12-31-2007
What is the energy mix associated with your apartment or house? What are the sources of the electricity generated there? Why should you care? Because you might want to promote the use of renewable energy sources in the way that you live, to the extent that you can influence these sources, not just by talking the talk.
I will briefly describe the sources for the electricity used in the house where I live.
We are part of a program called New England GreenStart. We pay a bit more per kilowatt hour (kWh) to use electricity generated only from small hydropower, biomass, wind, solar, and other renewable sources.
How does that work? The power grid here, under Massachusetts law, must use at least one percent renewables as energy sources (not very ambitious, huh?), rising to four percent by 2009.
The renewable energy sources are part of an accounting system, placed in a big pot, for instance, along with conventional sources such as natural gas, municipal trash, and nuclear. Using a certificate program, the electric utility chooses a mix of energy sources from the pot.
Traditionally, the vast majority of the sources of energy for New England are conventional and non-renewable, such as natural gas and nuclear. However, the demand for renewable energy sources increases as more people pay extra to join GreenStart; the amount of renewable energy the utility uses must correspond to this demand (as well as meet the minimum level specified by law). At any rate, here is the program's fine-grained details.
For GreenStart users in general, the breakdown of power sources goes like this: Small hydropower (72.6%); biomass (26.6%); solar (0.7%), and wind (0.2%).
Including our own grid-tied PV module array, which generated 11.9% of our electricity last year, then the breakdown looks about like this: Small hydropower (64%); biomass (23.2%); solar (12.6%), and wind (0.2%).
In terms of electricity consumption, we had one very bad winter month in excess of 5000 kilowatt hours (kWh). Otherwise, we had six months of far less than 1000 kWh used. There is a lot of room for improvement here in electricity reductions (by far, our most gluttonous electricity user are heat pumps that shift to electric heat in the event of very cold New England weather).
12-27-2007
The U.S. government passed new legislation, signed by President Bush last week, to alter its energy policy. The bill is called the Energy Independence and Security Act, or H.R. 6.
Given the compromises inherent in law-making, the bill's measures are quite modest. The only reason the measure has garnered any attention, is that the U.S. government, which has heretofore based its energy policy solely on the price of oil (and the desires of oil lobbyists), has finally decided to do something about its unsustainable, non-renewable fossil-fuel based strategy.
The bill did not include provisions to require electric utilities to use a specified minimum amount of renewable energy sources to generate electricity.
Here's a summary of three of the major provisions the bill includes (followed by my opinion).
The bill raises the corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standard to 35 miles per gallon (mpg) by 2020. A step in the right direction, but too little too late.
Obviously, it was a good idea to remove the ridiculous exemption of SUVs from previous CAFE provisions. The deadline is too far in the future, however, to have any meaningful impact in light of the onset of oil depletion or “Peak Oil” which is likely to rear its ugly head sooner than 2020.
The good aspect: With or without this provision, research and development on plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) continues apace; many of the car companies are planning to introduce these vehicles.
Besides, it's rather easy right now to get to 35 mph or better with a fleet including hybrids or light-weight cars.
The bill requires “alternative fuels” production (biofuels such as corn or celluosic ethanol) to reach 36 billion gallons per year by 2022. 21 billion gallons per year must be cellulosic ethanol or “advanced” biofuels by 2022.
Any requirement that boosts or subsidizes corn ethanol production is a huge mistake. Corn-based ethanol is already causing a large increase in food prices, and competes with arable land that is necessary for growing the important food staples for the world, like corn (for food) and wheat.
Corn ethanol production also has a low "energy returned on energy invested"; it takes a gallon of fossil fuels, for instance, and several gallons of water, to generate about 1.5 gallons or less of corn ethanol.
Advanced methods for making celluosic ethanol may improve the picture somewhat in terms of justifying a huge expenditure on biofuels. At any rate, 36 billion gallons will only comprise about 20 percent by 2022 of the gasoline used in the U.S. (considering that we burn up to 150 billion gallons per year right now!).
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”HR 6 sets new efficiency standards for appliances such as refrigerators and freezers, requires more efficient lighting, and improves the energy efficiency of consumer appliances, such as dishwashers, clothes washers, refrigerators and freezers.“
I'm all for this provision. The greatest gains in cutting energy use, the low-hanging fruit, can be realized by conservation and applying existing energy-efficiency technologies.
That said, renewable-energy technology research and investment has exploded upon the scene; it will be interesting to see how far this research will help realize the unlimited potential of solar energy, which was not a big beneficiary of the energy bill.
