Is there romance in energy efficiency?

By Elisa Wood

January 29, 2009

My mother told me many good reasons why I should get married. She appears to have forgotten one. It’s energy efficient.

Single people – at least those without roommates – appear to be gobbling up a lot of our energy supply. In fact, one person households are a main cause of consumer energy waste, according to a recent study “Consumer Energy Spending and the Demographics of Over-Consumption” by SMR Research. http://www.smrresearch.com/Energysummary.htm.

One in four households contains just one person. Singleton households have grown at rate three times faster than the population since 1960. Singletons use 18.4% more energy per capita than two-person households and 52.8% more than three-person households.

And it is not just that these folks live alone. Like all of us they live in bigger and bigger houses. The average new home is 34% larger than one built in 1980. People in a house with ten or more rooms use 18.8% more energy than those in eight-room homes, and 31.3% more than people in seven-room homes. The age of the house doesn’t matter.

Reversing this trend could dramatically reduce U.S. energy use. Yet, household demographics and home building are seldom mentioned in the debate over global warming and energy independence, say the researchers.

“This study shows that energy conservationists need a new public message,” said SMR President Stuart A. Feldstein. “The old focus on things like home insulation and auto fleet mileage is incomplete. People who decide to live alone, now more than one of every four households, and people who buy the McMansions, are those who squander our energy resources.”

Is it fair of us to single out singletons? Probably not. We all are guilty of energy waste in our own ways. Still with ‘green’ so popular these days, has no one yet proposed marriage with: “Will you be mine? It’s energy efficient.”

Visit Elisa Wood at www.realenergywriters.com and pick up her free Energy Efficiency Markets podcast and newsletter.

Energy efficiency’s $1 trillion identity

By Elisa Wood

January 22, 2009

The energy efficiency industry is a bit like the orphan who grows up to discover his long-lost parents left him a fortune.

The industry suffers from an identity crisis, says a report by the American Solar Energy Society. What is energy efficiency? Insulating attics? Demand response? Plug-in hybrids? Led lights? Combined heat and power?

ASES decided to quantify the worth of the energy efficiency job market, so first needed to define the industry. Here is what the organization came up with:

A job in the EE industry consists of an employee working in a sector that is entirely part of the EE industry, such as an energy service company (ESCO) or the recycling, reuse, and remanufacturing sector. It also includes some employees in industries in which only a portion of the output is classified as within the EE sector, such as household appliances, HVAC systems, construction, automobile manufacturing, and others.

The definition also includes those in government, finance, education, non-profit and environmental organizations, education, consulting and similar fields that deal with energy efficiency.

Using this definition the industry’s worth is tremendous. Gross revenues nationwide totaled more than $1 trillion in 2007. Energy efficiency created nearly 8.6 million jobs, more than 98% in private industry.

It is hard to fathom the import of $1 trillion. ASES provides perspective. It exceeds the combined sales of the three largest US corporations: Wal-Mart, Exxon- Mobil, and General Motors in 2007. Their sales were a meager $905 billion.

Beyond the report, why is it important for the industry to proceed with a clear identity? As President Obama moves forward with his “New Energy for America,” many will vie for a prominent position in the plan. ASES makes clear that a coalesced efficiency industry can provide what Obama seeks. Jobs and plenty of them: 29.8 million by 2030 that range from blue collar to high tech.

The industry has found its name–and fortune. Here is the chance to spread it around.

Visit Elisa Wood at www.realenergywriters.com and pick up her free Energy Efficiency Markets podcast and newsletter.

Retire the clunker?

By Elisa Wood

January 15, 2009

What would it take to convince you to get rid of your gas-guzzling old clunker? Would $5,500 do?

Some members of Congress think this is the magic figure. Under a bill introduced in the House and Senate today, Uncle Sam would give you a credit of up to $5,500 to scrap your old car. You could spend the credit on a new, fuel efficient vehicle or mass transportation.

The proposal makes a lot of sense and has won support from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.

Why the incentive? Because the rush for hybrids and other fuel-efficient autos is largely an upper- income trend. Nearly half of the nation’s $100,000/year-plus earners own cars that are less than four years old. But only about a quarter of the $40,000-$45,000 set have such young vehicles, says an ACEEE whitepaper. http://aceee.org/transportation/Crusher%20white%20paper%20fin.pdf.

