How much money can new lighting save your business?

By Elisa Wood
August 24, 2011

Am I average?

That’s the question that often hits me when someone quotes an ‘average’ statistic. The ‘average’ business or household seems almost mythological. Few of us fall right on that point on the line.

The same is true when it comes to often quoted energy efficiency savings statistics. For example, the US Environmental Protection Agency says that replacing one old-fashion incandescent light bulb with a compact fluorescent light will save on average $69 over the product’s lifetime.

Will your business save that much by installing new light bulbs?

Several factors come into play, some that you can control, the most obvious being how much you turn on the light.

Another important dynamic, not often discussed, is your electric rate. Rates vary dramatically through the United States. In coming up with the $69 savings figure, the EPA assumed an electric rate of 11.3 cents/kWh. If you operate a business in North Dakota, you’re paying a lot less than that for electricity, about 6.8 cents/kWh, so your savings from a CFL will be lower. If you’re in Hawaii, you are paying a lot more, about 28 cents/kWh, so your savings will be greater.

Take a look at this frequently updated chart of electricity rates in the 50 states. Is your business in one of the pricier states? If so, an investment in new lighting may quickly pay back. After you’ve found your electricity rate, you can go to this calculator and gauge what you’ll save if you switch from old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs to CFLs. This will give you a closer idea of your savings, although even with this calculation we still are dealing to some degree with averages. The electricity rate in the chart is the average for utilities in your state. Your utility can provide your specific rate.

Businesses are increasingly contemplating saving energy – and costs – by installing efficient lighting, not only CFLS, but LEDs and lighting controls. This is partly because lighting accounts for somewhere between 20 percent and 50 percent of the electricity commercial enterprises use, so the savings can be substantial. On a larger societal level, efficient lighting for businesses is important because US commercial buildings represent 47 percent of the total growth in energy expected in the US between 2010 and 2020.

Elisa Wood is a co-author of “Energy-Efficient Lighting Explained: A guide for business people who aren’t lighting techies,” published by RealEnergyWriters.com and The Daily Energy Report.

Desert Year: Robust Economy and Lessons of the Sonoran Agave

by Skip Laitner
Guest Blogger, Energy Efficiency Markets
Reposted from Real Climate Economics
August 17, 2011

John ‘Skip” Laitner is an economist, enjoying a desert year while on research sabbatical from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. Skip is discovering some surprising insights from his time in the desert that can inform the way one looks at the economy and social systems. In a series of posts entitled Desert Year, Skip lends us his new insights, as well as his 40 years of experience as an energy and natural resource economist, to probe the economic, climate, and energy challenges that confront us.

A Robust Economy

There is a good deal of worry about the robustness of our nation’s economy. And rightly so. Especially since we have about 5 million fewer jobs today than in 2007, even as we have about 10 million more people to support with those available jobs.

In an effort to understand why economic performance has been so lackluster, we are constantly taking our economic temperature. We measure it every way we can. But it is also true that – other than the occasional surprise – what you measure is what you find; and we may not be measuring all of the right things.

The current measure of our economic well‑being is the ebb and flow of dollars transacted in the marketplace. These dollars are usually indexed against things like investment, labor output or population. From these various indices we suppose that we can obtain a reading on how well the economy is doing.

Examining the economy from a resource rather than a market perspective, however, may yield an entirely different understanding of the economic process. To better illustrate this point let us borrow some momentary insights from Arizona’s Sonoran desert environment.

In the desert, similarities in plant appearance are poor indicators of whether or not plants are related to one another. While the agave plants have vegetative structures similar to those of the aloe family, neither plant lineage can be determined until we examine their flowers.

The vegetative parts of both the agave and the aloe plants are mostly products of the very few adaptive mechanisms available to help a plant survive in the desert.

These survival mechanisms include extensive root systems and the ability to store water in the leaves and stem of a plant. With so few adaptive features available to them, even plants from unrelated families may look very much alike.

Flowers, in contrast to the plant structures, are the result of intricate relationships with the animals that pollinate them. Because of this dynamic two‑way interaction with animals and insects, flowers are more complex than the leaves or stems of a plant.

