New Energy Watch

Thinking About Embodied Energy in Homebuilding

If you're thinking of making structural changes in your home, or of building a new home, consider the concept of "embodied energy," meaning the total amount of energy required to finish the project and maintain it thereafter, including the energy that has gone into the fabrication of building materials, the energy required by the equipment to transport and install the materials, and of course the energy required to heat and cool the living spaces. 

Embodied energy is expressed in Btu per pound, and provides a basis for comparison of all the various bits and pieces that make up dwellings and their contents.

Here's the Wikipedia entry on Embodied Energy.

As valuable as the concept of embodied energy is, it can also cause trouble and confusion, because it's not well standardized -- there are different ideas of which numbers can be used in a given situation. As a result, people on both sides of an energy issue can conjure up figures to support diametrically
opposed arguments and beliefs. For example, while you might include diesel tractor fuel as part of the embodied energy in a gallon of ethanol, would you also include the fuel in the farmworkers' cars when they drive to work? What about the food energy it takes to sustain the workers? The fight in and around the biofuels industry over ethanol and soy-diesel production has been bitter in this regard.

But don't let the confusion of self-interested feuds sour you on the concept of embodied energy. Maybe it's hard to take it into account when you go to the local building supply store to buy a few sheets of plywood or a can of paint, but if you're building a whole house, or adding a kitchen, or putting on a new roof, then it definitely pays to consider energy-efficient alternatives.

For more information, visit the U.S. Green Building Council.

~ Doug Logan, NewEnergyWatch

If Heat Rises in an Empty Room, Will Anyone Be Kept Warm?

As winter comes, isolate your unused or seldom-used spaces. Close warm-air vents and radiator valves in those rooms, put thin-film coverings on windows that won’t be opened for the winter, and keep the doors shut. This will reduce the amount of space that needs to be kept warm, and will make the whole heating system much more fuel-efficient. Set your thermostat at 68 degrees during the daytime, and a couple of degrees lower at night when everyone is under the covers. Lower it more -- to 55 or even 50 -- if you're going to be away for a few days or more (taking care not to overchill pets or plants). Programmable thermostats can be great for taking over routine settings.

~ Doug Logan, New Energy Watch

The Simple Home: The Luxury of Enough

Mies van der Rohe's architectural aesthetic was expressed by “Less is More.” Today's phrase, in light of the MacMansioning of America, should probably be “Enough is Enough.” But lest the concept suggest some sort of diminution or restriction or impoverishment, we need someone like Sarah Nettleton, an award-winning AIA architect, certified in the practices of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), to adjust the perspective. Her book is called The Simple Home: The Luxury of Enough. What a great title.

For two decades or so, even in the face of post-9/11 oil urgencies and the acceleration of global warming, developers have overwhelmed the landscape with bloated starter-castles (much as Detroit has encouraged the blistering of our roads with Hummers and Escalades). Young couples and families have been brainwashed into buying these houses, often at sub-prime interest rates, and now look -- environmental and fiscal disaster. There's been an obvious disconnect, brought on by hyper-consumerism in America, between what people think they want, and what they might actually want if given half a chance to consider their priorities. The disconnect seems to cause a tremendous yawing, back and forth, between the urgent desire for more and the urgent need to hassle with less.

This is our rant, not Nettleton's. She's more graceful in trying to make the connection again, with chapters covering what she calls the Six Paths to Simplicity:

• Simple is Enough
• Simple is Thrifty
• Simple is Flexible
• Simple is Timeless
• Simple is Sustainable
• Simple is Refined

Of these, the first is paramount. Why do we allow clutter to overwhelm us? Why would we have a 5000-square-foot home when we rarely if ever use 3000 square feet of it? Why would we feel compelled to heat, light, clean, and insure so much unused space? It’s tough on the environment, tough on the bank account, and, inevitably, tough on the psyche. How can we get to a point, in architecture and in our own perceptions, where we can find luxury in what we need and can arrange properly, separate from what someone else might have?

Flexible, Thrifty, and Timeless tie into this. In a typical American house, for example, the kitchen serves as nerve center, sitting room, homework room -– you name it. If you were freed from the strictures of thinking you also needed a separate family room, study, living room, and dining room, you might be able to conceive a space flexible enough to serve your needs more efficiently and more pleasingly.

While there are plenty of books on the topics of simpler living and smaller homes, Nettleton's is distinguished by superior photographs, typical of the Taunton Press, that illuminate a refined and responsible architectural philosophy.

Here are excerpts from the book, published on Taunton's Fine Homebuilding site.

~ Doug Logan, New Energy Watch

Get With Pepsi. Rack Up Some RECs

A couple of years ago we signed up for the Connecticut Clean Energy Options program, which allows customers to "buy" up to 100 percent of their electricity from clean energy sources (in our case mostly from wind farms in the mid-Atlantic region). We're not actually getting our power directly from the wind generators; we get it from our provider, Connecticut Light & Power, through the regular electrical grid. However, the clean energy we pay for through CL&P directly offsets energy that would have been generated by traditional sources like oil, coal, and nuclear power. There's a small monthly surcharge for customers who opt in for this program. (In a logical policy world, a policy world with guts and brains, there would be a small incentive break instead.) Still, for the average customer the surcharge amounts to about $4.00 per month for a 50-percent involvement, and $8.00 if you choose 100 percent, which we chose. We haven't noticed much of a difference in our bills, maybe because we've become so careful with electricity that we've negated the $8.00 surcharge.

