Green Options » energy consumption

Ledalite’s Ergolight Office Lighting Reduces Energy Consumption by up to 80%

Amiel Blajchman — Sun, 10 May 2009 21:10:42 +0000

Building managers and environmental passers-by always scream when they see office lights on in the middle of the night, illuminating someone’s cubicle for hours when they’re not there. Ledalite’s Ergolight Controls System has been designed to take care of that problem, as well as increase office energy efficiency. It’s such a good solution, that it was recognized by the David Suzuki Foundation as one of their climate change solution case studies. Designed to help building designers and architects achieve LEED certification, depending on the set-up, customers can decrease their energy consumption by up to 80%.

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SolveClimate: The Next 100 Days — Let’s Launch a War Against Energy Waste

SolveClimate — Sat, 02 May 2009 15:20:19 +0000

Editor’s note: This post was originally published on Friday, May 1, at SolveClimate.

It is time for President Obama to mobilize us all to help build the new energy economy.

He has begun shaping the public policies we need. Now he needs to launch an Apollo project, interstate highway project, war effort and Marshall Plan all rolled into one.

For starters, he should call on us all to pick up our caulking guns and enlist in the war against energy waste – a national clean energy surge.

The potential for savings through efficiency improvements and conservation is enormous.

As Obama noted during the campaign, the United States is only the 22nd most energy-efficient major economy in the world right now. With very few exceptions, every vehicle, home, power plant, factory, community and state is hemorrhaging energy, energy dollars and greenhouse gas emissions.

Consider just a few examples:

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Greening the Empire State Building

Lisa Wojnovich — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 23:36:41 +0000

New York City’s Empire State Building is the latest poster child for green innovation. Earlier this week, Anthony Malkin, president of W&M Properties, the company that owns the building, announced that they would begin a $500 million self-financed program to renovate the world famous landmark — $100 million of which would be used to reduce the building’s energy consumption and carbon emissions. The project should be completed by December 2010.

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It’s Time to Get Smart. Smart Grid Technology Proposed for MA

Isa Cann — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 20:18:55 +0000

Legacy electricity grids, the current distribution systems used for a century in the US, are highly inefficient. While we reasonably moan over electricity costs to our wallets and the environment, ironically, a great deal of that electricity, 7%, never makes it to the user, lost at the transmission and distribution levels. “Further, the cost of power outages and power quality disturbances is estimated at $180 billion annually in the United States alone,” reports Deloitte. On a global scale, grid inefficiency is profound at 33%.

The world suppliers can do better for us. The latest technology, smart grids or “SmartGrids”, provides a far more attractive 60% efficiency. How it works? “A smart grid delivers electricity from suppliers to consumers using digital technology to save energy, reduce cost and increase reliability,” explains Wikipedia.

My state, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is theoretically on board. MA electricity providers responded to Governer Deval Patrick’s request for smart grid proposals. The Boston Globe’s interview with Stephen Connors, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Energy Initiative, explains the attraction. Environmentalists and others have been pushing for smart-grid technology for over a decade because it will enable consumers to use less electricity and benefit the environment. “Eventually, smart grids will also incorporate renewable energy - such as wind and solar power, and even electric cars - and feature software applications that reduce consumption during peak-demand times, as well as help power companies identify outages.” For example, the technology will note when you are not home and shut down nonessential components.

The two specific Massachusetts electricity service providers serving the highly populated eastern MA region have proposed the following pilot programs:

1. National Grid’s two-year pilot proposal installs approximately 15,000 meters that read energy consumption almost in real-time. “Customers could access the information via the Internet, by a thermostat readout, or through text messaging, and use the data to change their consumption patterns,” reports the Boston Globe. The cost of the program for the 1.3 million customers would be approximately $ 57 million dollars, which represents less than a dollar per month cost to customers, but an approximate savings of $70 dollars per year.

2. “NStar’s plan, meanwhile, calls for partnering with Tendril Networks Inc., a Colorado energy-efficiency company, to provide nearly 3,000 customers in Newton and Hopkinton [Boston area cities] with energy-consumption information - accessible on the Web - gathered from electricity meters every 15 seconds. Two-way communication between NStar and consumers will also allow the company to eventually ask customers to help reduce electricity consumption during peak-demand periods.”

Obviously, the application of smart grid technology is sustainable on several levels, so we can hope that it is adopted in MA and worldwide pronto. For faster progress, call or email your local legislator to encourage this positive corporate behavior.

