People need direct and clear instructions, like road signs or charts in a doctors office.  A speed limit sign doesn’t say “Slow speed by 20%” when entering a school zone.  It says “Do not exceed 20 mph”.  If a doctor reports cholesterol is higher than it should be, he recommends how to cut enough get it down into a healthier range.  The blood test result is a number and the healthy target is a number.  Speed road signs and common health matters (cholesterol, heartbeat, breathing rate, blood pressure, etc) are always numbers.  We sometimes do not think about what they mean, but we often understand what’s better or worse.  For example, we might feel okay about going 22 in a 20 mph school zone, but probably not 35.  I might feel okay about a 105 cholesterol result but certainly not 150.

What might personal energy road signs be? The most important personal energy information would seem to be

• How much are my ongoing energy costs, compared to other people?
• How much of what kinds of fuel are being used to get the energy to me?
• How much pollution and environmental damages are associated with it?

          Yet many energy consultants give advice based on the house, not the people in it.  It is common in most energy analysis software and reports to describe and compare heating and cooling equipment size, energy costs and use per square foot (sf) of floor area.  This does not help with understanding per-person energy which can rise even as per-sf energy drops.  A larger conditioned space often achieves a naturally lower heating + cooling energy requirement per sf and improving thermal efficiency of any structure (like airtightening and insulating wall cavities and attics) also reduces heating + cooling energy requirements per sf.  But a single or 2-person household in a larger, even sometimes more thermally built home can result in more energy use per-person than if they were in a less thermally well-built smaller home.  The most important energy information for a person should be more about the person.

          Average home floor area per person in 2000 according to US DOE was about 760 sf.  Per-person household energy was about 36 million equivalent BTUs per year per person.  Average per-sf home energy usage was about 47 thousand equivalent BTUs.  In regions where a large portion of annual energy use is heating and cooling, energy use is often compared to heating and cooling degree-days (DD, tallies of accummulated average daily temperature differences between inside and outside).  Energy use per degree-day can be compared both per-sf and per-person.

          Examine this summary and breakdown of my household energy use in 2010, what I call an “Energy Snapshot”.

          To understand this sheet, let’s break it into sections.  In each grey cell, I enter the household information, also the local heating and cooling degree-days over the same period as the recorded energy use (or local averages if analyzing a new home design).  Having visited and used EnergyStar’s “home energy yardstick” (see above for website), I also entered my 9.2 yardstick score.  Mine is an existing house and household in 2010, so all my energy and degree-days numbers are actual.

          Each line of energy input (in the grey box under “Conventional Energies”) is processed to show equivalent energy BTUs and associated CO2 (based averages per fuel, for electricity on local utility reports of its per kWh average).  These results are in tables to the right of the raw energy use.

          The middle section (going down now, where there are 3 side-by-side yellow boxes) shows various calculated usage indices compared to known averages or norms.  The left-most box is about energy cost per sf and per person.  The center box is about energy usage and CO2 per sf and per person, but not referenced to climate severity.  Easy to see my 2010 usage per-sf was 52% and per-person was 71% of DOE-reported household averages in 2000.  Right-most yellow box shows my per-sf and per-person energy use per degree-day, 3.7 and 3.8.  Relate these to the color bar “Ohio Valley Ratings Gauge”.  Easy to see our performance was “super” per sf and “better than average” per person compared to norms in my climate region.

          The 9.2 Home Energy Yardstick score means according to EnergyStar, 91% of USA households used more energy than mine in 2010.

          This is an example of clear and personal household energy information.  Confirms that my usage is much lower by several gauges per person as well as per sf.  However, because mine is an all-electric home serviced by a mostly coal-fired electric utility, my per-person household CO2 emission are certainly higher than the 9 pounds per person I’ve seen suggested as “sustainable”. Our electricity use has already been lowered substantially, but we will consider additional reductions over coming years.

          I did some energy consulting for an urban homeowner recently who was so shocked at seeing how his energy use was so much greater than local and national averages that he became far more motivated to reduce a greater amount of his energy use.  As an energy consultant, I can easily say that it is ideal to be TOLD by a customer how much energy use to try to cut.  I very much prefer clients committed to challenging goals!  In my experience, the least aggressive and interesting projects are those driven merely to qualify for subsidies.  There is nothing wrong with looking for free money, but that can sometimes distract from accomplishing the greatest energy use and emissions reductions.

If there’s one thing we should agree about, we need to reduce our use of conventional energies substantially.  Fortunately, there many ways to achieve that for most homeowners.

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Frequent Commenter John F. Robbins writes this marvelous response to the 2GreenEnergy survey on renewables:

The most missing question or comment in your survey and most of this blog is how to move away from the current energy-guzzling nature of our culture. Almost all the old-wave renewable energy discussion (prior to 2000) was heavy and serious on how to use less prior to or while trying to convert to renewables. Yet now, under the mantra of “creating jobs” or “increasing profits and tax collection” or just “new-wave RE advocacy”, RE is being pushed with almost no inclusion or demand that energy guzzling be actually reduced.

