and 1979, regulators in a number of states ordered utilities to set up programs to encourage customers to cut electricity use. Demand side management (DSM) programs and integrated resources planning played an important part in curbing the growth of U.S. electricity demand well into the 1990s. But with electricity deregulation, the role of the state regulatory bodies were downsized and many of the DSM programs atrophied.
With or without utility DSM programs, each unit of energy consumed today provides significantly more energy services than the same unit of energy provided in 1970. In fact, energy efficiency has contributed more value to the economy in recent decades than any conventional energy resource, meeting three-fourths of all new demand for energy services since 1970. To all those people who have stuck with the energy efficiency industry through the ups and downs of the last 20 or 30 years, you should give yourself alot of credit.
Efficiency Gains Compared to New Supply, 1970-2008
(Sorry if this is hard to read. I am still mastering the art of adding images with the blogger software. The source of this graph is "The Size of the U.S. Energy Efficiency Market: Generating a More Complete Picture" Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez and John A. “Skip” Laitner,May 2008, Report Number E083, American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, www.aceee.org. )
U.S.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Dear US Representative Price
(I just sent this to my US representative David Price.)
We met in front of Northern High School one very cold afternoon in Durham when I was poll greeting and you were campaigning. You were a bit worried about the TROSA guys who were campaigning for your opponent.
I am getting pretty darn sick of listening to the Republicans bashing President Obama. We had to spend eight years of hearing that it was unpatriotic to bash Bush and like the wusses that we Democrats generally are we kept our mouths shut. Now we are in the majority and while I don't think criticism is unpatriotic I do think that the Democratic leaders in Congress of which Rep Price is one need to step up and express some heartfelt moral outrage at the disrespect of the Republican Party towards President Obama. If you need my help on this let me know. I can do moral outrage very well.
Also, NO BAILOUTS for the car companies. I am okay with helping displaced auto workers but I believe in the definition of insanity as the act of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We have been propping up the US auto industry for years. It ain't working and meanwhile their unwillingness or disinterest in building fuel efficient cars has been enormously hurtful to this country. They need to fail or dig themselves out of this hole. As far as I am concerned my fellow Dukie Rick Wagonner needs to retire.
Okay, lastly, no federal investments in alternative energy sources without a commensurate investment in energy efficiency. Basically I would define it as one negawatt for every kilowatt. Energy efficiency is a strategy not a virture and a very good one at that. It is our cheapest and lowest risk source of energy and still ignored.
That's all.
Rebecca
We met in front of Northern High School one very cold afternoon in Durham when I was poll greeting and you were campaigning. You were a bit worried about the TROSA guys who were campaigning for your opponent.
I am getting pretty darn sick of listening to the Republicans bashing President Obama. We had to spend eight years of hearing that it was unpatriotic to bash Bush and like the wusses that we Democrats generally are we kept our mouths shut. Now we are in the majority and while I don't think criticism is unpatriotic I do think that the Democratic leaders in Congress of which Rep Price is one need to step up and express some heartfelt moral outrage at the disrespect of the Republican Party towards President Obama. If you need my help on this let me know. I can do moral outrage very well.
Also, NO BAILOUTS for the car companies. I am okay with helping displaced auto workers but I believe in the definition of insanity as the act of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We have been propping up the US auto industry for years. It ain't working and meanwhile their unwillingness or disinterest in building fuel efficient cars has been enormously hurtful to this country. They need to fail or dig themselves out of this hole. As far as I am concerned my fellow Dukie Rick Wagonner needs to retire.
Okay, lastly, no federal investments in alternative energy sources without a commensurate investment in energy efficiency. Basically I would define it as one negawatt for every kilowatt. Energy efficiency is a strategy not a virture and a very good one at that. It is our cheapest and lowest risk source of energy and still ignored.
That's all.
Rebecca
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
FUEL EFFICIENCY AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE U.S. AUTO INDUSTRY
Enough about building efficiency. It's time to talk about the efficiency of our vehicles particularly as we debate bailing out the auto industry. You may want to stop reading right now if you support a taxpayer funded bailout of the auto industry because I don't. Charles E. Wilson,while president of General Motors Corporation, once said: “What’s good for the country is good for General Motors, and vice-versa.” It may be good marketing or lobbying but it's not true. Most of what has gone wrong with the US auto industry stems from our continual propping of this industry and the US auto industry has done little right for the US particularly when it comes to fuel efficiency.
Don't believe me? Here are the facts: Cars have shown relatively little improvement in fuel efficiency over the past forty years and even less over the past 100 or so years since their invention. Their efficiency improvements surpass only the truck’s, which has remained virtually flat or has even dropped in the past forty years. Over a 54-year time span, from 1949 to 2003, the mileage performance of transportation vehicles has improved by only 7.3 mpg, from 15 mpg to 22.3 mpg. Most of that gain occurred within the time frame of the enactment of federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) mandates in 1975 that required the car companies to nearly double the average fuel economy of passenger cars or light trucks by 1985. By 1982, the combined average fuel economy of new U.S. cars and trucks had reached around twenty-five miles a gallon—about where it stands today. The original legislation for CAFE improvements died in 1985 at the hands of the U.S. auto industry and its supporters.
One hundred years after their popularity took root, cars are still powered mostly by gasoline and still use an internal combustion engine. In the same time period that we have been driving cars, the computer has been created, vastly improved, and reduced in size; medicine has found cures for countless diseases; men have landed on the moon; and planes have become a common mode of transportation, moving more people farther and faster. The century that started with steam-powered ships as the most sophisticated means of transport ended with the space shuttle and fuel inefficient cars.
Automobile fuel efficiency has improved 50 percent over the 54-year period from 1949 to 2003. If you think for a moment that is a good rate of improvement, compare it to Moore’s Law in the information technology industry. Moore’s Law, based on a statement made by Gordon Moore, a cofounder of Intel, in 1965, says that the rate of technological development with respect to component cost will double every twenty-four months. Moore made this statement more as an observation than a prediction, but it became widely accepted as a goal for an entire industry. It has pretty well held true, and digital technology has profoundly changed Americans’ lives in much the same way cars have but at a much lower cost.
Fuel efficiency has never been a hallmark of the U.S. auto industry. A 1956 report of the U.S. Senate’s antitrust subcommittee contended that “Efficiency to General Motors is apparently its ability to achieve its planned return on investment.”
Let’s face it, the fuel efficiency of the vehicles the Americans build and drive should be better. The fact that it isn’t is symptomatic of the general resistance to change in the American automobile industry. The auto industry is the world’s largest manufacturer, and the American automakers long dominated the world industry. As the largest manufacturer in the U.S. since the early 1920s, automaking has been instrumental in shaping labor relations, corporate structure, and political influence. It has exerted enormous influence on economic events, and the U.S. government believes that “without question a successful and growing automobile industry is critical to the overall strength of the U.S. economy.” The lessons of the U.S. automobile industry vis-Ã -vis fuel efficiency offer insight into our conundrum of energy inefficiency. This resistance to change in the automobile industry has been fed by public policy and government regulation that protected the car industry from market forces and competition, a focus on car styling and marketing over performance, and the death of a product culture in American car companies.
With America’s rush to become a middle class society and its insatiable demand for cars, it was impossible in the heyday of the car companies for them not to make money. The inevitability about increasing sales led to little focus on improving the product. From 1949, when the automatic transmission was introduced, to the late seventies, the cars remained almost the same. What innovation there was came most reluctantly. While foreign carmakers were rapidly introducing new features into their cars to improve their performance, most change that the Big Three car companies brought to cars in that time period was focused on taking the cost out of them in order to increase corporate profit. The effect was to weaken the integrity and quality of the vehicles.
The size of cars in post-World War II America grew at an amazing rate—from 90 to 100 cubic-inch engines, to 160, to 250, and finally to Chevies with 325 and 400 cubic-inch engines. Gas mileage went down proportionately. Hal Sperlich, who was one of Detroit’s leading car designers, said car engineers no longer sought maximum efficiency but rather deliberate waste. This was viewed as feasible due to the discovery of immense amounts of oil in the Middle East even while American reserves remained static. On top of that, the countries that held these reserves were viewed as weak and they attributed to Americans and the West great power. No one foresaw that someday these oil-holding countries would form a powerful cartel, OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
As the Big Three’s market share and sales and size of cars grew, it was as if they were minting money. Ford and Chrysler were afraid to cut prices for fear of a price war with GM that they would lose. The result was that consumers paid more for the same product. In this situation, American carmakers turned cautious and staid. According to George Romney, one-time chairman of American Motors, the companies became muscle bound and mindless in the U.S. market—locked into mindless practices but unable to break out because they were so profitable. According to Romney, “There is nothing more vulnerable than entrenched success.”
Neither Detroit nor the buying public seemed interested in the late 1950s in smaller, more efficient vehicles. For one thing, designing and building big, heavy gas-guzzling vehicles was easier. It is harder to design and build small, efficient, yet high-quality cars that handle well and appeal to consumers. It takes great skill, creativity, and will. The American carmakers built monopoly products like the Russians in the Communist era measuring the success of the iron beds they built by weighing them. The more they weighed the better the beds were considered to be, even though the weight of a bed has nothing to do with how comfortable it is or how easy it is to move.