This program in Connecticut is part of the larger world of RECs, short for Renewable Energy Credits or Renewable Energy Certificates, depending on who's in charge of acronyms. Here's the Wikipedia explanation of RECs.

All this is by way of mentioning PepsiCo's recent purchase of 1.1 billion kilowatt-hours of RECs per year for the next three years. The news is a month old, but deserves constant replay, because this is the kind of big-player move that will save America. The purchase is equivalent to all the grid-supplied electricity used by Pepsi's US operations -- enough electricity to power 90,000 average homes. Here's the press release from the U.S. DOE's Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy website.

Wouldn't it be outstanding if all the country's major corporations followed suit, and inspired all the medium-sized companies, and then the small companies, to go for RECs? That would give the renewable movement huge momentum, and put a good-sized dent in OPEC.

If you own a business, or have the ear of the people who run the place where you work, push for RECs. For more information, visit the EPA's Green Power Partnership. If you check the partnership list on that site, you can see you'll be in great company. The 735 partners currently listed there account for 9 billion kilowatt-hours of green energy per year.

If you're already familiar with the concept of RECs, you may be wondering who certifies and monitors the organizations who are applying for and selling RECs. Good question. It appears that the Green-e Program, administered by the national non-profit Center for Resource Solutions, is the trusted broker both for Connecticut Clean Energy Options and the PepsiCo commitment.

~ Doug Logan, New Energy Watch

Product Review: PowerCost Monitor from Blueline Innovations

Here’s the PowerCost Monitor from Blueline Innovations in St. John’s Newfoundland. It shows you, at glance, how many kilowatts are being used in your house at any given moment. With the push of a button, it also shows you how much money you’re spending on electricity at the same moment. The numbers produced by the monitor can be very sobering if you’re paying about 19.2 cents per kilowatt-hour, as we are. (That doesn’t include the premium we pay for the 100-percent Connecticut Clean Energy Option.)

There are two components to the system -- the wireless monitor (2 AA batteries) that sits on your counter, and a sensor (2 AA batteries) that you fit to your electric meter. The sensor works on either electromechanical meters with spinning wheels, or electronic meters with digital read-outs. The Blueline website makes matters pretty clear, but you need to know which kind of meter you have. If you have any questions, give Blueline a call.

Our meter, for example, is electromechanical, but the electric company installed a circuit board that lets the meter-reader get numbers from the street. The circuit board obscures the front of the wheel. When we called Blueline, the tech on duty suggested that we try to jury-rig the sensor so that it could pick up the wheel movement from the side of the dome. We did this, with the aid of a couple of big rubber bands and plastic wire ties, then synchronized the sensor and meter, confirmed the signal, entered our electric rate into the monitor, and started getting readings immediately.

We’ve run the PowerCost Monitor for about six weeks, and have checked it against a full-month electric bill. It’s very accurate, and is easy to understand and operate. There are only four buttons, two used to choose displays for money being spent or kilowatts being used, one to clear the monitor and start again from zero, and one to sync the monitor and sensor during set-up.

Here’s why it’s a good thing: You walk past the meter and notice that it’s showing 1.2 kilowatts. You can hear the refrigerator compressor running, and you know you have a tower computer and big screen running in the other room. You have two CFLs on, one over the kitchen sink and one over the dining room table, but they only account for 30 watts together. So you wander around and find that your daughter has left two 60-watt incandescent lights on in her room, and there’s a 100-watt incandescent on for no particular reason in the front hall. You turn off those three lights and go check the monitor. Bingo, you’re down to one kilowatt. Those lights would have run all day with no one home. They would have used about 2.2 kWh, costing about 40 cents. If you’re that heedless every day, it adds up to $146 per year, not to mention the sap on the grid, the pollution, the global warming, and all that.

The PowerCost monitor is a good tool for letting you know what you’re burning and what you’re spending throughout the day. It costs about $150 U.S. Come to think of it, at the rate we’re going, this thing is well on its way to paying for itself.

~ Doug Logan, New Energy Watch

Ultimate roof gardens

Karen Joslin, a friend and realtor in Philadelphia, just sent information about a company in her fair city called Roofscapes, Inc. They have a product, or maybe it's a concept and a devotion that ends up as a product, called the Roofmeadow.

This goes way beyond the roof gardens that a lot of city dwellers plant to remind themselves of the outdoors. It's a serious commitment for urban roofs, with positive effects that go beyond the building.  A Roofmeadow is just about what it sounds like.

Here are some key points about the Roofmeadow,  from the FAQ file on the Roofscapes website:

Green roofs provide many ecological and aesthetic benefits, including:

•  Controlling stormwater runoff, erosion and pollution,
•  Improving water quality,
•  Mitigating urban heat-island effects, cooling and cleaning the air,
•  More than doubling the service life of the roof,
•  Conserving energy,
•  Reducing sound reflection and transmission,
•  Creating wildlife habitat, and
•  Improving the aesthetic environment in both work and home settings.

Thanks, Karen, and keep 'em coming.

~ Doug Logan, New Energy Watch