If we cut energy use first, that would be the most cost-effective solution ranked according to $/energy. That first step would also reduce how much and what scale of RE and storage are needed, thereby lowering those costs substantially.

As long as we allow, tolerate or are part of a culture of ever-increasing energy demand and use, both the futures of conventional and renewable energy are diminished, even bleak. The current energy model cannot exist ad infinitum, simply because it is based on infinite supplies at perpetually low prices.

Even if we didn’t move more quickly to RE, the price of future conventional will certainly be erratic and inflationary, especially as certain sources like oil become more depleted sooner. Natural gas will likely be second to deplete or become super-expensive to deliver in the current scale of demand.

Deceased thinker Donella Meadows often wrote about how our culture was operating beyond its physical limits. We need solutions which go beyond specific technologies and deal with our culture, how to change it so we can use and demand far less energy. Then the prognosis for energy futures gets better faster.

Thanks, John. All this is completely true, and you’re right; I most definitely fall into a faulty manner of thinking re: conservation and efficiency.  There is no doubt that, as a culture, we simply hog far too much energy.

This is why Vaclav Smil says, as he contemplates the effect that two billion more people will have on the Earth, “It depends. Will they use energy at the rate of the North Americans, or the Japanese?”

What I’ve noticed living here in the good ol’ USA is that virtually no one does anything that doesn’t benefit himself or his immediate friends and family. We’ve been programmed to ignore the needs of others, and that programming has been enormously effective. (It wasn’t always like this, btw. When we really became a consumer society after World War II, the idea that economics was an indifferent and often cruel taskmaster controlling all of us was vigorously drummed into our heads.)

Be this as it may, we live in a society in which the vast majority of people will not even consider sacrificing a pleasure for the good of someone else – regardless of how trivial the sacrifice or how enormous the benefit to the other.  In the main, we turn off our lights, replace our incandescent light bulbs, and install low-flow showerheads (when we do), because of our utility bills.  We buy more fuel-efficient cars because of the objectionable price of gasoline.

At the end of the day, if you want to save energy, you have to make it expensive. However, here in the US, we make it artificially cheap. If we had any sincerity about weaning ourselves off coal and oil (which we don’t) we would simply begin to force the producers and consumers of energy from those sources to pay the true and comprehensive costs. If we were to do that, you’d see an enormous change in people’s behavior – not next year, but this afternoon.

Here’s a start. Just take this list of subsidies we give the big oil companies and make them go away.

• Construction bonds at low interest rates or tax-free
• Research-and-development programs at low or no cost
• Assuming the legal risks of exploration and development in a company’s stead
• Below-cost loans with lenient repayment conditions
• Income tax breaks, especially featuring obscure provisions in tax laws designed to receive little congressional oversight when they expire
• Sales tax breaks – taxes on petroleum products are lower than average sales tax rates for other goods
• Giving money to international financial institutions (the U.S. has given tens of billions of dollars to the World Bank and U.S. Export-Import Bank to encourage oil production internationally, according to Friends of the Earth)
• The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve
• Construction and protection of the nation’s highway system
• Relaxing the amount of royalties to be paid – apparently, we get about 40% of revenues from oil on public land vs. 60% – 65% in most other countries

Then get the oil and coal companies to pay the increases in healthcare costs caused by aromatics, absorb the cost of the long-term environmental damage. All of this garbage would be gone in a heartbeat.

Again, thanks for your comment.

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Answer: Can be found at http://2greenenergy.com/cool-guess-answers/8732.

Relevance: We come across numerous attempts to improve this figure.  And, as the answer shows, there IS room for improvement – though not as much as the casual observer may think. Having said that, one of the top investment opportunities I recommend here is headed by a colleague who, I believe, really has made an important breakthrough.

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I pointed out that, according to this theory, that although the migration to renewable energy will happen – it will occur for reasons that have essentially nothing to do with the health and safety of our planet, of our nation, and of its people. I provided short explanations of what I see the true drivers: peak oil, public outcry, corporate embrace of renewables, the advent of the smart grid, increases in efficiency of mature clean energy technologies, and the maturation of new technologies.

Of 20+/- comments, most were quite positive. But I was amused by a commentor who wrote:

Do you lefties have to be such drama queens and continue to bring up G.W.? Some of us would like to forget his nonsense. It’s not really much different than what the far right did to the Clinton presidency. Besides, is continuing to make RE a political topic really going to help?

The answer, as I told him, is yes, renewable energy is, in its very essence, a political topic — quite independently of whether he or I want it to be.  As I’m fond of saying, the moment you take away the subsidies and force everyone to pay the true cost of the energy they’re producing and consuming, you’ll have ubiquitous clean energy in about 10 minutes.

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Craig, I couldn’t agree more.

 Other than geothermal energy, all the other sources of energy available to us originally came from solar energy and with a rather lossy process. Petrochemical from solar growing primordial goo. Hydrokenetic from solar driven convection. Wind from solar convection with a bit of coriolis effect. Water from lightning from solar convection. Wood and alcohol from solar energized green growy things.