Don't believe me? Here are the facts: Cars have shown relatively little improvement in fuel efficiency over the past forty years and even less over the past 100 or so years since their invention. Their efficiency improvements surpass only the truck’s, which has remained virtually flat or has even dropped in the past forty years. Over a 54-year time span, from 1949 to 2003, the mileage performance of transportation vehicles has improved by only 7.3 mpg, from 15 mpg to 22.3 mpg. Most of that gain occurred within the time frame of the enactment of federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) mandates in 1975 that required the car companies to nearly double the average fuel economy of passenger cars or light trucks by 1985. By 1982, the combined average fuel economy of new U.S. cars and trucks had reached around twenty-five miles a gallon—about where it stands today. The original legislation for CAFE improvements died in 1985 at the hands of the U.S. auto industry and its supporters.
One hundred years after their popularity took root, cars are still powered mostly by gasoline and still use an internal combustion engine. In the same time period that we have been driving cars, the computer has been created, vastly improved, and reduced in size; medicine has found cures for countless diseases; men have landed on the moon; and planes have become a common mode of transportation, moving more people farther and faster. The century that started with steam-powered ships as the most sophisticated means of transport ended with the space shuttle and fuel inefficient cars.
Automobile fuel efficiency has improved 50 percent over the 54-year period from 1949 to 2003. If you think for a moment that is a good rate of improvement, compare it to Moore’s Law in the information technology industry. Moore’s Law, based on a statement made by Gordon Moore, a cofounder of Intel, in 1965, says that the rate of technological development with respect to component cost will double every twenty-four months. Moore made this statement more as an observation than a prediction, but it became widely accepted as a goal for an entire industry. It has pretty well held true, and digital technology has profoundly changed Americans’ lives in much the same way cars have but at a much lower cost.
Fuel efficiency has never been a hallmark of the U.S. auto industry. A 1956 report of the U.S. Senate’s antitrust subcommittee contended that “Efficiency to General Motors is apparently its ability to achieve its planned return on investment.”
Let’s face it, the fuel efficiency of the vehicles the Americans build and drive should be better. The fact that it isn’t is symptomatic of the general resistance to change in the American automobile industry. The auto industry is the world’s largest manufacturer, and the American automakers long dominated the world industry. As the largest manufacturer in the U.S. since the early 1920s, automaking has been instrumental in shaping labor relations, corporate structure, and political influence. It has exerted enormous influence on economic events, and the U.S. government believes that “without question a successful and growing automobile industry is critical to the overall strength of the U.S. economy.” The lessons of the U.S. automobile industry vis-Ã -vis fuel efficiency offer insight into our conundrum of energy inefficiency. This resistance to change in the automobile industry has been fed by public policy and government regulation that protected the car industry from market forces and competition, a focus on car styling and marketing over performance, and the death of a product culture in American car companies.
With America’s rush to become a middle class society and its insatiable demand for cars, it was impossible in the heyday of the car companies for them not to make money. The inevitability about increasing sales led to little focus on improving the product. From 1949, when the automatic transmission was introduced, to the late seventies, the cars remained almost the same. What innovation there was came most reluctantly. While foreign carmakers were rapidly introducing new features into their cars to improve their performance, most change that the Big Three car companies brought to cars in that time period was focused on taking the cost out of them in order to increase corporate profit. The effect was to weaken the integrity and quality of the vehicles.
The size of cars in post-World War II America grew at an amazing rate—from 90 to 100 cubic-inch engines, to 160, to 250, and finally to Chevies with 325 and 400 cubic-inch engines. Gas mileage went down proportionately. Hal Sperlich, who was one of Detroit’s leading car designers, said car engineers no longer sought maximum efficiency but rather deliberate waste. This was viewed as feasible due to the discovery of immense amounts of oil in the Middle East even while American reserves remained static. On top of that, the countries that held these reserves were viewed as weak and they attributed to Americans and the West great power. No one foresaw that someday these oil-holding countries would form a powerful cartel, OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
As the Big Three’s market share and sales and size of cars grew, it was as if they were minting money. Ford and Chrysler were afraid to cut prices for fear of a price war with GM that they would lose. The result was that consumers paid more for the same product. In this situation, American carmakers turned cautious and staid. According to George Romney, one-time chairman of American Motors, the companies became muscle bound and mindless in the U.S. market—locked into mindless practices but unable to break out because they were so profitable. According to Romney, “There is nothing more vulnerable than entrenched success.”
Neither Detroit nor the buying public seemed interested in the late 1950s in smaller, more efficient vehicles. For one thing, designing and building big, heavy gas-guzzling vehicles was easier. It is harder to design and build small, efficient, yet high-quality cars that handle well and appeal to consumers. It takes great skill, creativity, and will. The American carmakers built monopoly products like the Russians in the Communist era measuring the success of the iron beds they built by weighing them. The more they weighed the better the beds were considered to be, even though the weight of a bed has nothing to do with how comfortable it is or how easy it is to move.
Thursday, February 05, 2009
Art Rosenfeld --The Father of Energy Efficiency or Energy Efficiency is not Rocket Science
Just when you think you know it all, you learn something new. I was searching for research to support an upcoming post about the recalcitrance of the automobile industry in improving the fuel efficiency of cars in order to compare it to the relative cooperativeness of appliance manufacturers and more specifically refrigerator manufacturers. I recall that in the 1980s and 1990s either the DOE or California conducted a competition among refrigerator manufacturers for the best way to improve refrigerator efficiency. The competition was successful and is certainly a factor in why our refrigerators today are much more energy efficient than they used to be. I still haven't found the details of that competition, but I did stumble upon an article about Art Rosenfeld, who when he received the Fermi Prize for lifetime achievement in physics last year the EPA credited with all the efficiency initiatives adopted between 1973 and 2005—the "Rosenfeld Efficiency Factor"— saving an amount of electricity equivalent to 21 percent of U.S. consumption last year, or $228 billion. He should be a national hero. Here is an article about him. Here is another one.
It turns out that Rosenfeld was a very accomplished physicist in the early 1970s when he realized during the OPEC oil embargo how much oil he was burning by leaving the lights on in his office at night. This inspired him to seek out ways first to make his office more energy efficient and then to look more broadly at the issue. He figured he would go back to physics eventually but has been leading the energy efficiency charge in California and the rest of the world ever since. California residents, by the way, consume 30% less electricity per capita than the rest of the country. Though his field of expertise in physics was not rocket science, the point is that he left the field of physics to pursue energy efficiency.
A friend of mine recently told me that I should write a book about how to be more energy efficient because he just didn't know how to go about it. I told him it wasn't rocket science. Most everything you need to know already exists in books, magazines, or on the internet. Much of it comes down to choosing the more fuel or energy efficient options. I think in fact the reason it seems so difficult to some people is that it is actually so remarkably simple. The challenge is how to collectively motivate ourselves to make the choices and take the actions to be energy efficient. With Valentine's Day coming up, I keep thinking I should start a little business to attractively decorate and gift wrap compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL) that people could give as housewarming gifts or send to each other on special occasions -- "You Light Up My Life...". One of the presentations would be as a bouquet with the CFLs in place of flowers.
My father, when we played tennis together, would regularly point out that I had a very energy efficient game. I think this might have been a subtle way of telling me he thought I was lazy. I have though maintained that energy efficient bent throughout my life though not slavishly. Our home is small by modern standards, heavily insulated, and configured to optimize the use of sun and shade. We have SEER 19 heat pumps, CFLs, an on demand hot water heater, all Energy Star appliances, and a hybrid vehicle. I try to eat as little meat as I can which doesn't mean I don't eat any but I try to keep it to a minimum for both health and energy reasons. I am by no means a paragon of energy efficiency but I think that's okay. If we collectively held ourselves to these standards, our energy security would be vastly improved. Unfortunately, many of us simply can't afford to spend the upfront money to live to these standards, which gets back to my idea of giving the gift of energy efficiency. That gift could go to a friend, someone less fortunate, a charity, or an institution like your local school, hospital, or college. And to make that gift even better, you could in the case of light bulbs screw them in yourself. What a great and easy way to make a difference.
It turns out that Rosenfeld was a very accomplished physicist in the early 1970s when he realized during the OPEC oil embargo how much oil he was burning by leaving the lights on in his office at night. This inspired him to seek out ways first to make his office more energy efficient and then to look more broadly at the issue. He figured he would go back to physics eventually but has been leading the energy efficiency charge in California and the rest of the world ever since. California residents, by the way, consume 30% less electricity per capita than the rest of the country. Though his field of expertise in physics was not rocket science, the point is that he left the field of physics to pursue energy efficiency.
A friend of mine recently told me that I should write a book about how to be more energy efficient because he just didn't know how to go about it. I told him it wasn't rocket science. Most everything you need to know already exists in books, magazines, or on the internet. Much of it comes down to choosing the more fuel or energy efficient options. I think in fact the reason it seems so difficult to some people is that it is actually so remarkably simple. The challenge is how to collectively motivate ourselves to make the choices and take the actions to be energy efficient. With Valentine's Day coming up, I keep thinking I should start a little business to attractively decorate and gift wrap compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL) that people could give as housewarming gifts or send to each other on special occasions -- "You Light Up My Life...". One of the presentations would be as a bouquet with the CFLs in place of flowers.
