Smart Ways To Cut Energy Costs At Home

Those costly winter heating bills might be out of sight momentarily, but they are never really out of mind.

If the thought of opening an electric bill this summer has you sweating even more than the heat itself, consider some ways to cut costs while simultaneously shrinking your carbon footprint.

Choosing energy-efficient products, making a few small repairs and adjusting some behavior can help consumers keep dollars from pouring out their often-drafty windows.

Applying Efficiency

Those familiar ENERGY STAR labels might be blue, but the products they represent have been helping consumers go green, and save green, since 1992.

A joint program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA, and the U.S. Department of Energy, ENERGY STAR offers thousands of models on products in 60 different categories for the home and office.

Delivering the same or better performance as comparable models, the products use less energy which helps consumers save money and protect the environment, says Maria Vargas, ENERGY STAR’s brand manager.

In 2010 alone, with the help of ENERGY STAR products, Americans saved $18 billion and greenhouse-gas-emissions equivalent to that of 33 million cars, according to the program.

“I think there’s a little bit of a cognitive disconnect for many consumers,” says Vargas. “I don’t think most consumers realize that their home causes twice the greenhouse gas emissions as the average car.”

The annual energy bill for a typical single-family home is approximately $2,200, according to ENERGY STAR, with nearly half that amount going toward heating and cooling costs.

“I think the biggest change we can potentially make for people is to get them to rethink how they heat and cool their home and the efficiencies they can derive from paying attention to that,” says Vargas. 

One of the most important things consumers can do to reduce their bills and become more energy efficient is to utilize a programmable thermostat, she says. ENERGY STAR no longer offers a label on the product because its mere installation does not guarantee energy savings.

“It can be huge in terms of saving energy but only if you program it and use it,” she says. With the help of a programmable thermostat used correctly, consumers can save approximately $180 annually, Vargas notes.

Phillip Gigante, an attorney from Airmont, New York, agrees with Vargas and says that after expanding his home from its original 2,500 square feet to 4,400 square feet, he has seen very little change in his heating bill thanks, in part, to using a programmable thermostat.

“I reran all the plumbing to turn the house from one-zone heat to three-zone heat, and the current programmable thermostats allow me to schedule when the heat comes on and shuts off,” says Gigante. “Now the parts of the house we don’t usually stay in aren’t unnecessarily heated.”

Gigante also credits a few other important improvements with making his home, built in 1962, more comfortable and energy efficient.

“During our renovations, we replaced all our insulation,” he says. “It’s not that old insulation is bad, but they used to use a lot thinner insulation before than they do now.  Most important is to insulate is the attic.  We had three-inch insulation up there, now it’s over one foot thick,” says Gigante.

Replacing old windows also helped. “Now all of our windows are double pane with Low-E (Low-emissivity) glass.”

Low-E coatings on glazing or glass control heat transfer through windows with insulated glazing. Windows manufactured with Low-E coatings typically cost about 10–15 percent more than regular windows, but they reduce energy loss by as much as 30–50 percent, according to the DOE.

“We know that the average home has enough leaks and cracks in its exterior and parts of the inside workings of your home that it’s the equivalent to leaving a window open," says Vargas.  If you don’t seal up those cracks, even though you have the most efficient HVAC (heating, ventilating, and air conditioning) unit on the planet, it’s just leaking out of your house like a sieve.”

Out With the Old, In With the New         

When replacing worn-out appliances, particularly heating and cooling systems that are over 15 years old, Vargas encourages consumers to look for the ENERGY STAR label.

Former New Jersey Governor Christie Whitman, who served as administrator of the EPA from January 2001-May 2003, also recommends seeking out the blue label when looking to replace “something as big as a refrigerator or as small as a light bulb.”

“People need to understand that the cumulative impact of their individual behavior can make a difference,” says Whitman. “Those figures [2010’s statistics] show you how much people save the environment over the useful time of the appliance. People tend to say ‘What difference will it make if I use ENERGY STAR? One person is not a big deal.’ Look, if you do it and your neighbor does it and your neighbor’s neighbor does it, then all of a sudden this is the impact you have.”

