Saving Energy Without Derision :: One Household's Real (And Reasonably Painless) Experience in Energy Conservation

DRAFT: NOT in final form
Comments welcomed at: zalan8587@qwest.net
Saving Energy without derision*∗:

One household’s real (and reasonably painless) experience
in Energy conservation
or
Practical Energy conservation experience in

a not-quite typical Household,
in a very atypical country
Alan P. Zelicoff
Scientific, Medical, and Legal Review of New Mexico
801 Morningside Dr. NE
Albuquerque, New Mexico
e-mail: zalan8587@qwest.net
Latest update: 9/16/04
Note: There is no formal charge for downloading this book, but readers are
asked to send along $5 or $10 (by check to the address listed above) if you think
the book has helped you save a few bucks of your own, and maybe spared
adverse environmental impacts as well. All proceeds will be used for improving
the book and in developing renewable energy and conservation techniques that
anyone can apply in their own lives.
The author welcomes comments, and plans on continuously updating and

improving this book if there is sufficient interest.
Any errors in this book are the author’s own, and will be corrected as soon as
anyone points them out.
∗
(that is, without being accused of being a nut by your fossil-fuel lusting – or
just plain lazy -- friends)
1
Saving Energy without derision:

Practical Energy conservation experience in a not-quite typical
Household, in a very atypical country
Table of Contents
Chapter 0: A few vocabulary words
Chapter 1: Energy: a little background and a few surprises
Chapter 2: Some easy, practical actions we all can take
Chapter 3: Energy Use in a Typical Household: Electricity and Gas
Chapter 4: Electricity Production and Use in the US
Chapter 5: Energy Use in Transportation
Chapter 6: Heating and Cooling your home
Chapter 7: Going to extremes
- including return on investment in residential photovoltaics
Chapter 8: Teach your children? Well….
Chapter 9: Some political comments (and some selfless ranting)
Chapter 10: Looking to the future, planning for the worst (in
process)
Addendum (in process):

• Predicting natural gas use from temperature and other
important factors
• A few inexpensive products that can save energy
• A few expensive products that can save energy
• Some fun (and depressing) facts about energy use
• About the author
2
Chapter 0: Words, words, words
You don’t have to be an engineer or a scientist to read and understand this book,
but it helps a great deal to have feel for what energy experts mean when they
talk about “BTUs”, “kilowatts”, “kilowatt hours” and “Quads”. There’s nothing
difficult it – its really just vocabulary, but so you can make the most of the
suggestions in this book for changing your own energy-use behavior, I’ll
describe these important terms and relate them to each other. It’s also quite
useful to have a feel for the huge quantities of materials – billions of gallons of
oil, billions of tons of coal, and billions of tons of carbon dioxide to name a few1 –
that humans find and use every year as primary energy sources.
One of the oldest terms still in use is the British Thermal Unit (or BTU for short).
One “BTU” is the amount of energy (or heat) that it takes to raise the
temperature of one pound of water one degree on the Fahrenheit scale. It’s a pretty
small amount of energy, so for convenience, engineers have defined the term
therm to mean 100,000 BTUs; in fact, if you look on your monthly heating bill
(assuming that you use natural gas to heat your home and make hot water),
you’ll see that it is quoted in “therms”.
Just how much energy are we talking about? Based on the definition of a single
BTU, it’s easy to see that a therm is the amount of energy needed to raise the
temperature of 100,000 pounds of water by 1 degree F. Or, it the amount of
energy needed to raise 10,000 pound by 10 degrees, and 1,000 pounds by 100
degrees and 2,000 pound by 50 degrees.
Let’s think about the latter therm “equivalent”. Since water weighs about 8
pounds per gallon, 2,000 pounds of water is about 250 gallons, or roughly the
amount of water to fill your water heater about 6 times (most residential water
heaters are 40 gallons, some are a little bigger and some a little smaller). If you’re
like most Americans, you’ll use about 20 gallons of water every time you take a
shower, and so will everyone else in your family. So, if you’re a family of four,
you use about 80 gallons of water (2 water heater “fills”) for showering
everyday. In a week you’ll use about 600 gallons for this purpose, and in a
month about 2,400 gallons (or in terms of weight, roughly 20,000 pounds of
water).
Now it turns out that when water comes into your home from the pipes in your
community’s distribution system, it’s about 50 or 60 degrees in temperature –
fine for drinking, but far too cold for showering. So, if your water heater raises
that temperature by another 50 degrees or so (to about 110 degrees), its just about
right for showering. We’ve already seen that 1 therm will raise the temperature
1
In this chapter, I will focus mostly on fossil fuels, since they account for the lions share (well
over 90%) of all energy used in the US and elsewhere. Most scientists believe – but can not yet
unequivocally prove – that there is a relationship between the burning of fossil fuels and climate
change. I’ll touch briefly on that, but this book isn’t about climate change. Rather, it’s purpose is
to give the reader enough technical understanding and sense for the order of magnitude of our
possible impact on our surroundings and what each of us can do (quite easily, it turns out) to
minimize that impact (and maybe save a few bucks in the process).
3
of 250 gallons of water to a nice showering temperature and provide you and
your family with about 10 – 12 showers. 10 therms, then will do the same for
2,500 gallons of water – about what the average family of four uses for showering
once a day over the course of a month.
So a therm is quite a bit of energy; try to imagine the amount of wood you’d
need to burn on a campfire to heat up 250 gallons of water to a comfortable
temperature for washing (it turns out to be about 200 pounds of wood!). And,
since natural gas has about a therm for every 100 cubic feet, it’s a very
concentrated source of energy. We’ll come back to this point later, but you can
already see why many of old power plants use natural gas as fuel to run their
boilers to generate steam to turn turbines (newer plants burn the gas directly in a
turbine – much like a jet engine – and avoid the steam-making step to increase
efficiency).
Electricity is typically measured in kilowatt-hours which is a shorthand way of