Google PowerMeter Will Provide Real-Time Home Energy Information on Your Computer

Ariel Schwartz — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 06:14:14 +0000

Google is persisting in its quest to change the way we live with the announcement earlier today of Google PowerMeter, a program that displays real-time information about home energy consumption on your computer. The program is in closed beta right now, but Google hopes that it will eventually be distributed to anyone who has a smart meter.

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The Twelve Days of sustainablog: Poop, Green Teeth, and Pimpin’ Your Ride

Jeff McIntire-Strasburg — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 02:37:24 +0000

June’s most often associated with weddings, summer vacations, and Father’s Day… as you can see by the headline, we went in some other directions that month, too.

Summer was here, and the living was sustainable… and here are some of our best efforts.

June 2008

Caroline Savery declared that one of the top rules of living sustainbly is “Have fun!”
Zachary Shahan offered a new twist on “think global, act local”: sustainability starts at the inidividual level.
Mark Winstein answered the question “What is an investment product?”
Low Impact Living listed 10 Ways to Cut Home Energy Consumption.

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3 Things You Can Do as We Count Down to Earth Hour 2009

Marika Collins — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 03:18:18 +0000

Did you read all about the World Wildlife Fund’s Earth Hour coming up on March 29th and get excited about what you can do to make a difference? Here are three simple things you can start with to take action:

1. Sign up for Earth Hour 2009

You can take action by signing up to participate in Earth Hour.

2. Spread the word

The most powerful tool you have is your voice. Tell your friends, neighbors, schoolmates and coworkers, about Earth Hour. Email the story and encourage others to sign up and further spread the good word. Run your own Earth Hour using this tool.

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How To Build A Carbon Neutral Home

Reenita Malhotra — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 01:46:13 +0000

This post contains additional media. Click here to view the full post.

Is it possible to build a carbon neutral home? Apparently so says the Australian Home Lifestyle TV show. Watch this segment about green building construction.

Turn off Your Video Game, Save a San Diego’s Worth of Energy

Shirley Siluk Gregory — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:46:43 +0000

Which would you rather have: your Sony Playstation 3 or a year’s worth of electricity for the entire city of San Diego?

Silly question? You might not think so after reading the Natural Resources Defense Council’s new study, “Lowering the Cost of Play: Improving Energy Efficiency of Video Game Consoles.” Prepared with the help of Ecos Consulting, the report finds that energy inefficiencies and poor practices like not turning off games that aren’t in use are wasting huge amounts of energy and generating lots of greenhouse gases.

This is the first time anyone’s taken a hard and comprehensive look at the energy and carbon footprint of video games, and the findings might surprise you:

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Daylight Savings: Bad for Energy Conservation, Pollution

Shirley Siluk Gregory — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 17:47:27 +0000

Congress might have finally moved the one-hour “fall back in the fall” time switch past Halloween so young trick-or-treaters don’t have to roam the streets in the dark, but it’s time to chuck the idea of Daylight Saving Time altogether. Why? Because it wastes energy and creates pollution.

The concept has been around since the days of Benjamin Franklin, who saw it as a way to reduce candle tallow consumption for household lighting. But while Daylight Saving Time, or DST, might have made sense purely from a lighting perspective in the 18th Century, it doesn’t work in a 21st Century society that also uses electricity for heating and cooling, according to research by Matthew J. Kotchen and Laura E. Grant of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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The Instant Energy-Loss Diet: How to Massively Reduce Unsightly Power Consumption Overnight

Shirley Siluk Gregory — Tue, 20 May 2008 15:45:15 +0000

Gas prices are sky-high and people are hurting. Is it market speculation, tight supplies or the first throes of peak oil? And, if it’s the latter, how can civilization survive?

Well, residents of the small Alaskan capital of Juneau are showing us how. Following an April 16 avalanche that severed the city’s main power lines, Juneau found itself forced to cut its energy calories big-time literally overnight. It was that, or face energy bills double or triple or many times more than the month before. The good news: society didn’t collapse.

How did residents do it? Let’s count the ways:

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How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Peak Oil

Shirley Siluk Gregory — Mon, 19 May 2008 16:11:13 +0000

I’ve recently witnessed a few scenes of life after peak oil, and it isn’t necessarily the Apocalypse.