The credit would bring middle-income families into the market to buy new and cleaner cars. Greater sales of these cars should reduce the cost of their advanced technologies.

Equally important, the credit helps fill a hole in the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard passed in 2007. The CAFÉ standard requires a 40% improvement in fuel economy for new vehicles by 2020. Nice idea, but not enough people buy new cars for the standard to significantly lower our oil use. In fact, about 70% of today’s auto purchases involve used vehicles.

Called the Accelerated Retirement of Inefficient Vehicles Retirement Act of 2009 (ARIVA), the bill would apply to used cars that get less than 18 miles/gallon and would be in effect from 2009 to 2012. ACEEE estimates consumers would retire 575,000 vehicles annually and save 46,000 barrels per day of oil by 2013.

I think I’d take the deal. But will Congress and the Obama administration? Stay tuned.

Visit Elisa Wood at www.realenergywriters.com and pick up her free Energy Efficiency Markets podcast and newsletter.

Energy Efficiency Markets chooses its favorites of 2008

By Reid Smith
January 8, 2009

We appreciate the entries submitted for Energy Efficiency Markets’ first annual ‘best of’ contest. It is difficult to select winners in an industry that is burgeoning with innovation. We hope you find our selections as intriguing as we did. Please continue to email us (realenergywriters@comcast.net) about interesting projects – we’d like to highlight them periodically in our weekly newsletter:

1. Best appliance: Energy orb

Remember the mood rings we wore as kids? The stone changed color depending on how we felt. Here is a variation on the theme: an orb that signals the energy mood of a building, glowing angry red when energy use is high and green when consumption is low. A kind of smart meter, this crystal ball helped Oberlin College students cut back by 56% on energy use in their dorms. What’s interesting is that the kids don’t pay energy bills – still they responded to the magic ball. http://features.csmonitor.com/innovation/2008/12/18/power-meters-help-homeowners-track-and-cut-their-energy-use/

2. Most innovative public policy: Connecticut

Connecticut tends toward gutsy moves when it comes to energy policy. The state is embracing innovation to reduce its electric rates, which hover around the second or third highest in the nation. We like Connecticut’s energy efficiency certificate or “white tag” trading program, which takes a page from the successful renewable energy certificate market now in several states. Companies, colleges, hospitals, factories and others earn the tags or credits for their energy reductions. They then sell credits to utilities or others who need them to meet state energy efficiency mandates. http://www.incisivemedia.com/energyrisk/Environmental_Risk/PDFs/Spring2008/7_EnvRisk_EnergyEfficiency.pdf

3. ESCO: CMC Energy Services

The health of any industry depends on truth in advertising. If the efficiency industry overstates what it can achieve, consumers will quickly lose faith. That is why we like the honesty in CMC Energy Services’ Home Energy Tune-uP®. The company calls it a pay-as-you-save residential energy audit program; it identifies the group of improvements in the home that will truly pay for themselves when financed. The whole house audit takes into account how various improvements interact and change your payback. If you install insulation, and you also get a new heat pump, less scrupulous auditors will calculate insulation savings based on your old, inefficient heat pump. That overstates your savings. CMC adjusts its audit to take into account the new heat pump. Consumers get a realistic picture. CMC also uses home inspectors to do the audits, rather than contractors who may have a natural conflict of interest. http://www.hometuneup.com/

4. Demand-response: Energy Curtailment Specialists

The DR market has several emerging players that deserve credit for growing use of the resource. We had a hard time deciding who to choose. We finally selected Energy Curtailment Specialists because of its intelligently packaged “Power Pay.” See http://www.ecsgrid.com for the company’s plain-talk pitch, one that avoids most of the jargon peculiar to demand response programs. FAO Schwarz and the Hyatt Regency are among recent converts to the program.

5. Transportation: Google

Google made a product that is so popular its name has become a commonly used verb. Now the company turns its attention to greening the world. Among other things, Google has a fleet of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) at its Mountain View headquarters for employee use. Following a seven-week experiment, Google announced some impressive performance from its fleet. The PHEVs averaged as much as 93 MPG average across all trips, and 115 MPG on city trips. http://www.google.org/recharge/. Will we eventually “PHEV” instead of drive?