saying “1000 watts running through the wires for 1 hour”. So a watt isn’t a unit
of energy, but rather the rate at which energy flows. By definition one watt of
power running for 1 sec is enough to heat 1 gram of water by one degree on the
Centrigrade scale. Confused? Don’t be; the English system of measurement
(which gave us “BTUs” and the Metric system of measurement (which gave us
watt-hours) have been the bane of students for a hundred years or more. But,
we’ll see that for our purposes its easy to convert between them.
Let’s think about that kilowatt-hour (abbreviated “kw-hr”). That’s enough

energy to run 10 standard-sized incandescent light bulbs for an hour – probably
the amount of energy you use in the evening to light your living room, one of
your childrens’ room, the kitchen and maybe the outside porch for an hour. That
too is a lot of energy -- it turns out that it takes about 3 or 4 pounds of coal in a
coal-burning powerplant to make just 1 kilowatt-hour of electricity. It also turns
out that 1 kw-hr is about the same amount of energy as a horse uses (pulling a
plow, say) for about an hour. So, in the era of electricity, you can flip on a few
lights and command the same amount of energy in the course of an evening as a
herd of horses working full-out in a field during the 17th century. Talk about
convenience….
But, a kw-hr is not nearly as much as a “therm”. In fact, there are about 33 kw-
hrs in one therm, and we’ll use this conversion rule frequently in this book.
So, let’s get an idea of how much energy your household uses. A typical utility
bill, for both natural gas and electricity might look something like this (its from
the Pacific Gas and Electric Company web page, a large utility located in
California2):
2
http://www.pge.com/res/understanding_bill/standard/page1.html
4
This is the summary page (which is all that most people look at or understand)
and it shows that in March of 2004 this typical family used about $230.00 worth
of electricity and $103.00 of natural gas (natural gas has gotten very expensive.
Even in balmy California, a little natural gas doesn’t go very far anymore)
Bottom line: $348.25. Most people write a check and forget about it.
But it is the second part of the bill that tells you just how much energy you used.
Let’s start with the natural gas accounting:
5
6
This family – probably not a lot different from yours – used 100 therms of gas for
the month of March, 2004. Most of that was probably for heating the house, but
this 100 therms is same energy content as about 100 gallons of gasoline, 1000
pounds of coal or a ton of wood (about half of a “cord” of wood). If King Arthur
of old England could see this, he’d wonder where all of that energy could come
from!
Indeed, the average American family of the 21st century uses far more energy
than the royal families of 17th and 18th Europe did (including their large
entourages). The point is made even more clearly by looking at this California
family’s electricity accounting for the same month:
7
Ignoring the various surcharges and other complications of utility billing in

California, we see that this family used about 500 kw-hrs of electricity in the
month of March, 2004 (which is actually below the national average as we’ll
8
discover later in this book). To make that electricity about 500 pounds of coal or
4500 cubic feet of natural gas were burned somewhere (or more likely, a
combination of both). And yes, a bit of nuclear power and hydroelectric power
entered into the mix; we’ll see more about the relative contributions of the
various so-called “primary” energy sources later on in this book.
We can easily put these meaning of these figures into something other than
dollars (though that’s probably what most people are concerned about to the
exclusion of everything else), and go beyond enumerating the huge volumes of
fossil fuel involved in keeping up the daily operation of our households. Instead,
let’s see how much that typical California family pollutes. Assuming the usual
mix of primary energy sources for generating electricity, and natural gas for
heating and cooking, we can calculate the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2)
produced from each of these activities, and add in the impact of driving two cars
800 miles each in any given month (something less than 10,000 miles per year for
each vehicle):
Amount of
CO2 CO2 CO2
Average use
Energy Type Units produced produced produced
per month
in tons per month per year
per unit
Natural Gas one therm 0.00079733 100 0.08 0.96
Electricity (assuming the US
mix of coal, nuclear, natural
gas, hydroelectric and
renewables combined to make one kilowatt-
electricity) hour 6.66E-04 500 0.33 4.00
Gasoline one gallon 0.009090909 64 0.58 6.98
Totals 0.99 11.94
So, for the hypothetical California family of three or four, the household
produces about one ton of CO2 per month just from using electricity, natural gas
and gasoline for shopping, family outings and vacations. It is also very
important to note that electricity is not a “primary” energy source, but rather is
an energy carrier (and a very convenient one at that as it can be converted into so
many useful end-products like heat, light, and cooled air). Electricity is made
from a number of “primary” sources in the US, roughly in the following
proportions:
9
US Energy Mix by primary