In Juneau, Alaska, for example, people are proving it’s possible to change our energy-hogging ways literally overnight and still keep a community up and running. The inspiration in their case: an avalanche that severed the hydroelectric power lines serving the remote Alaska capital, cutting off about 80 percent of the city’s available electricity.

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The Looming Internet Energy Crisis

Shirley Siluk Gregory — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:18:58 +0000

If you think the virtual, online world helps reduce energy consumption in the real world (a topic we’ve touched on before here at Green Options Media), think again: a new study by management consulting firm McKinsey & Company provides scary insights into how Internet computing is devouring more and more power and spewing out more and more greenhouse gases.

Based on data from the Uptime Institute, a technology consulting company based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the McKinsey report finds that, between 2000 and 2006, the amount of energy needed to power data centers doubled, and that consumption is likely to double again by 2012. In the U.S. alone, we would need to build 10 new power plants by 2010 just to meet the growing energy needs of this country’s data centers.

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Energy Takes Water, Water Takes Energy

Shirley Siluk Gregory — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 17:58:18 +0000

How do we meet the world’s future energy demands? Not an easy question, but it gets even more complicated when you factor in another critical need: water.

While water hasn’t always been factored into energy discussions — or vice versa — the two are “inextricably linked,” according to Sandia National Laboratories. That’s why researchers there are working to develop an advanced modeling tool that will help people better understand their energy and water needs in one neat, if complex, package.

It makes lots of sense, once you think about it. Purifying water for drinking, pumping water into homes and fields, and reclaiming water for reuse all require energy. And generating energy takes lots of water, whether indirectly by coal-burning power plants or nuclear reactors or directly by hydropower. According to Sandia Labs, the U.S. uses about 140 billion gallons of water per day to generate its electricity. Even though most of that water can be immediately reused, as opposed to the water used in agriculture, that still amounts to more than 40 percent of all the fresh water used by the nation every day.

As energy demands continue to rise, water shortages around the globe expand and climate change aggravates both, the complicated interplay between energy and water will become more important than ever for us to understand.

Take, for example, the rush to build desalination plants to turn salt water into drinking water as existing fresh water sources dry up. Desalination is energy-intensive; in fact, one study estimated that it takes 10,000 tons of oil a year to put out 1,000 cubic meters of desalinated water per day. Multiply that by the 13,080 desalination plants currently operating around the world, and the energy costs are clear.

Sandia researchers hope their new interactive energy-water model will give decision-makers across the board access to better information on how to plan for the future. The system, now in its second year of development, will eventually help answer questions about regional shortfalls, the tradeoffs involved for different energy and water sources, environmental and economic costs, and potential consequences. It’s a tall order, but one well worth trying to achieve.

“The challenge will be to have enough data to tell a story,” said Peter Kobos, a Sandia researcher handling energy modeling. “We think we do. If not, we’ll identify gaps and address them as the project progresses.”

Good News — Maybe — for Green-Collar Workers

Shirley Siluk Gregory — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 20:50:06 +0000

There’s good news for the future of green-collar employment, but it comes with a caveat: maximizing job growth in green industries will require the right public policy support. That means law-makers need to approve measures such as a renewable portfolio standard, incentives for renewable energy, public education programs and adequate funding for research and development.

If such measures are put in place, the U.S. could see as many as one out of every four workers employed by a renewable-energy or energy-efficiency industry by 2030, according to a new report from the American Solar Energy Society (ASES). That’s promising for both U.S. employees and for anyone concerned about reducing greenhouse gas emissions and our dependence on fossil fuels. But it will happen only, as the ASES report says, under “an aggressive deployment forecast scenario.”

That means we, as citizens and consumers, are going to have to apply strong and steady pressure on legislators — local, state and national — to do the right thing. And that, we all know, isn’t easy.

Still, if — as the saying goes — money walks, green-collar types might see Beltway support grow as green industries expand their economic muscle, which means more dollars for lobbying and campaign financing. And, in that regard, the future looks bright.

In the U.S., renewable-energy and energy-efficiency industries are already generating 8.5 million jobs and nearly $970 billion in annual revenues, according to the ASES report. “To put this in perspective,” the report states, “(t)otal sales for Wal-Mart, Exxon-Mobil and General Motors in 2006 were $905 billion.”

While companies on the energy-efficiency side — things like better windows, efficient appliances and insulation — are making more of the money right now, the renewables side is growing more rapidly.