6. Green building and construction: Pairing of green energy and efficiency

Here we honor not so much a company but a concept: the efforts by renewable energy companies to get customers to pursue all cost-effective efficiency before buying green energy. For example, California-based3Degrees, which markets renewable energy certificates (RECs) and carbon offsets, starts by analyzing a building’s carbon footprint. If it finds strong efficiency potential, 3Degress contracts with a third party to take on the project. http://www.3degreesinc.com. Chevron Energy Services offers a good example of successfully pairing solar and efficiency at three campuses of Contra Costa Community College. The $35.2 million Northern California project includes a 3.2-MW solar power generation system, efficient lighting and energy management systems, efficient heating, ventilation and air-conditioning, and high-voltage electrical system replacements. http://www.chevron.com/News/Press/release/?id=2008-01-31

Visit Reid Smith at www.realenergywriters.com and pick up his free Energy Efficiency Markets podcast and newsletter.

Will support for efficiency hold in 2009?

By Elisa Wood
December 18, 2008

The stars are aligned to make 2009 a good year for energy efficiency — or at least, most of the stars.

President-Elect Barack Obama has assembled an energy team that supports clean technologies. Most notably, Obama named Steven Chu as energy secretary on December 15. Chu is a Nobel Prize winner and director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a leader in bringing energy efficiency technologies to market, such as the compact fluorescent light bulb. http://www.lbl.gov/

Obama also is in the process of putting together an economic recovery package that places high priority on energy, including investment in efficiency. The goal is to quickly create jobs by giving ‘shovel-ready’ projects a boost in the sluggish economy. Efficiency projects more easily qualify as ‘shovel-ready’ — set for quick development – than most energy undertakings. Efficiency measures rarely require the kind of time-consuming permitting, engineering and financing of power plant or transmission construction.

So what star is out of place in the sky? The star that governs oil prices. It costs far less to fill up the gas tank now than it did last summer. That is a good thing. The problem is that the US consumer tends to be short-sighted. If gasoline is cheap today, who cares about tomorrow? Energy efficiency falls out of favor.

Joe Loper, senior vice president for the Alliance to Save Energy, warned about this “cycle of complacency” in testimony before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources December 10. Loper recommended $15 billion in economic stimulus money for energy efficiency to keep the nation’s energy goals on track. Investing in efficiency will not only create jobs, but also will foster continued use of technologies that have already proven their worth. “A silent partner” in meeting the nation’s energy needs, efficiency has reduced America’s energy bill and related carbon emissions by 50% since 1973, he said.

Obama, himself, is worried that declining gas prices may erode support for his aggressive energy agenda. He told Time magazine that lower oil prices make “the politics of it tougher than it might have been six months ago.” http://change.gov/newsroom/entry/the_president-elect_on_his_goals_and_agenda_in_a_time_of_crisis/

We’ll see in the next several weeks if support continues for an overhaul of the nation’s energy portfolio, or if the public follows the wrong star in the sky.

Visit Elisa Wood at www.realenergywriters.com and pick up her free Energy Efficiency Markets podcast and newsletter.

Front-load washers: Leaky solar panels revisited?

By Elisa Wood

December 11, 2008

Some days I’d like to throw my front-load clothes washer out the back door. But that probably won’t be necessary because it may walk out on its own.

The LG product shakes and rattles so much in the spin cycle that it ‘walks’ several inches across the floor each day. One guest to my kitchen thought we were experiencing an earthquake. Sears repairmen have visited twice, but tell me nothing is wrong with the machine: front loaders just do that. In fact, one repairman confessed that he’s called out to homes “all the time” because of these over-agitated beasts.

I spent several hundred dollars more on this machine than I would a conventional washer that loads clothes from the top. I was willing to do this because front loaders are more energy efficient. They use about one-third as much water as top-loading machines. That translates into less energy needed to warm the water. Front-loaders also spin faster, removing more moisture from clothes so that they require less time in the dryer.

The machine includes sophisticated electronics and can perform all sorts of tricks — from automatically measuring the size of laundry load to singing me a sweet song when the cycle is over. But I eye its friendly R2D2-like exterior warily. How soon before all of the rattling and rolling breaks the delicate electronics, and I have a hefty repair bill?