Whitman says initially there may have been some resistance to purchasing ENERGY STAR products because shoppers believed they were sacrificing quality for energy efficiency.

“People thought they were giving up something,” explains Whitman. “My ENERGY STAR appliances are better than any I’ve had before. They’re efficient, they’re quiet, they’re quick, they’re all the things that you want in a product. People get good quality for the money they spend on them.”

For Gigante, when it came time to replace his refrigerator, he sought out a high-efficiency model.

“The fridge that replaced my old fridge uses half the electricity,” he says.

Unplug and Save

The average American household has 24 consumer electronics products, which includes three televisions, two DVD players or recorders, at least one digital camera, one desktop computer and two cell phones, among others, according to the Consumer Electronics Association,.

In the average home, 75 percent of the electricity used to power those gadgets is consumed while the products are turned off. This is also known as “vampire” loss because energy is being sucked out of consumers home while not providing any useful function.

According to ENERGY STAR, the average U.S. household spends $100 per year to power devices while they are off or in standby mode. On a national basis, standby power accounts for more than 100 billion kilowatt hours of annual U.S. electricity consumption and more than $10 billion in annual energy costs.

This can be avoided by unplugging the appliance or using a power strip and using the switch on the power strip to cut all power to the appliance, ENERGY STAR suggests.

“When you finish charging your iPhone or your iPad unplug the charger from the wall — don’t just unplug the device, unplug the charger or otherwise it’s drawing power,” says Whitman. “These are things you can do that you don’t have to sacrifice anything.”

Tax Credit

For those who may have been left out in the cold by not taking advantage of the 2009-2010 tax credits, the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010 extends the tax credits for energy efficiency into 2011, but at less-generous levels.

The levels revert back to those in effect in 2006 and 2007, which were 10 percent of the cost of the improvement, up to $500, with a $200 max for windows, with most pertaining to an existing primary residence.

For a complete list of available tax credits, visit ENERGY STAR’s website.

By making some changes in both product choices and lifestyle habits, the summer electrical bills don’t need to have you breaking out in a sweat. When things heat up this summer, save energy and save money — there’s nothing cooler than that.

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EcoFactor: Using big data to reduce home energy by 17%

EcoFactor, a startup that uses big data tools to act as a new brain for connected thermostats, has some stellar results from ten different trials where it automated the process of turning up and down consumer’s thermostats. The company,which launched at the end of 2009, says that on average its services can reduce a person’s home energy use by 17 percent compared to a programmable but non-optimized thermostat.

That’s a 17 percent reduction in a consumer’s energy bill, too, and EcoFactor found it could reduce consumer’s bills by up to $56 per month when its service was used. EcoFactor did many of its trials during demand response events for utilities, which are times (like a really hot day) when a utility wants to turn down the energy consumption of some users to better manage the grid. EcoFactor also found that it delivered better demand response events for utilities, providing a 36 percent increase in yield for utilities during the event.

As I noted back when the company launched: finally a smart way to control thermostats. I’m not sure why every utility, energy service provider and consumer wouldn’t want to use this. The only requirements are a connected thermostat (well, and waiting for the service to be available in your area).

Here’s how it works: EcoFactor collects thousands of data points — from weather to regional building codes to home value — that give a clue about how an individual home might use energy and also respond to a service that promotes energy savings. EcoFactor then combines that service with the consumer’s ability to manually override the system (press up and down on the thermostat). When a consumer signs up for the service EcoFactor uses the first couple of weeks to set a baseline for how that individual user prefers the temperature in their home — when a person pushes up or down on the thermostat the original baseline starts to get set.

Then EcoFactor’s service then automatically makes over 1,000 micro adjustments per month to the thermostat, bumping it up, and down every so slightly, so that the user doesn’t notice the temperature change, but so that the user also reduces their energy consumption. During demand response events on a particularly hot day in the Summer, EcoFactor can pre-cool some houses — turning on the AC a bit before the demand response event — and then turning down the power use of the house during the event while the house acts essentially as a thermal battery and doesn’t notice the inconvenience of having their energy use curbed.