My father, when we played tennis together, would regularly point out that I had a very energy efficient game. I think this might have been a subtle way of telling me he thought I was lazy. I have though maintained that energy efficient bent throughout my life though not slavishly. Our home is small by modern standards, heavily insulated, and configured to optimize the use of sun and shade. We have SEER 19 heat pumps, CFLs, an on demand hot water heater, all Energy Star appliances, and a hybrid vehicle. I try to eat as little meat as I can which doesn't mean I don't eat any but I try to keep it to a minimum for both health and energy reasons. I am by no means a paragon of energy efficiency but I think that's okay. If we collectively held ourselves to these standards, our energy security would be vastly improved. Unfortunately, many of us simply can't afford to spend the upfront money to live to these standards, which gets back to my idea of giving the gift of energy efficiency. That gift could go to a friend, someone less fortunate, a charity, or an institution like your local school, hospital, or college. And to make that gift even better, you could in the case of light bulbs screw them in yourself. What a great and easy way to make a difference.
Monday, February 02, 2009
Should You Eat Out Tonight?
Here is a reason to go out for dinner tonight, besides being too tired to shop and cook.
Storing and preparing food at home is the largest use of energy in the U.S. food system. This energy use includes the electricity for refrigerators and freezers, energy for stoves, ranges, and microwave ovens, dishwashers, and heating water for dish washing. Over 40 percent of food-related household energy consumption goes to operating refrigerators. Improvements in appliance efficiencies have decreased refrigerator energy consumption over the past decade, but the number and size of refrigerators in American households continue to grow. Cooking at home accounts for about 20 percent of our household food-related energy use, while hot water heating for dish washing is estimated to be another 20 percent.
I found this is information in a report called: Life Cycle-Based Sustainability Indicators for Assessment of the U.S. Food System, Martin C. Heller and Gregory A. Keoleian, Center for Sustainable Systems, University of Michigan, Report No. CSS00-04,December 6, 2000, p. 41.
Storing and preparing food at home is the largest use of energy in the U.S. food system. This energy use includes the electricity for refrigerators and freezers, energy for stoves, ranges, and microwave ovens, dishwashers, and heating water for dish washing. Over 40 percent of food-related household energy consumption goes to operating refrigerators. Improvements in appliance efficiencies have decreased refrigerator energy consumption over the past decade, but the number and size of refrigerators in American households continue to grow. Cooking at home accounts for about 20 percent of our household food-related energy use, while hot water heating for dish washing is estimated to be another 20 percent.
I found this is information in a report called: Life Cycle-Based Sustainability Indicators for Assessment of the U.S. Food System, Martin C. Heller and Gregory A. Keoleian, Center for Sustainable Systems, University of Michigan, Report No. CSS00-04,December 6, 2000, p. 41.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Me and Energy
You can hear me read this while watching my horses in the pasture here. It doesn't really sound like me. I think the microphone on my camera is bad.
Much as I would like to think it isn’t so, the cliché that the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree is probably true. Like my dad, I started my career in energy as a petroleum engineer. He kicked off his career in Romania in the 1930s. Back then Romania was one of the world’s leading oil producers and one of its leading economies. Dad got his degree in petroleum engineering from the University of Bucharest and then took a job with Shell Oil in Ploesti, Romania. Fortunately, his job was considered essential to the Romanian war effort in World War Two because the battalion he would have joined fought the Russians in St. Petersburg and was decimated. My father liked to tell stories of the Allied bombers bombing the refineries where he worked. He and his girlfriend would hop on his motorcycle and ride off into the hills to watch the resulting fireworks. It wasn’t all good times though; they often got short notice of the impending air strikes and found themselves running for their lives.
He survived but the postwar peace in Romania was tense. Fortunately his family was well-connected in Romanian politics, and after the war his great uncle, Peter Groza, was appointed premier of Romania’s coalition government. Uncle Peter saw the writing on the wall—communist Russia would soon completely dominate Romania—and he managed to get my father a job in the Romanian legation in the U.S. Soon after my mom and dad arrived here, they defected, becoming political refugees. Out of work and foreign, Dad struggled to find a job. He wound up working again for Shell Oil developing oil fields in the jungles of Venezuela, leaving my mom in New York City pregnant with my brother. Eventually Dad returned to the U.S., where he attended graduate school and got a job. Many years later, I graduated from Duke University’s engineering school and took a job working for Shell in New Orleans as an oil-field engineer. Thus began my career in energy.
Since then I have worked in almost all aspects of the energy business, from oil production to energy trading to energy efficiency. I chose the energy industry because I thought my work would offer social value. And working for Shell was actually pretty fun. I lived in New Orleans, had an expense account and a lot of responsibility, and learned from one of the masters of the industry. I saw the oil industry in its heyday booming with the run-up in oil prices in the late seventies and early eighties. High oil prices meant more drilling and more business opportunities for companies like Halliburton that worked as subcontractors to companies like Shell and Exxon. With control of multimillion dollar budgets for oil platforms and gas plants, my Shell buddies and I would get wined and dined at New Orleans’ best restaurants by these companies eager for our business. It was rare when we paid for our own lunch and not so rare when one of us would go back to the office after lunch tipsy.
Much to my chagrin, after three years in New Orleans, I was transferred to Bakersfield, California. Back then, Bakersfield was an oil and agricultural town with not much else going on. I lasted there about five months before I quit my job to attend Harvard Business School. It was in Bakersfield that I first faced the griminess of the oil business. It was not at all like what I had seen in New Orleans where much of our work was in the Gulf of Mexico and Shell maintained a high level of safety and operations. In Bakersfield, Shell had just acquired an oil field from another company that hadn’t been run to nearly the same standards. There were horsehead oil pumpers and steam generators scattered everywhere in this desert environment at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley where the Tule fog periodically descended, making everything look even worse. Oil was spilled on the ground, old equipment lay randomly on the side of the road, and the natural environment was depleted and barren.
I am sensitive about our environment. Almost my entire life I have owned and ridden horses. Whether I lived in the city or the suburbs, I have always had a reason on a nearly daily basis to escape from the concrete jungle into the countryside of America where my horses lived. This maintained a connection for me with nature and the environment that the typical American lifestyle has lost. Today over 90 percent of American life is lived indoors which means more buildings and less countryside. The places where I can ride are rapidly disappearing under the spread of suburbia that’s fueled by relatively cheap gasoline and big comfortable cars.
With a growing concern for energy’s impact on the environment, I moved my career focus away from energy production to energy efficiency where I have focused for the past seventeen years. That choice relegated me for a long while to “Birkenstock” status in the realm of liberal do-gooder hippies and left-wing Democrats. That characterization, which has changed, was unfortunate because the truth of the matter is that energy efficiency is the Occam’s razor of the global energy and environmental crisis that is sure to hit our planet as its population continues an upward spiral and developing countries accelerate their quest to match the standard of living in the U.S. and Europe. (Remember Occam’s razor is the principle that the simplest explanation is probably the best.)
The use of energy in our country has grown much more rapidly than the energy efficiency of the equipment which uses it. Had it been the reverse right now we could be enjoying our travel, big air-conditioned houses, super-malls, and mega-office buildings worry free. But our designs focused on size and style rather than efficiency. Look at the car industry. In the its early days, the big players used what was known as “the annual style change,” a modification in the look or style of the car to keep new competitors from getting a toehold in the business. Before introduction of the annual style change, starting a car manufacturing business was relatively easy and did not require a large amount of capital. However, the practice of annual style changes meant changing tools and dies before they were worn out. Expenditures on large-scale advertising were needed to alert consumers to the new designs each year. The established larger firms could spread the cost of these changes over more vehicles, thus lowering their unit costs. Dealer networks with specialized maintenance abilities and parts inventories had to be cultivated. Up until then parts had been standardized and interchangeable. By the early 1960s, the overall cost of annual style changes was estimated to be 25 percent of the cost of a new car. Unfortunately, annual style changes were just that. They didn’t include improvements to fuel efficiency, safety or environmental protection.
That’s just one example of how our technology to use energy hasn’t kept pace with how we use it. As a result, our consumption of energy has exceeded our capacity or will to produce it and our nation is gripped by volatile energy prices, environmental strife, and the associated political and economic ramifications. We assume every oil supply disruption and price shock is a fluke and that things will return eventually to normal. But the truth is that we don’t really know what normal is because we have never been in this position before. Instead of watching our oil supply swirl away like water draining out of a tub, why don’t we develop a strategy to use oil only for what we absolutely need it for and alternative fuels and efficient technologies for everything else? There is no way we have even come close to exploiting the range of energy efficient technologies and ingenuity that is possible. After all, this is America. We can do anything when we set our minds to it.
Energy efficiency doesn’t just save energy. Fossil fuels contribute to global warming, and climate change causes death, disease, floods, droughts, ecological harm, rising seas, intense storms, and increased heat waves. Using energy more efficiently also saves the environment. Maybe it’s time to set our hearts right on energy use and choose energy efficiency. It’s simply the best solution.
Much as I would like to think it isn’t so, the cliché that the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree is probably true. Like my dad, I started my career in energy as a petroleum engineer. He kicked off his career in Romania in the 1930s. Back then Romania was one of the world’s leading oil producers and one of its leading economies. Dad got his degree in petroleum engineering from the University of Bucharest and then took a job with Shell Oil in Ploesti, Romania. Fortunately, his job was considered essential to the Romanian war effort in World War Two because the battalion he would have joined fought the Russians in St. Petersburg and was decimated. My father liked to tell stories of the Allied bombers bombing the refineries where he worked. He and his girlfriend would hop on his motorcycle and ride off into the hills to watch the resulting fireworks. It wasn’t all good times though; they often got short notice of the impending air strikes and found themselves running for their lives.