The relationship between the agave and the aloe plants is revealed, not by looking at their vegetative structures, but by comparing their flowers and fruits. It turns out that despite initial appearances, the Sonoran Agave and the South African Aloe have entirely different histories and origins.

In a similar way, we may develop a different understanding of why the nation’s lagging job creation is so lackluster if we measure it in a wholly different manner. And here we might build on the work of my colleagues Bob Ayres and Benjamin Warr in their book, The Economic Growth Engine: How Energy and Work Drive Material Prosperity. Measurements might include, for example, not just how much energy we are actually throwing at our various economic processes. More critically, we might ask how efficiently we actually might be in converting that energy into useful goods and services. This might reveal different insights than if we only ask how many dollars are consumed in the production process.

As the data from Ayres and Warr might suggest, when viewed from an energy rather than a market perspective, the American economy is perhaps 13 percent energy (in)efficient.

It takes energy to explore, mine and produce or transform coal, the oil and the natural gas needed to power our homes schools and businesses. And it takes energy to clean up the many wastes produced by that production and consumption of energy. Based on 2005 data we waste, in short, about 87 percent of all the energy consumed in our various economic activities.

As we might imagine, that level of huge waste creates an array of costs that might otherwise constrain a more robust economy. That level of waste adds a very large burden to our air, land and water resources. But we would not find this out by looking only at the dollar transactions of the marketplace. As with the Sonoran Agave and the South African Aloe, we need to look at more than the familiar indicators to understand the full historical relationships that determine the robustness of our nation’s economy.

John A. “Skip” Laitner is Director of Economic and Social Analysis for the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE), based in Washington, DC. Tucson is his family’s hometown, and he likely will be there through August of 2012. He hopes to provide a new posting roughly every week over this next year. While these columns do not reflect the official opinion or views of ACEEE, its board or its staff, he can be reached atjslaitner@aceee.org.

Home energy devices: Can we bewilder Edison?

By Elisa Wood
Aug. 10, 2011

Why do so many energy insiders insist that home energy automation will fail? Many whom I respect say the typical householder will never take the time to fiddle with smart gadgets that reduce energy costs.

Their skepticism, however, just elicits a verbal shrug from Peter Porteous, CEO of Blue Line Innovations, maker of the PowerCost Monitor, one of the many devices hitting the market to help homeowners manage their energy.

Porteous sees things differently because he spent several years selling products in other industries. Smart energy devices, he says, are really no different than food, automotives or any other consumer item.

“We are no different than any other market. The text book tells it all. First there are the early adopters, and you gradually move through the product lifecycle to where there is mass adoption. Business models evolve, and products evolve, and gradually you make yourself more appealing to a wider segment of the population. There are no surprises here,” he told me by phone this week.

We’ll know soon if he’s right. The company has worked with about 125 utilities on various pilots and projects since it was formed about seven years ago. But it’s not relying solely on that channel to get its product out. Blue Line is testing its ability to thrive in the mass market by offering its energy display monitor directly to consumers in stores like Lowes and Frys.

The PowerCost Monitor’s bragging rights are that it’s relatively cheap (about $100 for a basic model), easy to install (no electrician required), and does not rely on a smart meter. In fact, Porteous says the system works with 90 percent of existing meters, even the old-fashion analog kind. A sensor placed on the home’s meter reads your electricity usage and transmits it wirelessly to a handheld display inside the house. The display shows how much electricity you’re using both in kilowatt-hours and in dollars and cents. A more advanced cloud-based system (about $229) lets consumers slice and dice their home energy use and pinpoint the appliances that are energy hogs. The technology is increasingly moving away from the displays and toward use of cell phones, making it easy to monitor energy usage while away from home.

Porteous also is nonplussed by Google and Microsoft’s recent decision to quit the home energy display market. Skeptics cited the back-to-back departure of the two giants as evidence that smart grid devices have no place in the home. But again Porteous sees the event as a function of a normal market. Smart energy is non-core to Google and Microsoft, and “it is just the natural course of companies in harder times to focus their resources,” he says.