12-18-2007
The statistics are in for 2007 in terms of my own gasoline consumption. I reduced my consumption by at least 150 gallons of gas in 2007, mostly by driving a hybrid vehicle that averaged from 42-56 miles per gallon, and partly by riding a bicycle and walking for short errands.
(About 85 percent of trips in America of five miles or less are done in a car. Ouch!!)
Obviously, it would have been more meaningful if I consumed zero gallons of gasoline. Before I shower myself with praise, the latter outcome would have been the most beneficial one for the environment, as well as for helping reduce our country's self-destructive dependence on foreign oil. Any driving is polluting, even reduced driving.
However, what difference in the aggregate does reducing gasoline consumption by 150 gallons in a year mean? What if all the drivers in the U.S. made these annual cuts; would it make a meaningful difference in reducing CO2 emissions and imported oil? Let's see.
About 200 million people in the U.S. have a driver's license.
The U.S. consumes 140 billion gallons of gasoline per year, according to 2004 figures.
If every driver, all 200 million of them, reduced their gas consumption by 150 gallons in a year, then the U.S. would consume 30 billion fewer gallons, or 21 percent less than the previous year. This is a meaningful reduction.
How meaningful?
Burning 30 billion gallons of gas releases about 293,460,000 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2). (19.564 pounds of CO2 per gallon of gas, according to this site.)
Okay, sounds pretty good. How does 30 billion gallons translate to barrels of oil? About 20 gallons of gasoline and 7 gallons of diesel are produced from each barrel of crude oil.
Therefore, given the latter reductions, the U.S. would have consumed about 1.5 billion fewer barrels of crude oil (let's round that off to roughly one billion barrels fewer, given that the oil is also needed to generate diesel fuel, and we did not take any measures to reduce that fuel.)
One billion barrels annually rounds off to about 2.74 million barrels per day. This number represents almost the entire amount of oil imported each day from Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, combined. Or, half of all the oil the U.S. must import per day from OPEC.
Do you want to reduce the U.S. oil imports from the Middle East by 50 percent? Now that would be making progress.
12-06-2007
From where I live, about a half a mile as a crow flies from a major northeast U.S. highway, the sound of vehicular engines is a non-stop drone. The continuous white noise of incessant driving is almost as ineffable as the luffing of wind through the nearby coniferous trees, an unquestioned act of nature.
It is a fitting testament to the U.S.'s profound dependence on fossil fuels.
Chew on these statistics. About 70% of U.S. transportation relies on petroleum. More than 90 per cent of lubricants and up to 99 percent of food production depends on oil.
The U.S. consumes more oil than the next four highest consumers combined (China, Japan, Russia, and Germany), and 10 times as much as the United Kingdom or France.
Yet, the U.S. must import 60 percent of its oil, more than 10 million barrels of crude per day. The highest single exporter to the U.S. is Canada, at about 1.8 million barrels per day. But more than three times that amount derives from OPEC, a cartel of oil exporters not all of which are particularly stable or friendly to the U.S. (about 1.5 million barrels per day from Saudi Arabia, which in Spring of 2007 broke up a 9/11-scale terrorist plot targeting its oil facilities; and 1.4 million per day from Venezuela, whose out-spoken and demagogic President Hugo Chavez recently threatened to "turn off the spigot" to the U.S.).
In rhetoric that Chavez himself would enjoy, we have made a pact with the devil, in entwining ourselves so deeply with a finite, depleted, and unstable energy resource.
Neither is oil very expensive right now. At all. Despite all the recent hand-wringing, we are still living in a Golden Age of cheap petroleum.
At $98 per barrel, oil costs about 15¢ per cup (eight ounces). The organic skim milk we drink at home costs 69¢ per cup; so milk for us is almost five times as expensive as oil. The Starbucks coffee I bought today (for research, of course) costs $1.73 for 12 ounces, or $1.15 per cup (not one of the fancy coffees either), about eight times the price of oil.
We haven't even touched on the substantial effect of fossil-fuel emissions on climate change. The point? The U.S. must begin a World-War II level crash course to break its unsustainable dependence on a finite resource which it generates locally at woefully inadequate levels, and on which it depends for life's essentials: producing and transporting foods and medicine, heating many northern latitude homes during the winter, not to mention all the billions of pounds of plastics and road materials (i.e., tar) that have oil as a principle ingredient.
It takes decades for a large country to make fundamental changes in its energy infrastructure. For the U.S. to have a "soft landing," and avoid very alarming consequences such as food shortages and civil unrest, as a tipping point of diminished oil supplies approaches or due to a sudden loss of supply, the country must make this effort in earnest.