He survived but the postwar peace in Romania was tense. Fortunately his family was well-connected in Romanian politics, and after the war his great uncle, Peter Groza, was appointed premier of Romania’s coalition government. Uncle Peter saw the writing on the wall—communist Russia would soon completely dominate Romania—and he managed to get my father a job in the Romanian legation in the U.S. Soon after my mom and dad arrived here, they defected, becoming political refugees. Out of work and foreign, Dad struggled to find a job. He wound up working again for Shell Oil developing oil fields in the jungles of Venezuela, leaving my mom in New York City pregnant with my brother. Eventually Dad returned to the U.S., where he attended graduate school and got a job. Many years later, I graduated from Duke University’s engineering school and took a job working for Shell in New Orleans as an oil-field engineer. Thus began my career in energy.
Since then I have worked in almost all aspects of the energy business, from oil production to energy trading to energy efficiency. I chose the energy industry because I thought my work would offer social value. And working for Shell was actually pretty fun. I lived in New Orleans, had an expense account and a lot of responsibility, and learned from one of the masters of the industry. I saw the oil industry in its heyday booming with the run-up in oil prices in the late seventies and early eighties. High oil prices meant more drilling and more business opportunities for companies like Halliburton that worked as subcontractors to companies like Shell and Exxon. With control of multimillion dollar budgets for oil platforms and gas plants, my Shell buddies and I would get wined and dined at New Orleans’ best restaurants by these companies eager for our business. It was rare when we paid for our own lunch and not so rare when one of us would go back to the office after lunch tipsy.
Much to my chagrin, after three years in New Orleans, I was transferred to Bakersfield, California. Back then, Bakersfield was an oil and agricultural town with not much else going on. I lasted there about five months before I quit my job to attend Harvard Business School. It was in Bakersfield that I first faced the griminess of the oil business. It was not at all like what I had seen in New Orleans where much of our work was in the Gulf of Mexico and Shell maintained a high level of safety and operations. In Bakersfield, Shell had just acquired an oil field from another company that hadn’t been run to nearly the same standards. There were horsehead oil pumpers and steam generators scattered everywhere in this desert environment at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley where the Tule fog periodically descended, making everything look even worse. Oil was spilled on the ground, old equipment lay randomly on the side of the road, and the natural environment was depleted and barren.
I am sensitive about our environment. Almost my entire life I have owned and ridden horses. Whether I lived in the city or the suburbs, I have always had a reason on a nearly daily basis to escape from the concrete jungle into the countryside of America where my horses lived. This maintained a connection for me with nature and the environment that the typical American lifestyle has lost. Today over 90 percent of American life is lived indoors which means more buildings and less countryside. The places where I can ride are rapidly disappearing under the spread of suburbia that’s fueled by relatively cheap gasoline and big comfortable cars.
With a growing concern for energy’s impact on the environment, I moved my career focus away from energy production to energy efficiency where I have focused for the past seventeen years. That choice relegated me for a long while to “Birkenstock” status in the realm of liberal do-gooder hippies and left-wing Democrats. That characterization, which has changed, was unfortunate because the truth of the matter is that energy efficiency is the Occam’s razor of the global energy and environmental crisis that is sure to hit our planet as its population continues an upward spiral and developing countries accelerate their quest to match the standard of living in the U.S. and Europe. (Remember Occam’s razor is the principle that the simplest explanation is probably the best.)
The use of energy in our country has grown much more rapidly than the energy efficiency of the equipment which uses it. Had it been the reverse right now we could be enjoying our travel, big air-conditioned houses, super-malls, and mega-office buildings worry free. But our designs focused on size and style rather than efficiency. Look at the car industry. In the its early days, the big players used what was known as “the annual style change,” a modification in the look or style of the car to keep new competitors from getting a toehold in the business. Before introduction of the annual style change, starting a car manufacturing business was relatively easy and did not require a large amount of capital. However, the practice of annual style changes meant changing tools and dies before they were worn out. Expenditures on large-scale advertising were needed to alert consumers to the new designs each year. The established larger firms could spread the cost of these changes over more vehicles, thus lowering their unit costs. Dealer networks with specialized maintenance abilities and parts inventories had to be cultivated. Up until then parts had been standardized and interchangeable. By the early 1960s, the overall cost of annual style changes was estimated to be 25 percent of the cost of a new car. Unfortunately, annual style changes were just that. They didn’t include improvements to fuel efficiency, safety or environmental protection.
That’s just one example of how our technology to use energy hasn’t kept pace with how we use it. As a result, our consumption of energy has exceeded our capacity or will to produce it and our nation is gripped by volatile energy prices, environmental strife, and the associated political and economic ramifications. We assume every oil supply disruption and price shock is a fluke and that things will return eventually to normal. But the truth is that we don’t really know what normal is because we have never been in this position before. Instead of watching our oil supply swirl away like water draining out of a tub, why don’t we develop a strategy to use oil only for what we absolutely need it for and alternative fuels and efficient technologies for everything else? There is no way we have even come close to exploiting the range of energy efficient technologies and ingenuity that is possible. After all, this is America. We can do anything when we set our minds to it.
Energy efficiency doesn’t just save energy. Fossil fuels contribute to global warming, and climate change causes death, disease, floods, droughts, ecological harm, rising seas, intense storms, and increased heat waves. Using energy more efficiently also saves the environment. Maybe it’s time to set our hearts right on energy use and choose energy efficiency. It’s simply the best solution.
Energy Efficiency is a Strategy not a Virtue
According to Chevron’s CEO, David O’Reilly, energy efficiency is the cheapest form of new energy we currently have.( “Chevron’s CEO: The Price of Oil,” Fortune, November 28, 2007). The Prius is a great example of the types of energy efficiency options that are available to us and the people who are trying to bring them to us. But you might not think about the Prius when you think about energy efficiency because there is a lot of confusion about what energy efficiency is. Most people have that Dick Cheney view of it as energy conservation, usually typified by the image of Jimmy Carter shivering in a cardigan back in the late 1970s. Energy conservation is any behavior that results in the use of less energy—turning off the lights, turning down the heat, driving less, walking more, eating less—all of them positive activities; but if you don’t want to do them, they are seen as being uncomfortable. Energy conservation is widely viewed as being a step backward in our technological and societal progress, and that’s why proponents work hard to differentiate energy conservation from energy efficiency. I personally advocate both but am also very disinclined to do anything that creates personal discomfort.
It is not the goal of energy efficiency to cause discomfort. If anything, energy efficiency creates a higher degree of comfort and well-being because it requires more productivity from the energy we use via smarter technologies. Above all else, energy efficiency represents progress—technological, social, environmental, and cultural progress. And progress is what America is all about. The introduction and rapid adoption of energy in America, particularly electricity, was fueled by society’s perception that using it was a step forward into a future in which we controlled nature and disease and our children lived happily ever after. In the twentieth century, energy use drove the American dream in the form of cars, the modernization of the home, and information, communication, and entertainment technology. In the twenty-first century, energy efficiency will be fundamental to continuing that American dream in a cleaner and more secure national environment.
In a nutshell, energy efficiency is the use of technology that requires less energy to perform the same function. A better way to think of it is that energy conservation is a virtue and energy efficiency is a strategy. In my experience, it is far easier to be strategic than virtuous, which is why I am an advocate of energy efficiency. Energy efficiency means doing more, and often better, with less energy—the opposite of simply doing less or worse or without. To me, the iPod is the perfect example of this. If you consider the history of the ability to listen to music whenever you wanted in the absence of a live performance, it started with Edison’s invention of the phonograph. Back in the day, this music-playing device, known as a gramophone or Victrola, was a big wooden box with a hand crank. Here is a photograph of one I downloaded from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph):
In a nutshell, energy efficiency is the use of technology that requires less energy to perform the same function. A better way to think of it is that energy conservation is a virtue and energy efficiency is a strategy. In my experience, it is far easier to be strategic than virtuous, which is why I am an advocate of energy efficiency. Energy efficiency means doing more, and often better, with less energy—the opposite of simply doing less or worse or without. To me, the iPod is the perfect example of this. If you consider the history of the ability to listen to music whenever you wanted in the absence of a live performance, it started with Edison’s invention of the phonograph. Back in the day, this music-playing device, known as a gramophone or Victrola, was a big wooden box with a hand crank. Here is a photograph of one I downloaded from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph):
Here is another photograph of a phonograph, from Wikipedia:
This is actually a phonograph cabinet built in 1912 out of Portland cement. The speaker, or amplifying horn, is behind the human figure.
The music listening device evolved to (also from Wikipedia), a portable record player in the 1930s. It played records that were flat round disks the player rotated on a table. The hand crank used a mechanical device to store energy so that the player did not need to be connected to an electrical source. A record could hold several songs on it, depending on the length of the songs. Music lovers accumulated large libraries of records, which had to be well-protected to maintain the quality of the sound. Over time, technology continued to evolve and people grew to like listening to their personal selection of music wherever they went, whether in their car or at the beach or in the gym. With that desire came the invention of the eight-track tape player and tape, the popularity of which grew rapidly when in 1965 Ford introduced dealer-installed eight-track players for their cars, and RCA Victor introduced fifty Stereo-8 Cartridges of prerecorded music from their label of artists. The players and tapes became very popular and home players and portable players—“boom boxes”—were created to enable the use of the tapes wherever people went. However, with the introduction of the compact cassette in the early 1970s, the eight-track quickly lost ground, because its size compared to the compact cassette made it unwieldy. The compact cassette required a cassette player. So most of us threw out our eight-tracks and players and bought cassettes and cassette players.