Their departure was something of a blow to Blue Line, since it used the Google and Microsoft applications with its hardware. However, Blue Line was already well on its way to launching a third option offered by People Power when the giants announced they were transitioning out. “The impact was quite minimal,” he says.

So will Blue Line prove that the home energy skeptics are off base? We’ll see. In the meantime, we should probably cut the skeptics some slack. Innovation is new to the electric industry. Those who frequent energy conferences have heard the line many times that while Alexander Graham Bell would be shocked at the changes made to telephones, and barely recognize the technology, Thomas Edison could pretty much pick up where he left off if he were to return today. But if Porteous and his competitors have their way, we’ll have a pair of bewildered ghosts.

What if the light bulb produced more than light?

By Elisa Wood
Aug. 4, 2011

Talk about a light bulb moment.

A professor of engineering at Edinburgh University recently demonstrated for the first time to a wide audience his technology that uses common every day lights to transmit data.

Harald Haas streamed a video through a desk lamp at Ted Global 2011at Scotland’s Edinburgh International Conference Center in July.

If commercialized, the technology not only creates a vast new application for light, but also dramatically expands our now limited wireless capacity. Imagine downloading your email from any of the14 billion light bulbs installed in the world.

Haas’ technology swaps out our current way of transmitting data – through radio frequency – with a new approach using visible light from LED light bulbs. This is significant because we are running out of radio frequency spectrum as our appetite for wireless communication grows, Haas says. The visible light spectrum, on the other hand, is enormous, with about 10,000 times more capacity than radio frequency. Using light instead of radio frequency would give us a lot more capacity for our cell phones, wireless computers and other devices.

The energy implications are even more interesting.

First, the technology creates a new impetus for switching from incandescent light bulbs to LEDs. Until now, LED champions have argued their cause based on the light bulb’s energy efficiency. It’s a good argument, but not one that always motivates the consumer. With Haas’ technology the LED takes on new importance. LED lights are necessary because they contain a semi-conductor; incandescent light bulbs do not.

Second, the whole process of transmitting data through light is more energy efficient than using radio frequency, according to Haas. Think of it this way. We have 1.4 million cellular masts, or base stations, that now allow us to transmit data through our 5 billion cell phones worldwide. These base stations use a lot of energy, particularly for cooling, operating at only a five percent efficiency level, according to Haas. What if instead we transmitted data through the 14 billion light bulbs already installed worldwide? Haas says he’s calculated the “energy budget” and found light-based data transmission to be so efficient, it is virtually free.

“It should be so cheap that it’s everywhere. Using the visible light spectrum, which comes for free, you can piggy-back existing wireless services on the back of lighting equipment,” he says.

The technology offers some other advantages as well, particularly privacy, convenience and health assurances.

Light is more secure than radio waves. Light does not penetrate walls and radio waves do. So it appears that it would much more difficult to hack your calls via light wave than radio wave.

As for convenience, think of how you’re asked to switch off your computer on an airline, so that you don’t interfere with radio signals needed by the plane. If you were instead using the light above your seat to access the Internet, you could keep the computer on.

And last, for electric utilities, light-based transmission would eliminate customer concerns that smart meters placed on homes cause cancer. Industry research has not supported these claims. Nonetheless utility customers in some states, particularly California and Maine, have protested installation of smart meters, themselves an energy efficiency device.

How does Haas’ technology work? It all looks pretty simple. He switches on a desk lamp that uses a $3 LED light. The light beams into a hole to a receiver. The receiver detects small changes made in the light’s amplitude and converts those changes into an electronic signal. Voila! A streaming video, showing flowers opening, appears on a nearby screen. To stop the video, Haas simply passes his hand in front of the light.

Haas hopes to see the necessary microchip fitted into every lighting device: household lights, street lamps, cell phones, overhead lights on planes, traffic lights. Of course, the road to commercialization trips up many potential technologies. And he’s still working on improving data speed. (He has achieved rates of 10 MBit/s per second and hopes to achieve and 100 MBit/s by the end of this year.) But this is one to watch. See his TED talk here.