EcoFactor is first and foremost targeting consumers as its end customer, but is working via distribution channels like utilities, broadband service providers (cable, DSL), and home security systems companies to reach those customers. Probably the only reason EcoFactor isn’t in more widespread use today is because partners like utilities and telcos are notoriously slow moving when it comes to adopting new services. EcoFactor worked with Oncor in Texas, and other unnamed utilities for its trials.

It’s still early days for the service — the demand response trials included hundreds of homes, and EcoFactor says by the end of the year (after its Summer trials) it will have been tested in “tens of thousands of homes.” In the utility world, that’s still a small footprint.

But EcoFactor is one of the only companies out there in the energy and utility world that is truly leveraging big data tools and the cloud to make energy use smarter (to learn more about cloud computing come to our Structure event on June 22 and 23 in San Francisco). And for those not used to reading energy reduction metrics, 17 percent is actually really high for an energy management service. In comparison OPower’s billed smarter energy bills on average reduces consumer energy consumption by 2 percent. EcoFactor is backed by RockPort Capital Partners and Claremont Creek Ventures.

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Sarah Palin wants to eliminate all energy subsidies, including ethanol

This presidential election cycle, Republicans are increasingly willing to take a tough stand on ethanol subsidies. The latest to stake out a potentially damaging position on the issue, which heavily effects Iowa, is former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

Palin told Real Clear Politics on Tuesday that she opposes all energy subsidies. “I think that all of our energy subsidies need to be relooked at today and eliminated,” Palin said.

The possible presidential candidate continued, “we need to make sure that we’re investing and allowing our businesses to invest in reliable energy products right now that aren’t going to necessitate subsidies because, bottom line, we can’t afford it.”

Palin’s rationale will likely resonate with free market conservatives. “We’ve got to allow the free market to dictate what’s most efficient and economical for our nation’s economy. No, at this time, our country can’t afford the subsidies,” she said.

Despite the strongly-worded opposition to subsidies, Palin offered a qualifier. Referencing recent comments by President Obama, Palin said, “Before, though, we even start arguing about some of these domestic subsidies that need to be eliminated — should be — we need to look at ending subsidies and loans to foreign countries and their energy production that we’re relying on, like Brazil.”

Palin was in Pennsylvania on a cross-country bus tour of the nation’s historical sites.

The current Republican field is increasingly leaning against subsidies. Of the leading candidates, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich are subsidy supporters. Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty has called for the gradual elimination of energy subsidies.

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Companies look for power way, way up in the sky

The world's strongest winds race high in the sky, but that doesn't mean they're out of reach as a potentially potent energy source.

Flying, swooping and floating turbines are being developed to turn high-altitude winds into electricity.

The challenges are huge, but the potential is immense. Scientists estimate the energy in the jet streams is 100 times the amount of power used worldwide annually.

Cristina Archer, an atmospheric scientist at the California State University in Chico, said there's "not a doubt anymore" that high-altitude winds will be tapped for power.

"This can be done, it can work," she said.

The question is, when? Some companies project their technology will hit the market by the middle of the decade, but Fort Felker at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory says the industry is 10 years away from making a meaningful contribution to the nation's electricity demands.

No company, for instance, has met the basic requirement of demonstrating its turbine can safely fly unsupervised for prolonged periods of time.

High-altitude wind power is similar to ground wind in the 1970s — facing questions but soon to prove its viability, said PJ Shepard of Oroville, Calif.-based Sky WindPower, which is developing a "flying electric generator."

"It's kind of like the adjustment folks had to make when the Wright brothers started flying airplanes," she said.

The lure of high-altitude wind is simple: Wind speed generally increases with its height above the ground as surface friction diminishes. Each time wind speed doubles, the amount of energy it theoretically holds multiplies by eight times.

The world's most powerful winds circulate in the jet streams, which are found four to 10 miles off the ground and carry winds that regularly break 100 miles per hour.