Then in 1982 the compact disk was introduced and once again how we listened to music on the go was transformed. Standard CDs have a diameter of 120mm and can hold up to eighty minutes of audio. The CD and its extensions have been extremely successful: in 2004, worldwide sales of CD audio, CD-ROM, and CD-R reached about thirty billion discs. By 2007, about 200 billion CDs had been sold worldwide.( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc) Portable CD players were introduced in the 1980s and took off in the 1990s when the technology improved. With the choice of cassette tapes and CDs, music listeners had the option of purchasing and maintaining two media for their libraries. Many of us maintained both because each had its advantages and disadvantages. Part of the choice for many depended on what kind of player you had in your car.
In the late 1990s, the digital audio player device was introduced, which most of us think of as the MP3 player. I have owned several of these over the years. The very first ones offered sixteen MB of storage, which is meager. But over the last few years, several companies have competed to improve the capabilities. Today, an Apple iPod the size of a very large postage stamp is the most popular MP3 in history, not that there is much MP3 history. The Nano sold its first million units in only seventeen days. Today’s Nano can hold up to eight GB of digital media, including music and video like movies and television shows you can rent or download from Apple’s iTunes Web site. Eight GB can hold up to 2,000 songs or 7,000 photos or eight hours of videos. They are powered by small lithium ion batteries that are rechargeable. MP3 player batteries typically need three to five watts to charge, which means it costs between about thirty-six cents and sixty cents every time you charge your iPod for an hour. If you are like me and leave it plugged in endlessly, it costs a lot more.
Here is an iPod with a hand cranked charger:
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2005/03/hand_powered_ip.html
The iPod, as one example, represents the type of technological design and engineering of which our society is capable when we are fueled with the desire to make something happen. This ability to carry the performances of all of Beethoven’s greatest symphonies in one’s pocket to listen to whenever one wanted was beyond belief 100 years ago when people had trouble envisioning the need for telephones.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Take the Energy Efficiency Decisions Out of the Hands of Real Estate Developers
This is my next topic. Stay tuned.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
When Is A Building Considered Energy Efficient
Here is a good article. As far as I am concerned a building should not be certified as green or efficient until its performance is verified in actual use.
Monday, January 19, 2009
Lots of Buildings, Lots of Energy
In 1979, the Department of Energy (DOE) estimated that there were 3.8 million commercial buildings in the United States; twenty-five years later there were nearly five million commercial buildings larger than 1,000 square feet in size and more than seventy-one billion square feet of commercial floor space in the U.S., or about 2,600 square miles of commercial floor space. If you laid out all that commercial floor space, it would cover about 1 percent of the state of Texas, which happens to be larger than any nation in Europe except Russia.
Most of those buildings are used for education, retailing, offices, and storage. Altogether, those activities use about 60 percent of the total commercial floor space and 51 percent of buildings in the U.S. The construction business that builds these buildings itself generates more than $531 billion in annual revenues and employs more than 1.7 million workers (2002), with an annual payroll of nearly $62 billion. More than 1.8 million residential houses and buildings (2003) and approximately 170,000 commercial buildings are built and about 44,000 commercial buildings are demolished annually. Almost seventy-three million Americans, including 68.5 million children, spend their days in approximately 117,000 public and private primary and secondary schools (2000). While our kids are in school, the rest of us are in some other structure—house, office, store, or hospital, as on average, according to an EPA study on indoor air quality, Americans spend 90 percent or more of their time indoors. Buildings and homes account for 40 percent of total U.S. energy consumption and 70 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption. Consumption is pretty evenly split between homes and commercial buildings. All that energy consumption means that buildings in the United States contribute 38 percent of the nation’s total carbon dioxide emissions.
Worldwide, 30 to 40 percent of all primary energy is used in buildings that in turn produce approximately 30 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions. That won’t change much over the next twenty years without extensive retrofitting of existing building stock, because, due to their long life cycle, buildings that will be operating in the decade of 2030 have in the majority already been built. Energy use in buildings is strongly related to the building’s construction, its purpose, and the climate where it is located. There are five phases of energy use in a building’s life cycle: (1) the manufacturing of the products and components that make up the building; (2) the transportation of these products and components to the construction site; (3) the construction itself; (4) the ongoing operation of the building after it is built; and (5) the final demolition and recycling of the building.
The operating phase is the most energy intensive, with the use of heating, cooling, and lighting. But the other phases aren’t insignificant. For example, buildings are large users of materials that have a high content of embodied energy. Embodied energy is the energy that is consumed when building materials and components are produced. This includes the mining and manufacturing of materials and equipment, especially materials with high embodied energy content such as aluminum, cement and steel, the production of which usually depends on the use of fossil fuels, resulting in CO2 emissions. Cement plants alone account for 5 percent of global emissions of carbon dioxide. Each year, three billion tons, more or less, of raw materials—40 to 50 percent of the total flow in the global economy—are used in the manufacturing of building products and components worldwide.
Housing accounts for the major part of energy consumed in buildings; in developing countries the share can be over 90 percent. In the low-income rural areas of Africa, India, and China the main energy source for more than 70 percent of the population is wood, animal dung, and crop waste; and kerosene and paraffin are still widely used for lighting. Surprisingly, even today, around 2.4 billion people depend on wood, agricultural residues, and dung for cooking and heating; that number is expected to increase to 2.6 billion by 2030. According to a forecast presented by the IEA (2002), in 2030 biomass use will still represent over half of residential energy consumption in developing countries. The use of biomass does not necessarily contribute to climate change as biofuels are renewable unless harvested in an unsustainable way, but it often causes serious indoor pollution.
It is believed that building construction costs typically increase by 3 to 5 percent due to the introduction of energy efficient solutions. The reduction of energy use in one system can affect the energy use in another system. For instance, lighting savings can lead to significant reductions in the energy used for cooling and ventilation systems even in countries like Sweden, where typical modern buildings require cooling even at an outdoor temperature of -10°C. Commercial buildings enjoy a net Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) benefit from lighting savings because of the considerable internal heat generated by the lighting. A rule of thumb is that about one watt of air cooling energy savings result from every three watts of lighting energy savings.
In the U.S., the perceived increase in the cost of energy efficiency discourages investment in it and building codes often do not require it. Building codes are intended to protect public health, safety, and general welfare as they relate to the construction and occupancy of buildings and structures; but we don’t have a standard national building code or national energy code. Building codes vary by state and municipality, but because the codes are expensive to structure they are frequently set on a model code put out by various industry associations and government funded entities. In the case of energy use in buildings, the Department of Energy has a Building Energy Codes Program that works with federal agencies, national code organizations, the building industry, and state and local officials to promote more stringent building energy codes.
Building energy codes currently are set in a complicated process. National model codes are updated every few years, typically with incremental improvements, by two independent organizations: the International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) from the International Code Council for residential buildings, and American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers better known as ASHRAE Standard 90.1 for commercial buildings. The DOE determines whether the amended model code saves energy. States set the actual building energy codes (except a few states that leave codes to local governments) based on the national models. States are required to adopt a commercial code at least as stringent as the national model within two years of DOE’s determination. For residential codes, states are required to look at updates to the national model and either adopt them or explain why they chose not to.
According to the DOE, twelve states in the U.S. have residential energy building codes that meet or exceed the standards of the latest IECC, which was released in 2006. Some have codes based on earlier versions of the IECC and some have codes that were developed prior to 1990. Just because a state has an energy building code doesn’t mean that the code is applied to all new residences. In many states, the codes are not broadly enforced and may be restricted to state or federally owned buildings or in municipalities that have chosen to adopt the state energy building code.
According to the Alliance to Save Energy, if model building energy codes were strengthened incrementally by 30 percent in 2010 and 50 percent in 2020—and if all states implemented the codes—by 2030 cumulative savings from these code improvements would reach 56 quads of energy, $435 billion (nominal 2003 dollars), and 889 million metric tons of carbon equivalent. The greenhouse gas emissions reductions would be equivalent to taking 32 million cars off the road for twenty years. In the year 2029 alone, the savings would be 6.1 quads of energy (about 5 percent of total U.S. energy use), $47.5 billion in consumer energy bills, and ninety-seven million metric tons of carbon equivalent. This is comparable to removing seventy million cars from the road for one year.
If the benefits are so great, why do we need the regulation in the first place? Why doesn’t the market just adopt these measures? There is no simple answer, although it is true that the building construction industry suffers profoundly from a lack of leadership when it comes to energy efficiency. There are a variety of reasons for this. Buildings and homes are becoming increasingly complex, with many more choices for materials and products. Those products and materials are chosen, assembled, and constructed by many different parties that frequently don’t work together on an ongoing basis. The building team is usually led by the least experienced member of the team—the owner or developer—who often knows the least about building, let alone running loosely knit impromptu organizations that are usually at each other’s throats. That is what building team is like. It’s a group of business parties glued together by contractual relationships that are usually contentious. Litigation in the building business is very common, with lots of finger pointing. (I know because my husband is a builder.) This is hardly the climate in which to create an innovative product. Besides the inexperienced and untrained owners coordinating contentious building teams, the local utility company often pushes energy consuming solutions because they make money by promoting energy use and not efficiency. Construction and permanent lenders do not distinguish between energy efficient and non-energy efficient buildings; and builders and architects are not well trained in the issues of energy efficient construction and design. Some say that architects’ roles in the past century have, for various reasons, devolved from that of master builders to stylists.