Several months after I bought the machine, Sears advised that the machine might stop shaking if I shored up the laundry room floor from below and replaced the linoleum with tile. Sears sales folks did not tell me before I bought the machine that its successful use required home remodeling.

Supposedly, a next generation front loader will be released shortly that does not try to escape its owners. I’m not sure what good that does me – and so many others – who already put down our hard-earned cash on today’s poor design.

I write this not to whine about my purchasing misstep, but to point out the dangers that faulty products cause the green energy movement. We’ve been down this road before. In the 1980s, when high oil prices piqued consumer interest in renewable energy, the industry rushed solar panels to market without properly training installers. Many roofs leaked. Renewable energy became associated with poor quality. Today, the solar industry wisely puts a great deal of effort into proper training of installers and product warranties. Solar panels, in fact, are now associated with quality custom construction. But it took years to restore consumer confidence.

Energy efficient appliances risk the same backlash if they take advantage of our desire to do the right thing. Consumers are willing to pay more for greater efficiency; their willingness will falter if energy efficiency becomes associated with inferior workmanship.

The stakes are high. In the not-too-distant future the auto industry is likely to offer the plug-in hybrid vehicle. A source I interviewed recently pointed out the enormous damage to public confidence that will occur if the plug-in hybrid is introduced before its battery is perfected. Not long ago several million laptop computers were recalled because their batteries overheated and sometimes caught fire. Imagine the consumer dismay if several million plug-ins cars – far more expensive than laptops — were recalled ? I am as eager as anyone to fuel my car by plugging it into an electric socket. But I do hope the auto industry takes its time overcoming the difficulties of perfecting the battery and gets it right before marketing the cars.

The public supports green products now more than any other time in our history. We may think that this support is rock solid. I’m not so sure. My front-load washer could rattle anything.

Visit Elisa Wood at www.realenergywriters.com and pick up her free Energy Efficiency Markets podcast and newsletter.

Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and combined heat & power

By Elisa Wood

Dec. 4, 2008

The universe contains many mysteries. A big one for me is: Why doesn’t the United States use more combined heat and power (CHP)?

It requires an energy geek, of course, to even ask that question. Most of the world knows nothing about CHP, even when referenced by its other name: cogeneration. So it was heartening to see the Department of Energy’s recent effort to educate the public in a Dec. 1 report: “Combined Heat and Power: Effective Energy Solutions for a Sustainable Future.” http://www1.eere.energy.gov/industry/distributedenergy/

What’s the problem with CHP? People are unaware of it – even though it’s been around for 100 years. It could benefit from a marketing makeover, especially a name change. Combined heat and power does not roll off the tongue easily like solar and wind, nor does it evoke an image of efficiency and greenness.

Here is a quick definition: CHP systems are a form of distributed energy (like solar) built close to where they are used. They generate electricity and use the excess heat that is produced to cool or warm the building. So a CHP system uses one fuel to create two resources – power and usable heat. As a result, CHP plants are about 35% more efficient than typical generators.

“CHP may not be widely recognized outside industrial, commercial, institutional, and utility circles, but it has quietly been providing highly efficient electricity and process heat to some of the most vital industries, largest employers, urban centers, and campuses in the United States,” says the report.

It appears the United States may finally embrace the resource. The DOE report proposes that 20% of US generation capacity come from CHP, up from today’s 8.6%. Because CHP is so efficient, its greater use would mean far less greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, the report finds that under the 20% scenario, the US could avoid over 60% of its projected increase in carbon dixoide emissions between now and 2030.

Several states are putting policies in place to help advance CHP, particularly energy efficiency portfolio standards. These standards require that energy efficiency make up a certain percentage of the state’s mix of electric resources. Fourteen states allow use of CHP to meet the standard.

CHP also should get a boost from a new 10% federal tax incentive signed into law as part of the financial recovery package in early October. The credit applies to small and medium-sized CHP projects.

That still leaves the problem of the brand name. Suggestions welcome! Preferably something that could make combined heat and power the “Brangelina” of the energy world.

Visit Elisa Wood at www.realenergywriters.com and pick up her free Energy Efficiency Markets podcast and newsletter.