The dream is to eventually tap the jet streams, but high-altitude wind companies are focusing for now below a 2,000-foot ceiling, above which complex federal air-space restrictions kick in. Adam Rein, co-founder of the Boston company Altaeros Energies, said his company calculates winds at the 2,000 foot level are up to 2½ times stronger than winds that can be reached by a typical 350-foot land turbine.

High-altitude wind advocates say their smaller, lightweight turbines will be far cheaper to build and deploy than windmills with huge blades and towers that must be drilled into land or the sea floor.

Those savings would mean inexpensive energy. With wide-scale use, advocates see a range of prices, from something comparable to land wind's current 9 or 10 cents per kilowatt hour down to an astonishingly low 2 cents per kilowatt hour.

"They are projecting crazy numbers," Archer said. "I'm not saying that it's true. ... But it's really the lowest, the cheapest energy source, possibly."

As the turbines eventually aim higher, advocates say there are plenty of remote and offshore no-fly areas where they won't interfere with aircraft and have minimal interaction with people.

Still, any nearby residents must be convinced there's no danger from falling turbines while accepting a view that includes flying objects attached to long tethers that carry the energy to the ground. High-altitude turbines also won't escape the various environmental concerns that face conventional turbines, such as their effect on bird flight.

And each turbine concept awaits extensive testing on its reliability, durability and effectiveness, said Felker, director of NREL's National Wind Technology Center.

Keeping the turbines operating autonomously over long periods in changing weather may be the biggest obstacle, Felker said.

"You have powerful reasons to stay aloft as much as possible," he said. "What do you do when a thunderstorm comes by? Do you recover (the device)? Do you land? ... How do you operate in the real world?"

Different companies have proposed answering that question in different ways.

A "kite" being developed by Makani Power of Alameda, Calif., looks like a glider with four high-speed rotors that launch it into flight, then switch modes to generate electricity that's carried down the tether.

An onboard computer steers the kite in a wide circle, mimicking the path of the tip of a giant wind turbine blade. That allows the device to interact with a larger wind area, increasing the amount of energy it can capture in the same way increasing the size of a sail increases the potential speed of a sailboat, said Damon Vander Lind, Makani's chief engineer.

The kite can also stay up in high winds, and power itself to land in low winds, Vanderlind said.

"It lets us make a very reliable system, something operators can just plug in and use," he said.

Sky WindPower's generator has four rotors, each 35 feet in diameter, that transmit power down the tether. It's built to hover, rather than swoop or circle, Shepard said. While moving turbines can actually fly faster than the wind by flying crosswind, they can't fly as high, she said.

"We can get up a little higher than they can. We can get to higher velocity winds and make up for it," Shepard said.

Altaeros is developing a stationary turbine that sits inside a 60-foot tall, helium-filled shroud that acts like a wind funnel. Similar blimp-like devices, called aerostats, have long been used to keep heavy equipment aloft, such as government surveillance radar tethered up to 15,000 feet above U.S. borders.

"Our view is that our approach is less risky, because we're using a technology that's been out there for decades," Rein said.

Altaeros has big aims — no less than "making an impact on the global energy crisis," Rein said — but it's starting small. Its 10 full and part-time employees share a building with seven other start-up companies in a former wool manufacturing factory in South Boston.

Rein notes that before it tries to bring the untapped power of high-altitude wind to thousands, his company is first developing a system that could bring power to about 40 homes in remote areas.

"You start smaller... and then you scale up over time," Rein said. "We think that approach makes a lot of sense."

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GE’s big bet on natural gas

General Electric Co. (GE) is betting big on natural gas.

The $150-billion a year company, whose power plants generate about one-fourth of the world’s electricity,today announced a new natural-gas power plant that it says is more efficient and flexible than any other in the market.

By phone from Paris, where the announcement was made, Steve Bolze, president of GE Power & Water, told me:  “This is about transforming the industry over the next five or 10 years.”

GE says it invested more than $500 million in the new plant development. It will be manufactured in France and sold first in Europe and Asia, and then later in the U.S.

One key selling point of the new plant is its unprecedented flexibility: It can ramp up and down rapidly, and thus be easily combined with wind and solar power plants that generate electricity intermittently.