A case in point on the state of the construction industry is the Stata Center on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This $300 million building is one of the most celebrated works of architecture in years. MIT paid renowned architect Frank Gehry $15 million to design the building, which was completed in 2004. Three years later, MIT sued Gehry, alleging the building design causes leaks that lead masonry to crack, mold to grow, and drainage to back up. According to Gehry, “These things are complicated and they involved a lot of people, and you never quite know where they went wrong. A building goes together with seven billion pieces of connective tissue.” If one of the leading engineering schools in the world can’t work together with one of the leading architects in the world to create a building that doesn’t leak, what does this say about the possibility for creating energy efficient buildings?
Home building isn’t much different. Much of the residential construction is now done by stock builders who repeat ten or twenty designs ad infinitum, meaning they repeat the same mistakes and same inefficiencies ad infinitum as well. The stock builders have learned that they don’t make money adding options or customizing existing plans, so energy efficient improvements in the homes they build don’t often happen. For individuals choosing to build a home on their own, hiring an architect is often an expensive proposition—usually 10 percent or more of the projected building cost. And when you use an architect you have to make lots of decisions that you don’t have to make when you buy an off-the-shelf house or even off-the-shelf house plans. For the decision and design challenged like me, the prospect is daunting at best and at worst purported to be a proven destroyer of marriages. My husband and I built a house recently and remain married; but we both have experience in the development and building industry, so we were well prepared for the task. We rejected design proposals from well respected architects due in part to the cost and in part from the knowledge that we would go crazy making all the additional decisions that go with designing something. We wound up using stock building plans we bought online for a house we saw featured in a book. Then we used the book to help us make aesthetic decisions, my experience to make decisions regarding energy efficiency and my husband’s construction experience for the rest. Even so, and despite the fact that the home builder we used was both pleasant and honest, it was apparent to me that had we left the decisions regarding energy-using equipment, insulation, windows, etc., in his hands, our home would have ended up as yet another energy hog.
The building industry is very fragmented and there are few barriers to prevent any Tom, Dick, or Harry from entering the business. The many small firms mean that no one company dominates the market, competition between builders is ferocious, and profits are slim. Licensing exists, but it is not a significant barrier. Education, particularly in home building and design, seems to more by experience than through formal training, with the result that innovation and progress in energy efficient design and construction is close to nonexistent. Meanwhile, with building growth rampant, there are an overwhelming number of new products being introduced into the marketplace, but builders are not trained or motivated to sort them out to decide what’s best. Builders are a cautious lot and not known for being innovative. Because there is little corporate size or presence in the industry, corporate research dollars are scant. Builders rely mainly on owners and architects to tell them what to do. Commendably, some builders are cleaning up their own acts from a waste and efficiency standpoint. They have a lot to clean up. Industry studies show that up to 46 percent of time spent on job sites is wasted.
The process of building home or commercial buildings is pretty much the same. The owner or developer sets the program. They decide how many bedrooms or conference rooms are needed, where the building will be located, and what the budget will be. Frequently this owner will not be the entity or person who ultimately uses the building or home. The home-building industry has constructed about 13.5 million single-family homes since the mid-1990s. For the past few years, nearly 20 percent of single-family home buyers have been purchasing newly constructed houses. In recent years, the difficulty of getting things built has made business harder for small, local builders and easier for big companies, with their greater resources, to gain control of the housing market. Over one-quarter of the homes built today in the U.S. are built by home building companies such as Pulte, Centex, or Toll Brothers. They build the homes according to their interpretation of what the market wants and then sell the homes to people looking for a place to live. Frequently, commercial space is built by a developer who then either sells or leases the space to a company or individual who uses it for their enterprise needs. In both cases, the party responsible for the building has little interest in the long-term operating characteristics of the home or building they construct unless either the customer or regulation demands them to take an interest. Since that so far hasn’t been the case, the resulting structure usually isn’t energy efficient. At Toll Brother’s developments, the average customer spends $103,000 on special extras like additional bathrooms and prime locations. According to Toll, buyers choose visible flourishes over pragmatism every time. During the energy crisis of the late 1970s, for instance, one option was a higher grade of insulation but no one bought it. Instead, everyone spent their extra money on moldings.
Even in a good housing market when profits are healthy, most home builders don’t build energy efficient homes. How good are their profits? According to the New York Times, in one of Toll Brothers’ developments the actual cost of building a single 2,700 square-foot home, including infrastructure, land, labor, and materials, was around $300,000. The houses went on the market in the spring of 2003 at $424,000. Most recently the same house now costs $695,000, yielding a profit per house of $395,000.
A small group of players in the building industry, having recognized its negligence, organized a program called Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED. LEED is a voluntary program now over a decade old. In that time period, approximately 1,025 buildings have been LEED certified. These are not the only energy efficient buildings that have been built, but of the million or so buildings built in the past ten years, less than one-tenth of 1 percent have been LEED certified. Part of the reason for this is the amount of paperwork required to certify a building for LEED. I know this because I developed software to help document the information required for certification. Another reason is the perception, true or not, that it costs more to build a LEED certified building. And for many architects, who sit in the passenger seat of the building development process next to the owner/driver, the LEED guidelines often lead to a constricted idea of what sustainability and energy efficiency means.
In Europe, where green architecture is more prevalent, architects have expanded the notion of energy efficiency and sustainable design beyond compact fluorescent lightbulbs, solar panels, and sod roofs. It is unfortunate but we Americans have become laggards in architectural design trends, unlike the days of architects like Frank Lloyd Wright. In Europe, the building industry, particularly architects, have come to see that the sustainability and energy efficiency of buildings come from integrating forward thinking design with much broader stakeholder participation that takes into account energy consumption, the organization of the home or workplace, building location, and transportation. This is unlike programs such as LEED, which present a long checklist of items that, to those of us long in the energy industry, have almost become cliché and discourage the innovation, invention, and leadership needed to mobilize the broader community of people looking to build.
The truth is that people like good design and would respond to sustainable energy-efficient design that pleases the eye. That design does not have to be out of the reach of the pocketbooks of all but the very rich. If Martha Stewart is available to the K-Mart shopper and Isaac Mizrahi and Michael Graves to the Target shopper, then good architecture that is energy efficient and sustainable should be available to the home and commercial building customer.
An alternative to LEED is the Energy Star program, a jointly managed program developed by the U.S. EPA and DOE. Unlike LEED, Energy Star programs focus solely on saving money and energy through energy efficient products and practices, with a direct reduction in greenhouse gases. In fact, Energy Star certification is one of the requirements of achieving LEED certification. However, Energy Star is a more robust program with higher brand awareness, much wider acceptance and adoption, and far more bang for the buck. Energy Star certification can be achieved for new construction and existing buildings, factories, and homes. Energy Star also certifies products based on their energy use so you know that when you are buying a new refrigerator, computer, washing machine, etc., you are buying the most energy efficient model available. The Energy Star label simplifies the buying decision for many of us looking to be more energy efficient. Its advantage at this point is its high brand awareness among average consumers. For buildings and homes, Energy Star recognizes the best performing ones in the country based on an energy management program developed by the EPA. Energy Star has partnered with over 12,000 organizations representing almost 15 percent of the commercial building market to improve their energy performance. Similarly, they have signed up over 3,500 home builders who have built over 725,000 Energy Star qualified homes since the program’s inception.
If we continue to build homes and buildings for the next 140 million Americans the way we have for the last twenty or thirty million, we will waste an enormous amount of energy. We can’t afford to do that. But the bad news about how buildings are built is good news for the retrofit business. Unlike cars, buildings are pretty easy to retrofit for meaningful energy savings. The truth is that, while we can make sure new construction is built to high standards of energy efficiency, retrofitting existing building stock is equally, if not more, important. Every year the commercial building stock grows by about 3.5 percent. Unless it is retrofitted with energy efficiency improvements, that means that over 90 percent of the building stock remains energy inefficient.
According to a study by the American Council for an Energy Efficient Environment (ACEEE), the average energy savings to be had in the U.S. by retrofitting existing homes and businesses with energy savings improvements is 33 percent. If we just made what would be considered cost effective improvements, we would save about 21.5 percent of our current energy use. Of course that cost effectiveness analysis presents a whole different kettle of fish. Consider the investment analysis to install energy efficient lightbulbs. When making a cost effectiveness calculation, you could count in not only the reduced energy bills but also saved operating and maintenance costs—high efficiency light bulbs have a longer life, so they don’t need to be changed nearly as frequently as regular light bulbs, which saves the cost of labor, planning, and shipping, and the saved costs of environmental cleanup because fewer light bulbs need to be made, less emissions are generated from the energy used, and fewer light bulbs will need to be disposed of. But those latter costs are often considered to be “societal,” not on the individual making the decision, and thus are usually not considered in the investment decision. If and when a carbon emissions market is put in place in the U.S., these costs may be factored into the investment decision, because theoretically the owner could sell the carbon credits that are created to someone who needs those credits. Or the maker and retailer of the high efficiency light bulb could embed the value of the carbon credit into the light bulb, thus lowering the cost of the bulb to the owner.