The ASES predicts the hottest, fastest-growing industries will involve solar power, wind energy, ethanol and fuel-cell technologies. With the right level of public support, it says, we could see up to 40 million people employed — as everything from accountants and biochemists to engineers, mechanics and truck drivers — in the renewable-energy and energy-efficiency sectors by 2030, with annual green-industry revenues of $4.5 trillion.

Getting there, though, will require much more than a business-as-usual approach, the ASES report warns.

“This scenario requires appropriate, aggressive, sustained public policies at the federal and state level during next two decades,” it states. Getting decision-makers to come on board might take oil shortages, fossil-fuel price increases, growing security concerns or a greater awareness of the impact of climate change. The fear of suffering economically at a global level might also be a motivator.

“If we fail to invest in (renewable energy and energy efficiency), the United States runs the risk of losing ground to international … programs and industries,” the report concludes. “For the United States to be competitive in a carbon-constrained world, the (renewable energy and energy efficiency) industry will be a critical economic driver.”

Efficiency Alone Not Likely to Solve Energy, Climate Problems

Shirley Siluk Gregory — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 17:49:24 +0000

Can better energy efficiency help us reduce our consumption of fossil fuels and curb our greenhouse gas emissions? Maybe not as much as some hope.

While some people tout better and more energy-efficient technology as one solution to our current fuel and climate challenges, their expectations might be overblown. A new study from the UK Energy Research Centre, for example, finds that improved efficiency sometimes creates a tendency to use more energy, or to engage in other activities that counteract the efficiency gains. It’s called the “rebound effect,” and it can work either directly or indirectly to reduce expected energy savings from improved efficiency.

Rebounds occur, for example, when someone who buys a more fuel-efficient car decides to take the occasional longer day trip because, “Hey, I’m not spending as much on gas anymore.” They can also happen when someone who’s improved his home insulation uses the money saved on heating and cooling to pay for a plane trip to Orlando.

Then there’s “backfire,” also known, somewhat bizarrely, as the Khazzoon-Brookes postulate. That’s the even worse effect that can occur when a new energy-efficient technology actually causes overall energy use to increase. It happened, for instance, after the steam engine came onto the scene. Nineteenth-Century Scotland saw its total coal consumption increase tenfold thanks to the steam engine, which made it possible to mine coal at a lower cost, which made it cheaper to produce iron, when then lowered the cost of steam engines and drove the development of the railway industry.

While backfires are uncommon, rebounds are not. A recent report from the InterAcademy Council noted that technology improvements over the past 20 years have helped drive a small decline in the world’s energy intensity — which compares energy consumption to economic output — but not in its overall energy consumption. And the United National Environmental Programme’s latest “Global Environmental Outlook” (GEO-4) warns that, while technology can help defend against environmental stresses, it’s sometimes important to look beyond the “technology-centred development paradigm.”

The UK rebound report concludes we could be overestimating our savings from improved effiency by anywhere from 10 to 50-plus percent. It adds that policy-makers need to start taking rebounds into effect now if they want to enact energy- and carbon-reducing measures that actually work.

Red, Green & Blue: Me-Tooism Goes Green

Shirley Siluk Gregory — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 19:03:19 +0000

So every big corporation is green now, huh? That’s apparently what I’m supposed to believe based on every other commercial on prime-time TV: Walmart, esurance.com, Waste Management, GE, Delta, Coca Cola, and on and on. But, to one degree or another, I’m not buying it.

Sure, some companies are doing some things to reduce their carbon footprints or save energy … but, in plenty of cases, those are moves that make sense for them from a cost-cutting perspective. It’s nice that these actions help the environment a bit while helping the bottom line, but do corporations really have to go out of the way to pat themselves so hard on the backs for it … and persuade consumer America that they’re the greenest thing since Kermit the Frog? For Pete’s sake, I’ve even seen a cigarette company ad touting how "natural" its product is because its tobacco is organically grown. Yuck.

I appreciate that airline companies and auto-makers (some of them, anyway) are trying to reduce their fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. But I’m going to go out on a limb here (A hippie in a tree? Someone call Brent Musburger!) and say that no airline or car company is really entitled to call itself a green business yet … not until, say, cellulosic ethanol and zero emissions become standard.

I think the real green companies are the ones spending more time going green and less time talking about it, like these 10 contenders for Co-op America’s 2007 People’s Choice Awards.