It’s also efficient enough to work as a generator of baseload power, Bolze said. Here’s a GE webpagedescribing the plant and its operation.

The new GE plant—dubbed the FlexEfficiency 50–is rated at 510 megawatts and offers fuel efficiency greater than 61 percent.  Competing plants burn natural gas at efficiency rates of 57 or 58 percent, Bolze said. Each percentage point of improved efficiency saves a utility about $2 million a year, he said. Capital costs are projected to be CapitaCosts should be somewhere “north of $450 million.” he said.

What this tells you is that, all other things being equal, natural gas has become the fuel of choice for the global electricity business. Wind and solar power can’t compete with cheap gas without government mandates, subsidies or a price on carbon. Nuclear is expensive and it is deemed riskier than ever, for better or worse, after Fukushima. Coal is low cost but dirty and, as a result, politically unpopular in western Europe and the U.S.

Speaking last week at a conference, GE’s CEO, Jeff Immelt, said : “It appears like we’re entering into a natural-gas cycle.”

GE didn’t announce any customers for the plants. The businesses that comprise GE Energy—GE Power & Water, GE Energy Services and GE Oil & Gas—employ about 90,000 people and generated $38 billion in revenues last year. GE is continuing to invest in wind and solar power, the company said.

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Japan's Softbank announces solar power plan

Japanese telecom company Softbank is to work with local authorities in a drive towards renewable energy, its president said on Wednesday after announcing the construction of 10 large solar power plants.

Since Japan's March 11 earthquake and tsunami sparked a nuclear emergency, Softbank CEO and president Masayoshi Son, Japan's richest man, has been a high-profile advocate for a shift away from atomic power and toward renewables such as solar, wind and geothermal.

Son and local officials from across the country told a joint news conference they would launch a "Natural Energy Council" in early July to promote natural energy power generation.

"We want to set up the council, considering how we can create initial momentum toward expanding natural energy power generation in a concrete and swift manner," Son told reporters.

"I believe we can make a significant achievement by combining various kinds of natural energy sources appropriately in each region," Son said.

Son stopped short of unveiling further details of his solar power project, saying only that his company would begin dialogue with local officials on the council on the construction of solar power plants.

Son has proposed building a string of solar energy facilities that would cost about eight billion yen ($97 million), each as part of an "Eastern Japan Solar Belt" that would also help revitalise tsunami-hit areas.

Softbank, the sole supplier of Apple products in Japan, plans to put up about 10 percent of the funding, with local governments providing about 100 million yen for each facility and Softbank likely to borrow the remainder from banks, the Nikkei business daily reported.

The firm is expected to keep the solar power operations separate from its consolidated earnings since there is little connection with its main telecommunications business, the report said.

If the project moves forward, Softbank will likely adopt solar panels produced by Sharp Corp., with which it has dealings in mobile phones.

Debate has picked up in Japan on a shift toward clean and renewable energy sources since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was hit by a monster tsunami causing radiation to leak into the air, soil and sea.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan has scrapped a national energy policy plan under which nuclear reactors would meet half of Japan's energy needs by 2030 and advocated making renewables "key pillars" of the energy mix.

At this week's Group of Eight summit in Deauville, France, he is set to outline a "Sunrise Plan" to install solar panels on all suitable buildings and homes in Japan by 2030, the Kyodo News agency has reported.

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India Balances Development against Emissions

 One of the key challenges facing fast developing economies such as India is how to fuel and sustain economic growth while simultaneously reducing emissions. Like China, India is strongly opposed to setting emission reduction targets, arguing that any constraints would adversely impact economic growth, with this resistance unlikely to weaken before the current first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol ends in December 2012. But this emission constraint resistance should not be confused with sustainable market development.

Since 2004, India has averaged quarterly GDP growth of 8.4 percent, reaching a historical high of 10.1 percent in September of 2006 and a record low of 5.5 percent in December 2004. In the fourth quarter of 2010, GDP grew 8.2 percent over the corresponding quarter in 2009, with the IMF forecasting GDP for 2011 at 8.2 percent.