Energy retrofitting requires the knowledge, analysis, and experience to know what can be retrofitted and how to do it, and investment to implement it. One vehicle for accomplishing these retrofits is via a method called performance contracting. Under the performance contracting model, money now being paid to the utility for energy that is wasted by running inefficient equipment can be redirected through a special financing vehicle known as a performance contract to fund new equipment that uses less energy and costs less to operate and maintain. The performance contracting business model has been around for the past twenty or more years but has seen limited adoption for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the lack of interest and understanding on the part of potential users, the poor marketing skills of companies offering the contracts, and poor performance by some contractors. Today most energy retrofits occur via utility demand side management (DSM) programs or when energy services companies, which are privately owned companies organized to offer energy savings contracts, enter a market.
The organization Rebuild America estimates that between the years 2000 and 2030, growth-related and replacement development in America will increase by more than two-thirds the buildings and homes existing in the U.S. in 2000. All told, perhaps $25 trillion in construction will occur, maybe more. A significant portion of that construction will be to replace existing structures, although the majority will be for new ones. This window of time offers an opportunity for us to shape imminent construction into something more energy efficient than would otherwise occur, thus improving the nation’s quality of life.
Most of those buildings are used for education, retailing, offices, and storage. Altogether, those activities use about 60 percent of the total commercial floor space and 51 percent of buildings in the U.S. The construction business that builds these buildings itself generates more than $531 billion in annual revenues and employs more than 1.7 million workers (2002), with an annual payroll of nearly $62 billion. More than 1.8 million residential houses and buildings (2003) and approximately 170,000 commercial buildings are built and about 44,000 commercial buildings are demolished annually. Almost seventy-three million Americans, including 68.5 million children, spend their days in approximately 117,000 public and private primary and secondary schools (2000). While our kids are in school, the rest of us are in some other structure—house, office, store, or hospital, as on average, according to an EPA study on indoor air quality, Americans spend 90 percent or more of their time indoors. Buildings and homes account for 40 percent of total U.S. energy consumption and 70 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption. Consumption is pretty evenly split between homes and commercial buildings. All that energy consumption means that buildings in the United States contribute 38 percent of the nation’s total carbon dioxide emissions.
Worldwide, 30 to 40 percent of all primary energy is used in buildings that in turn produce approximately 30 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions. That won’t change much over the next twenty years without extensive retrofitting of existing building stock, because, due to their long life cycle, buildings that will be operating in the decade of 2030 have in the majority already been built. Energy use in buildings is strongly related to the building’s construction, its purpose, and the climate where it is located. There are five phases of energy use in a building’s life cycle: (1) the manufacturing of the products and components that make up the building; (2) the transportation of these products and components to the construction site; (3) the construction itself; (4) the ongoing operation of the building after it is built; and (5) the final demolition and recycling of the building.
The operating phase is the most energy intensive, with the use of heating, cooling, and lighting. But the other phases aren’t insignificant. For example, buildings are large users of materials that have a high content of embodied energy. Embodied energy is the energy that is consumed when building materials and components are produced. This includes the mining and manufacturing of materials and equipment, especially materials with high embodied energy content such as aluminum, cement and steel, the production of which usually depends on the use of fossil fuels, resulting in CO2 emissions. Cement plants alone account for 5 percent of global emissions of carbon dioxide. Each year, three billion tons, more or less, of raw materials—40 to 50 percent of the total flow in the global economy—are used in the manufacturing of building products and components worldwide.
Housing accounts for the major part of energy consumed in buildings; in developing countries the share can be over 90 percent. In the low-income rural areas of Africa, India, and China the main energy source for more than 70 percent of the population is wood, animal dung, and crop waste; and kerosene and paraffin are still widely used for lighting. Surprisingly, even today, around 2.4 billion people depend on wood, agricultural residues, and dung for cooking and heating; that number is expected to increase to 2.6 billion by 2030. According to a forecast presented by the IEA (2002), in 2030 biomass use will still represent over half of residential energy consumption in developing countries. The use of biomass does not necessarily contribute to climate change as biofuels are renewable unless harvested in an unsustainable way, but it often causes serious indoor pollution.
It is believed that building construction costs typically increase by 3 to 5 percent due to the introduction of energy efficient solutions. The reduction of energy use in one system can affect the energy use in another system. For instance, lighting savings can lead to significant reductions in the energy used for cooling and ventilation systems even in countries like Sweden, where typical modern buildings require cooling even at an outdoor temperature of -10°C. Commercial buildings enjoy a net Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) benefit from lighting savings because of the considerable internal heat generated by the lighting. A rule of thumb is that about one watt of air cooling energy savings result from every three watts of lighting energy savings.
In the U.S., the perceived increase in the cost of energy efficiency discourages investment in it and building codes often do not require it. Building codes are intended to protect public health, safety, and general welfare as they relate to the construction and occupancy of buildings and structures; but we don’t have a standard national building code or national energy code. Building codes vary by state and municipality, but because the codes are expensive to structure they are frequently set on a model code put out by various industry associations and government funded entities. In the case of energy use in buildings, the Department of Energy has a Building Energy Codes Program that works with federal agencies, national code organizations, the building industry, and state and local officials to promote more stringent building energy codes.
Building energy codes currently are set in a complicated process. National model codes are updated every few years, typically with incremental improvements, by two independent organizations: the International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) from the International Code Council for residential buildings, and American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers better known as ASHRAE Standard 90.1 for commercial buildings. The DOE determines whether the amended model code saves energy. States set the actual building energy codes (except a few states that leave codes to local governments) based on the national models. States are required to adopt a commercial code at least as stringent as the national model within two years of DOE’s determination. For residential codes, states are required to look at updates to the national model and either adopt them or explain why they chose not to.
According to the DOE, twelve states in the U.S. have residential energy building codes that meet or exceed the standards of the latest IECC, which was released in 2006. Some have codes based on earlier versions of the IECC and some have codes that were developed prior to 1990. Just because a state has an energy building code doesn’t mean that the code is applied to all new residences. In many states, the codes are not broadly enforced and may be restricted to state or federally owned buildings or in municipalities that have chosen to adopt the state energy building code.
According to the Alliance to Save Energy, if model building energy codes were strengthened incrementally by 30 percent in 2010 and 50 percent in 2020—and if all states implemented the codes—by 2030 cumulative savings from these code improvements would reach 56 quads of energy, $435 billion (nominal 2003 dollars), and 889 million metric tons of carbon equivalent. The greenhouse gas emissions reductions would be equivalent to taking 32 million cars off the road for twenty years. In the year 2029 alone, the savings would be 6.1 quads of energy (about 5 percent of total U.S. energy use), $47.5 billion in consumer energy bills, and ninety-seven million metric tons of carbon equivalent. This is comparable to removing seventy million cars from the road for one year.
If the benefits are so great, why do we need the regulation in the first place? Why doesn’t the market just adopt these measures? There is no simple answer, although it is true that the building construction industry suffers profoundly from a lack of leadership when it comes to energy efficiency. There are a variety of reasons for this. Buildings and homes are becoming increasingly complex, with many more choices for materials and products. Those products and materials are chosen, assembled, and constructed by many different parties that frequently don’t work together on an ongoing basis. The building team is usually led by the least experienced member of the team—the owner or developer—who often knows the least about building, let alone running loosely knit impromptu organizations that are usually at each other’s throats. That is what building team is like. It’s a group of business parties glued together by contractual relationships that are usually contentious. Litigation in the building business is very common, with lots of finger pointing. (I know because my husband is a builder.) This is hardly the climate in which to create an innovative product. Besides the inexperienced and untrained owners coordinating contentious building teams, the local utility company often pushes energy consuming solutions because they make money by promoting energy use and not efficiency. Construction and permanent lenders do not distinguish between energy efficient and non-energy efficient buildings; and builders and architects are not well trained in the issues of energy efficient construction and design. Some say that architects’ roles in the past century have, for various reasons, devolved from that of master builders to stylists.
A case in point on the state of the construction industry is the Stata Center on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This $300 million building is one of the most celebrated works of architecture in years. MIT paid renowned architect Frank Gehry $15 million to design the building, which was completed in 2004. Three years later, MIT sued Gehry, alleging the building design causes leaks that lead masonry to crack, mold to grow, and drainage to back up. According to Gehry, “These things are complicated and they involved a lot of people, and you never quite know where they went wrong. A building goes together with seven billion pieces of connective tissue.” If one of the leading engineering schools in the world can’t work together with one of the leading architects in the world to create a building that doesn’t leak, what does this say about the possibility for creating energy efficient buildings?
Home building isn’t much different. Much of the residential construction is now done by stock builders who repeat ten or twenty designs ad infinitum, meaning they repeat the same mistakes and same inefficiencies ad infinitum as well. The stock builders have learned that they don’t make money adding options or customizing existing plans, so energy efficient improvements in the homes they build don’t often happen. For individuals choosing to build a home on their own, hiring an architect is often an expensive proposition—usually 10 percent or more of the projected building cost. And when you use an architect you have to make lots of decisions that you don’t have to make when you buy an off-the-shelf house or even off-the-shelf house plans. For the decision and design challenged like me, the prospect is daunting at best and at worst purported to be a proven destroyer of marriages. My husband and I built a house recently and remain married; but we both have experience in the development and building industry, so we were well prepared for the task. We rejected design proposals from well respected architects due in part to the cost and in part from the knowledge that we would go crazy making all the additional decisions that go with designing something. We wound up using stock building plans we bought online for a house we saw featured in a book. Then we used the book to help us make aesthetic decisions, my experience to make decisions regarding energy efficiency and my husband’s construction experience for the rest. Even so, and despite the fact that the home builder we used was both pleasant and honest, it was apparent to me that had we left the decisions regarding energy-using equipment, insulation, windows, etc., in his hands, our home would have ended up as yet another energy hog.