Gas turbines can be around 50% efficient burning fuel but, again, how efficient is the production and transportation of the fuel?

Steam turbines a bit more efficient.

Gasoline engines about half as efficient as turbines with Diesels a bit more efficient that gasoline.

Stirling engines are quite efficient but pound for pound don’t produce much work.

Interestingly, hydrogen fueled aircraft could be more efficient than kerosine since the specific weight of hydrogen is less than gas but the design of the aircraft would have to change dramatically since the specific volume of hydrogen is greater. Fat planes would result that would probably fly slower than today’s aircraft. Again, how would the hydrogen be produced?

The idea of collecting solar energy from the upper surfaces of already constructed buildings seems like the least intrusive and most efficient method to utilized light, in my opinion. It doesn’t shade the natural ecosystem and collects/distributes the energy where humans need it.

What do you think?”

To which I respond:

Thanks, Geoff.  Everything you write here is true, as far as I understand.  PV on rooftops makes a great deal of sense.  The costs and coming down, the efficiencies are going up, and the overall engineering is getting increasing clever.  See my post on California-based Solyndra as an example.

The only piece you’re missing, I feel, is solar thermal / concentrated solar power (CSP) as described at the bottom of the post.

Thanks for writing!

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The science: Hydrogen in its pure form is rare, because it combines so readily with other substances, releasing energy in the process.  It can be burned (combining it with oxygen to form water) or used in a fuel cell, (i.e., pulling the electron off and moving it through a separate electrical path from its proton, again, ultimately combining with oxygen). But energy is required to create this pure hydrogen such that we can then harvest useful work from these processes. And the mechanisms by which hydrogen is generated (e.g., electrolysis) and then the energy is gathered from burning or fuel cells are three times less efficient than the standard mechanisms by which electrical energy is generated, stored in batteries, and then converted back into useful work through electric motors.

The business: It is true that civilization will face issues in building out the electrical grid to provide ultimately a complete network of convenient and safe charging stations for electric vehicles. But the electrical grid has a 130-year headstart on whatever delivery mechanism is proposed to serve up hydrogen over the enormity (3.5+ million squares miles) of a place like the United States. In addition to being far more efficient, electrical energy is already available in the vast majority of homes and work places.

The politics: In my opinion, the idea that we should take an inefficient carrier of energy and use to to create “hydrogen highways” could only have come from someone who really doesn’t want alternative fuels ever to see the light of day, and is disguising this malice in a not-too-clever way.  And those of you who have seen “Who Killed The Electric Car” will recognize that this is hardly an original idea. 

Not too long ago, it appeared that the powers of reason and decency had made their case effectively, and this distraction had been shelved; in fact, Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s DoE defunded hydrogen at the federal level earlier this year. But it’s back with a vengeance. For example, California, while teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, is subsidizing the hydrogen highway with public funds.

And ask yourself why this is happening, and who will be delivering this hydrogen (assuming it ever happens). ExxonMobil and Chevron. Hey, guys: You make $10 billion in profit each quarter. If you really want this to happen, do you mind paying for it yourselves? How dare you ask the taxpayers to pay for this folly, when you and only you will profit from it — on the off chance that it ever happens?

There you have it, the 1-2-3 of hydrogen energy.  If only it were that easy to make it go away.

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What is a solar tour, you ask? The National Solar Tour, part of the non-profit American Solar Energy Society (ASES), is the largest grassroots solar event in the nation. In 2008 almost 140,000 attendees visited over 5,000 buildings in 3,000 communities across the country. In each state, homeowners, business owners, and building owners who are using solar energy to generate electric power and heat showcase their building to the public, educating large number of people on exactly what solar energy can do for them. For many people, this is the first step on an investigation and a learning experience that will take them through what Jim calls “the good, the bad, and the ugly” of solar power.

For California’s Central Coast, the solar tour is October 3, from 10 AM – 3 PM.

I asked about the standards in efficiency today, and what Jim sees on the horizon. Polycrystalline and monocrystalline are starting to come into their own at 14% – 18%. Thin film technologies offer only 9% – 10% efficiency, but are accompanied by lower production cost and lighter construction, and are thus relevant for those with roofs that may be oddly shaped or unable to handle heavier weight. Still in the lab, but looking very promising are multichromatic systems that absorb solar energy at various wavelengths, and have achieved efficiencies over 40%. The trade-offs, however, are based on the fact that the materials required (cadmium, germanium, etc.) are a bit exotic – certainly not as common as silicon.

Jim says that the confluence of the a progressive administration, financial incentives that are in place, high energy prices, and consumer awareness create an environment that is most favorable to alternative energy since the OPEC embargoes of the 1970s. R&D is “alive and kicking.” And more fundamentally, solar panels are on the shelf now; they’re as common to roofers as shingles or insulation.

Alternative energy is a true national security issue, Jim believes. So why did the George W. Bush administration – ostensibly so concerned about national security — do essentially nothing in this area? Jim explains his theory, which happens to match mine: it’s business. The folks that controlled the purse strings were the people who profited from drilling oil and mining coal. The current administration puts long-term health and safety issues first.

We can only hope.

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