A Personal Blog
On Thursday, February 13th, 2020, AEP (American Electric Power)and Efficiency Crafted Homes held their annual awards ceremony in Columbus, Ohio. Our builder, Dan Troth, on the right above, of GreenTech Construction (1) had the honor of taking home four awards from AEP. The one we were most interested in was for our house, Lowest HERS Score Including Renewables, (solar panels, in our case) with a HERS Score of 16. Lower is better, 100 is typical of a standard new home.
-George
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told Greta Thunberg to get an economics degree before advising others as to how to deal with energy policy. (1) In doing that, Mnuchin demonstrates his total lack of understanding of the interplay of energy policy and our climate crisis. The fact is that the climate crisis is not an economic problem unless you are invested in fossil fuels and don’t care what damage you cause or who you kill to make your buck. The climate crisis is a survival problem, a breathing problem, a thirst problem, a hunger problem, a fire problem, an immigration problem, yes, but not an economic problem in the sense that we have any choice about spending boatloads of money to get it under control. Even so, you’ll find more than one real economist (not Steve) who will tell you that the technology and industrial effort required to save our planet through something like a “Green New Deal” is really a remarkable economic opportunity. (2) Would I rather dig coal or build hydro plants and install solar panels?
We are starting to build another small Zero Energy Ready house in our community with the builder of our present home. We’ll sell it, and try to build another after that. Maybe one each year if we do not lose our shirts along the line. That’s doing something that is visible on the street, something neighbors will talk about. We never planned to become home-builders, but it is something we can do, indeed, must do.
There is a list of 10 simple things we can all do at ThoughtCo. (3) You can visit the site to get the story on each item.
Even if these are small things in themselves, they help create the awareness and the culture we need, they add up, and you don’t need an economics degree to get them done.
Go Greta, goodbye Steve.
-George (01/23/2020)
A few days ago (12/18/2019) I dug up some of the old global temperature files from a simple personal study I ran in 1987 and added data from 1988 to 2013. Even way back then in 1987 (and long before (1)), it was obvious that people were doing something to change the climate. That’s not surprising considering that we live in a thin haze much like a balloon’s skin, the chemistry of which we are changing with highly inefficient combustion engines, and into which we leak and dump gaseous waste.
Below, you’ll see a scatter chart of annual average temperatures in Buenos Aires from 1856 to 2016. Argentina has really good historical data.
Two things are clear to me. The first is that temperatures are rising. Temperatures are up over 2 degrees C since the mid 19th century. The second is that there is less variation from year to year starting in the 1940s or so. I don’t know what this means, but wonder if it has something to do with adding energy to a medium that really does not want to accept it. A form of thermal compressibility factor? Will we reach a point where something “snaps”? Or, maybe the instruments are better from the 1940s onward. Don’t know.
I have not included a lot of other information I collected in 1987. That included sunspot and UV radiation data that showed absolutely no correlation to temperature variations in Buenos Aires or anywhere else I looked. The sun is not causing the climate changes we are seeing now.
-George
We had a little Christmas party this week (12/12/2019) at several of the model homes in our new New Urbanist community. We walked from home to home, engaged with the builders, our neighbors, potential new neighbors, ate a few cookies, and drank a little ale. A good time was had by all.
At one of the homes, the builder asked some questions about our high performance home. In the course of that discussion, he raised four objections to American actions to reduce carbon emissions through technologies like solar panels and electric cars. Those points were:
Point 1. This sounds like a propaganda claim that is passed around without much thought. Facts will certainly not be found to back it up. The claim may have its tenuous roots in a 2017 Swedish study that raised serious concerns about the CO2 emissions related to electric car battery production (among other factors). That study was revised in 2019 to reflect the impact of improved production efficiencies at high volumes and the use of renewable energy in the manufacturing process. Check out the roofs of Tesla factories. (1) The revised study can be found at Scribd. (2) The 2019 CO2 estimate is about half of the 2017 study number. Importantly, the Swedish reports of 2017 and 2019 do not actually compare gas and electric car emissions, so the numbers must be used with great care and in context.
However, according to Mike Barnard, Executive Consultant, Energy and Cloud at IBM, (3) the CO2 cost of building an electric car is “. . . trivial compared to the emissions avoided due to not burning fossil fuels to move the car . . .” And, that is including the possibility that the electricity is derived from coal. This may have something to do with the fact that a combustion engine is only about 25% efficient, whereas an electric motor is nearly 100% efficient.
A better source of factual information about the emissions of electric cars is “Cleaner Cars from Cradle to Grave” (4) by the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the source of data for Mr. Barnard’s triviality comment, above.
Point 2: We did not forgo building our high-performance home because of China’s or India’s environmental policies. Certainly not because of Trumpian EPA policies. In a proverbial sense, we do not act as fools because our neighbors are fools, although it should be noted that both China and India are working very hard to correct their problems. We built our little house because we can see the what is happening in the world around us. We let the facts be our guide. When we lack leadership, we must assume the mantle ourselves, and we did.
Point 3. We may not see electric 737s in our lifetimes. I won’t argue that we will, but I will argue that we absolutely shall be required to reduce our use of jet transport aircraft and to change our lifestyles as we accommodate that reduction. That’s the real point here. Our environment cannot continue to accept today’s levels of emissions from the non-essential jet transportation of bananas and lobsters or next-day deliveries of crockpots.
Point 4. Power companies do have a problem with local generation of power, although it is not so much the economics of the basic grid infrastructure. Solar and wind can cause rapidly fluctuating demand that is difficult to manage. Difficult, not impossible. Difficult because our present electric grid was not designed to work with these newer distributed generation technologies. The real problem with today’s slow and steady highly centralized grid is its lack of quick response storage, and the answer to this problem is not to protect the past through legislation to penalize distributed solar and wind generation, but to encourage change and adaptation through legislation in a joint government/industry effort to redesign our power infrastructure for an inevitable coal and gas free future where energy comes from a variety of distributed and nearly autonomous sources. A good read on this topic is “The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era” by Gretchen Bakke.
-George