The building industry is very fragmented and there are few barriers to prevent any Tom, Dick, or Harry from entering the business. The many small firms mean that no one company dominates the market, competition between builders is ferocious, and profits are slim. Licensing exists, but it is not a significant barrier. Education, particularly in home building and design, seems to more by experience than through formal training, with the result that innovation and progress in energy efficient design and construction is close to nonexistent. Meanwhile, with building growth rampant, there are an overwhelming number of new products being introduced into the marketplace, but builders are not trained or motivated to sort them out to decide what’s best. Builders are a cautious lot and not known for being innovative. Because there is little corporate size or presence in the industry, corporate research dollars are scant. Builders rely mainly on owners and architects to tell them what to do. Commendably, some builders are cleaning up their own acts from a waste and efficiency standpoint. They have a lot to clean up. Industry studies show that up to 46 percent of time spent on job sites is wasted.
The process of building home or commercial buildings is pretty much the same. The owner or developer sets the program. They decide how many bedrooms or conference rooms are needed, where the building will be located, and what the budget will be. Frequently this owner will not be the entity or person who ultimately uses the building or home. The home-building industry has constructed about 13.5 million single-family homes since the mid-1990s. For the past few years, nearly 20 percent of single-family home buyers have been purchasing newly constructed houses. In recent years, the difficulty of getting things built has made business harder for small, local builders and easier for big companies, with their greater resources, to gain control of the housing market. Over one-quarter of the homes built today in the U.S. are built by home building companies such as Pulte, Centex, or Toll Brothers. They build the homes according to their interpretation of what the market wants and then sell the homes to people looking for a place to live. Frequently, commercial space is built by a developer who then either sells or leases the space to a company or individual who uses it for their enterprise needs. In both cases, the party responsible for the building has little interest in the long-term operating characteristics of the home or building they construct unless either the customer or regulation demands them to take an interest. Since that so far hasn’t been the case, the resulting structure usually isn’t energy efficient. At Toll Brother’s developments, the average customer spends $103,000 on special extras like additional bathrooms and prime locations. According to Toll, buyers choose visible flourishes over pragmatism every time. During the energy crisis of the late 1970s, for instance, one option was a higher grade of insulation but no one bought it. Instead, everyone spent their extra money on moldings.
Even in a good housing market when profits are healthy, most home builders don’t build energy efficient homes. How good are their profits? According to the New York Times, in one of Toll Brothers’ developments the actual cost of building a single 2,700 square-foot home, including infrastructure, land, labor, and materials, was around $300,000. The houses went on the market in the spring of 2003 at $424,000. Most recently the same house now costs $695,000, yielding a profit per house of $395,000.
A small group of players in the building industry, having recognized its negligence, organized a program called Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED. LEED is a voluntary program now over a decade old. In that time period, approximately 1,025 buildings have been LEED certified. These are not the only energy efficient buildings that have been built, but of the million or so buildings built in the past ten years, less than one-tenth of 1 percent have been LEED certified. Part of the reason for this is the amount of paperwork required to certify a building for LEED. I know this because I developed software to help document the information required for certification. Another reason is the perception, true or not, that it costs more to build a LEED certified building. And for many architects, who sit in the passenger seat of the building development process next to the owner/driver, the LEED guidelines often lead to a constricted idea of what sustainability and energy efficiency means.
In Europe, where green architecture is more prevalent, architects have expanded the notion of energy efficiency and sustainable design beyond compact fluorescent lightbulbs, solar panels, and sod roofs. It is unfortunate but we Americans have become laggards in architectural design trends, unlike the days of architects like Frank Lloyd Wright. In Europe, the building industry, particularly architects, have come to see that the sustainability and energy efficiency of buildings come from integrating forward thinking design with much broader stakeholder participation that takes into account energy consumption, the organization of the home or workplace, building location, and transportation. This is unlike programs such as LEED, which present a long checklist of items that, to those of us long in the energy industry, have almost become cliché and discourage the innovation, invention, and leadership needed to mobilize the broader community of people looking to build.
The truth is that people like good design and would respond to sustainable energy-efficient design that pleases the eye. That design does not have to be out of the reach of the pocketbooks of all but the very rich. If Martha Stewart is available to the K-Mart shopper and Isaac Mizrahi and Michael Graves to the Target shopper, then good architecture that is energy efficient and sustainable should be available to the home and commercial building customer.
An alternative to LEED is the Energy Star program, a jointly managed program developed by the U.S. EPA and DOE. Unlike LEED, Energy Star programs focus solely on saving money and energy through energy efficient products and practices, with a direct reduction in greenhouse gases. In fact, Energy Star certification is one of the requirements of achieving LEED certification. However, Energy Star is a more robust program with higher brand awareness, much wider acceptance and adoption, and far more bang for the buck. Energy Star certification can be achieved for new construction and existing buildings, factories, and homes. Energy Star also certifies products based on their energy use so you know that when you are buying a new refrigerator, computer, washing machine, etc., you are buying the most energy efficient model available. The Energy Star label simplifies the buying decision for many of us looking to be more energy efficient. Its advantage at this point is its high brand awareness among average consumers. For buildings and homes, Energy Star recognizes the best performing ones in the country based on an energy management program developed by the EPA. Energy Star has partnered with over 12,000 organizations representing almost 15 percent of the commercial building market to improve their energy performance. Similarly, they have signed up over 3,500 home builders who have built over 725,000 Energy Star qualified homes since the program’s inception.
If we continue to build homes and buildings for the next 140 million Americans the way we have for the last twenty or thirty million, we will waste an enormous amount of energy. We can’t afford to do that. But the bad news about how buildings are built is good news for the retrofit business. Unlike cars, buildings are pretty easy to retrofit for meaningful energy savings. The truth is that, while we can make sure new construction is built to high standards of energy efficiency, retrofitting existing building stock is equally, if not more, important. Every year the commercial building stock grows by about 3.5 percent. Unless it is retrofitted with energy efficiency improvements, that means that over 90 percent of the building stock remains energy inefficient.
According to a study by the American Council for an Energy Efficient Environment (ACEEE), the average energy savings to be had in the U.S. by retrofitting existing homes and businesses with energy savings improvements is 33 percent. If we just made what would be considered cost effective improvements, we would save about 21.5 percent of our current energy use. Of course that cost effectiveness analysis presents a whole different kettle of fish. Consider the investment analysis to install energy efficient lightbulbs. When making a cost effectiveness calculation, you could count in not only the reduced energy bills but also saved operating and maintenance costs—high efficiency light bulbs have a longer life, so they don’t need to be changed nearly as frequently as regular light bulbs, which saves the cost of labor, planning, and shipping, and the saved costs of environmental cleanup because fewer light bulbs need to be made, less emissions are generated from the energy used, and fewer light bulbs will need to be disposed of. But those latter costs are often considered to be “societal,” not on the individual making the decision, and thus are usually not considered in the investment decision. If and when a carbon emissions market is put in place in the U.S., these costs may be factored into the investment decision, because theoretically the owner could sell the carbon credits that are created to someone who needs those credits. Or the maker and retailer of the high efficiency light bulb could embed the value of the carbon credit into the light bulb, thus lowering the cost of the bulb to the owner.
Energy retrofitting requires the knowledge, analysis, and experience to know what can be retrofitted and how to do it, and investment to implement it. One vehicle for accomplishing these retrofits is via a method called performance contracting. Under the performance contracting model, money now being paid to the utility for energy that is wasted by running inefficient equipment can be redirected through a special financing vehicle known as a performance contract to fund new equipment that uses less energy and costs less to operate and maintain. The performance contracting business model has been around for the past twenty or more years but has seen limited adoption for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the lack of interest and understanding on the part of potential users, the poor marketing skills of companies offering the contracts, and poor performance by some contractors. Today most energy retrofits occur via utility demand side management (DSM) programs or when energy services companies, which are privately owned companies organized to offer energy savings contracts, enter a market.
The organization Rebuild America estimates that between the years 2000 and 2030, growth-related and replacement development in America will increase by more than two-thirds the buildings and homes existing in the U.S. in 2000. All told, perhaps $25 trillion in construction will occur, maybe more. A significant portion of that construction will be to replace existing structures, although the majority will be for new ones. This window of time offers an opportunity for us to shape imminent construction into something more energy efficient than would otherwise occur, thus improving the nation’s quality of life.
References:
2002 Economic Census. Census
Annual Housing Starts (1978-2003). Census
http://www.census.gov/const/www/newresconstindex.html. C-Series Reports. Manufacturing and Construction Division, Census
The Total Exposure Assessment Methodology (
“Emissions of Greenhouse Gases in the
http://www.energycodes.gov/implement/state_codes/state_status_full.php (accessed
Proceedings of the 2004 ACEEE Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings, the Technical, Economic and Achievable Potential for Energy-Efficiency in the U.S.—A Meta-Analysis of Recent Studies, Steven Nadel, Anna Shipley, and R. Neal Elliott, American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.
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