In its summary for policymakers, the Energy and Resources Institute's National Energy Map for India: Technology Vision 2030 said that, given the government's plans for rapid economic growth, the country's requirements for energy and supporting infrastructure will also increase rapidly over the next two decades.

Analysts estimate that to maintain this pace of growth will require India to increase its energy consumption by about 4 percent annually, with the IEA estimating that India will need to spend approximately US$800 billion on its energy sector by 2030.

Last year the Indian government published a study based on 2007 data which showed a sharp increase in industrial activity since the last assessment in 1994, making India the world's fifth biggest CO2 emitter after China, the US, Europe and Russia.

Since 1994, emissions from electricity, cement and waste have more than doubled. India generates 90 percent of its electricity from coal, which in turn accounts for more than a third of its emissions. Yet India's emissions are some 75 percent less than those from China and the US.

Like China, India believes the appropriate measure of sustainable economic development is carbon intensity. Its emissions relative to economic output fell by 30 percent between 1994 and 2007 and the government has set a carbon intensity reduction target of 24 percent by 2020. To meet this target India will have to become more energy efficient, will have to reduce its energy intensity and, most importantly, will have to rapidly invest in its renewable energy infrastructure. And it is making good progress.

India is among the top five countries in terms of renewable energy capacity with an installed base of over 19 GW of grid interactive renewable power, accounting for 11 percent of total installed capacity, and about 2.5 GW of renewable generation being added annually.

To support this policy India recently launched the ambitious National Solar Mission with a target capacity of 20 GW by 2020 and the aim of solar energy achieving grid parity with the cheapest coal-fired capacity by 2030. With over 400 million of its population lacking access to modern forms of energy, it also has one of the largest off-grid renewable energy programmes, with more than 1.5 million decentralized solar applications, over 4 million biogas plants, and in excess of 5 million m² of solar thermal applications installed.

According to the Energy and Resources Institute, 'renewable energy resources play a crucial role in providing decentralised power to remote areas. Apart from continuing to provide support to renewable energy schemes, efforts should also be directed towards large-scale deployment of related technologies in order to further bring down their costs.'

Aside from solar power, India's government has committed to significantly increasing its hydro capacity.

But it is wind power that presents India's major growth opportunity. According to the Indian Wind Energy Outlook 2011, 'wind power must play a key role in fuelling India's growing economy, by delivering substantial amounts of clean and indigenous electricity'.

The report forecast that 65.2 GW of wind power could be installed by 2020, up from 13.1 GW at the end of 2010, with a potential of 160.7 GW installed by 2030. Citing last April's Gulf of Mexico oil spill, ongoing unrest in the oil-producing Middle East and North Africa region, and the Fukushima nuclear disaster arising from the Japanese earthquake and subsequent tsunami, GWEC secretary-general Steve Sawyer warned: 'A return to old-fashioned power generation cannot be the answer, not only for environmental, but also for economic reasons.

'Betting on the obsolete polluting technologies of the past is not a viable solution, and only renewable energy can fill the gap that will be left by nuclear power in a sustainable fashion.'

Scaling up wind power, said the report, would provide both environmental and economic benefits, arguing that wind is now competitive with conventional new-built power generation technologies such as natural gas.

But, it cautions, to realise the full potential of India's rich renewable resources the government needs to address several challenges and barriers, including a clear renewable energy framework at national level, incentives for repowering, and rapid up-scaling of grid infrastructure to transport increasing amounts of wind power to the demand centres.

According to the World Bank, achieving India's government's renewable energy goals for the next decade will cost between $10 billion and $64 billion in subsidies, depending on whether the government adopts a low-diversity, low-cost renewable energy resources scenario or a high-diversity, high-cost scenario. The higher cost scenario, which would include solar, will only be viable if fossil fuel prices continue to rise and are free of distorting subsidies. Yet although the government committed to removing fossil fuel subsidies at last year's G20 summit, the country's deep poverty problems make this a politically sensitive policy.

For all its support for renewable energy development, and its desire to become a world renewable energy leader, the fact remains that India will continue to be heavily reliant on fossil fuels over the next two decades.

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