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Energy for the Future

We just need the courage to invest our remaining wealth in the right energy technologies. The stakes are high because if we delay too long or invest badly, we’ll forfeit our prosperous lifestyle. Our first task is to reduce our energy consumption by 40 to 50 percent. There is certainly enough energy waste in our lives to accomplish this goal.

Next, we must attack our three primary energy problems.

1. Our combustion-based electrical generation is pathetically wasteful.

2. Our internal-combustion-engine vehicles are inherently inefficient.

3. Most or our important large buildings are not insulated and can’t be easily retrofitted. We need a continuing supply of cheap energy to heat them.

The solutions to these problems are inter-related and involve switching to some uncommon, although well-developed, technologies. These technologies include electric vehicles, combined heat and power (CHP), distributed electrical generation, and district heating. The following energy futures will help America maintain a long and prosperous run.

Benefits of Trees

Tree planting provides important environmental, economic, and energy efficiency benefits.

• Deciduous trees, planted on the South, Southeast, and especially Southwest of a building, shade windows, keeping the building cooler in hot weather. Shading buildings reduces air-conditioning electricity consumption, which reduces global warming caused by electricity generation. Every air conditioner owner needs the a/c running at the same time during the summer heat. Air conditioning constitutes about 60 percent of our increasing summer electrical peak load, which drives the need for new coal-fired power plants.
• Mature trees shade lawns, which then require less watering than un-shaded lawns. Less watering reduces water-pumping and therefore reduces municipal electricity consumption. Reduced watering also postpones investments in additional water-resource facilities. Ultimately we need to shade our lawns or employ xeriscaping  to reduce the huge water and electricity burden of keeping them green.
• Research indicates that trees cool whole communities by providing both shade and evaporative cooling due to the water transpiration from tree leaves. Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL) found a 3-to-6 degree temperature difference between neighborhoods with mature-tree shade and newer neighborhoods with little shade.
• Trees reduce the root cause of global warming: our rising global carbon dioxide levels by sequestering (removing and holding) carbon dioxide.
• Coniferous trees, planted to the North, Northeast, and Northwest of buildings block cold winds and reduce Winter heating costs. A South Dakota study measured 25-to-40 percent heating savings from windbreaks in windy areas.
• Trees  also increase your property value far more than their initial cost plus the water and mulch you put on them. Few other investments can provide you with as many benefits as a well-planted tree?

Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory scientists report that trees save electricity at a cost of around 1¢ per kilowatt-hour (kWh), which beats buying it at 10¢ per kWh a typical North American cost. For advice on the right trees and the right places for tree planting, contact your local nurseries, landscapers, and landscape architects.

Regardless of current politics and energy prices, our buildings desperately need weatherization. But buildings are owned by our customers who must agree to pay for our services. I’ll hazard to state the obvious, but selling is a skill. You can succede at selling weatherization services if you know how to do it. So what do you do? Where do you start? If you want to start your own weatherization business, talk to everyone you know about it. You’ll get endless advice—good and bad. All your friends and relatives should know that you want their business. Remember to charge everyone the same rates. Making deals for one and not the others lowers the value of your services.

We all have expectations for the lighting of our living and working spaces. Like many electrical energy uses, lighting presents three main energy conservation opportunities.

• Remove light fixtures
• Reduce the wattage of lamps and ballasts
• Increase the off time of the light fixtures

Habit and expectations play a major role in electricity use. A great many American buildings are over-lit because our expectations are high and nobody with a commercial building wants to disappoint potential tenants. I realized that Europeans have lower expectations when I lived in Europe from 2003 to 2006. Using electric lights during the day is considered wasteful in many countries over there. People are accustomed to far less light than we Americans demand. The lower light levels don’t seem to hurt them. You notice lights off during the day, less light fixtures, and lower wattages. We should try this approach. Our book Homeowners’s Handbook to Energy Efficiency contains an entire chapter on lighting and appliances.

A company called Energetechs in Missoula Montana sells energy expertise with energy products. This must be a good strategy because they’ve been in business for over 25 years. The company was formed by Gary and Gregg Mazade and was sold to Russ Hellem some years ago. Energetechs sells products and information for building airtight energy-efficient buildings. They show builders how to make a building airtight with sealants and gaskets and then they sell and install heat-recovery ventilators to ventilate the home efficiently. Energetechs sells superwindows, sealants, ventilators, advice, installation, quality control and training.

The subsidy for ethanol expired on the last day of 2011 and I didn’t shed any tears.  To make a gallon of ethanol, start with 23 pounds of corn with a potential energy of about 185,000 BTUs. Add 40,000 to 80,000 BTUS of fossil energy per gallon and presto you have a gallon of ethanol containing 77,000 BTUs. Therefore the efficiency of the corn-to-ethanol conversion, including the fossil energy, is around 30%. Then ethanol isn’t a very efficient motor fuel, so the conversion from heat to mechanical energy is around 15%. Really only about 5% of the energy in the corn is used to turn the wheels of the vehicle. No wonder ethanol requires subsides of $0.50 to $1.00 per gallon, including corn subsides! If you burn the corn in a pellet stove, you would harvest around 75% of the corn’s potential energy in space heat.

Cities are the best places for large power plants. I read a recent Time Magazine article about the Fisk Coal plant in Chicago and its cost in respiratory problems to the citizens of that great city. Time hinted that the city isn’t a good place for a power plant but I would disagree.

The city of Graz Austria burns wood chips at around 85% thermal efficiency with far less pollution than American coal plants. Most American electric generating plants  burn coal, a much better fuel than wood chips, at around 30% thermal efficiency. The difference is that the Graz plant and many plants in Europe use the waste heat from the turbine generators to heat homes in a city. To use the waste heat, the plant must be near a city. The Graz plant heats 50,000 homes. The Graz plant produces 2.8 times as much useful energy as Chicago’s Fisk plant, while using waste wood for fuel. Air pollution technology has advanced dramatically in the past 10 years. Americans need to adopt this technology called either combined heat and power or co-generation.

Saturn Resource Management will again be a premier exhibitor at The RESNET Building Performance Conference. Come see us at booth 223. For more information on the conference visit RESNET’s conference page. The will take place at the Renaissance Austin Hotel in Austin Texas on February 27 to 29, 2012, with pre-conference sessions on the 25th and 26th.

I’ve never coined a word and never wanted to either. The English language has approximately 600,000 words: that’s enough. However I need some catchwords for Saturn’s efforts in the new year of 2012. My first new word is the verb: complexify. We complicate, we obfuscate. We over-reach with our blind faith in standards, certification, and great mountains of paperwork. In short, we complexify.

Many homes with cathedral ceilings or flat roofs have little or no insulation. The IRC 2009 building code requires a ventilated space of at least one inch above the roof insulation. Building scientists sometimes ask how useful the ventilation is and how much ventilation could actually flow in the one-inch space.

Many cathedral roof cavities have been dense-packed with fiberglass insulation without providing space for ventilation and some experts believe this is an effective solution. However, this solution usually requires engineered plans approved by your building department.