fuel type (DOE, 2002) Percentage
Coal 50.3%
Natural Gas 18.0%
Nuclear 20.3%
Hydroelectric 6.7%
Renewables (solar and wind) 2.3%

Petroleum (fuel oil) 2.5%
Total 100.0%
So, in calculating the amount of CO2 dumped into the air as a result of electricity
generation, we take into account the fact that nuclear energy does not produce
any CO2, nor do renewable energy sources like wind and solar. Oddly,
hydroelectric power generation probably does produce greenhouse gases (mainly
methane) as a result of flooding behind dams which in turn leads to the decay of
billions of tons of plants, producing methane and CO2 in the end. That little
known fact has been ignored in these calculations, making the electricity picture
look “cleaner” than it really is.
Also, the “mix” of primary sources in the US is changing rapidly; fuel oil
(because of its ever-increasing cost) has dwindled as a contributor to electricity
generation. Nuclear power has increased both in absolute terms and as a
percentage of primary US electricity fuel – mostly due to better plant operation
gained through a few decades of experience, including shorter down-times for
refueling – but has likely reached its theoretical maximum (or close to it) as there
has not been a single new permit for nuclear plant construction in the US for over
10 years (more on the tradeoff of risks and benefits of nuclear power can be
found later in this book). But most interesting of all (and a bit frightening as
well) is the dramatic increase in the use of natural gas for electricity production.
The US Department of Energy estimates that 90% of all new electricity power
plant construction in the US over the next 10 years will be for natural gas fired
electricity (mostly using advanced turbines instead of boiling water to make
steam to turn turbines).
It is not very likely that many new coal-burning plants will be built in the US.
Most communities recognize the hazards of coal-burning as well as the
unpleasant smoke and slag waste produced. In many parts of the US where coal
10
is abundant, water – necessary for cooling – is not, making coal even more
unattractive. However, there may be some mileage to be obtained from
increasing the efficiency of coal-burning plants: on average, only about 35% of
the heat from coal burning is turned into electricity. It may be possible to
increase this fraction to something closer to 45%, getting more electricity “bang”
for the CO2 “price” that is inevitably paid3.
Now of course, there is no such thing as an “average” family, and across the
United States there is quite a bit of variance in the use of energy across the
country. But even more important is that residential energy use (including your
vehicles gasoline consumption) comprises only about 35% of all energy use
nationwide. The rest is shared between industry (e.g. factories and other
manufacturing or processing facilities), government (for everything from offices
to street and highway lighting) and commercial establishments: stores,
restaurants, shopping malls, and the like. But, make no mistake: each of these
entities exist to provide products and services that we purchase. So, we all
“consume” the energy associated with industrial, government and commercial
sections of the overall economy. Put another way, that yearly 12 tons of CO2
creation we’re directly responsible for in our homes is augmented to about
another 24 tons of CO2 produced from the consumption of energy to make the
things and services we buy adding up to about 36 tons of CO2 per household
(and other pollutants as well, but you get the idea.) So, it’s not hard to see that if
we multiply that amount by roughly 120 million households in the US (we’re just
after an approximation here, so let’s not worry too much about precision), we
end up with 5 billion tons of CO2 being produced in the US every year.
We can check this calculation by looking at measurements of world-wide CO2

production. This data has been nicely summarized in a recent paper from the
Oak Ridge National Laboratories4 that looked at trends since the 1950s.
Graphically, the results are these:
3
Some industry analysts believe that it will be possible to sequester CO2 from coal burning (the
largest single source of “man-made” CO2 across the globe) by pumping the gas into
underground caverns such as exhausted oil fields or old mines. As of this writing, the
technology for doing so is undergoing “proof-of-principle” testing in the US and Canada. It is
simply too soon to know how feasible this approach to mitigation of CO2 side-effects will be.
4
Andres, R.J., G. Marland, I. Fung, and E. Matthews 1996. A 1° _ 1° distribution of carbon dioxide
emissions from fossil fuel consumption and cement manufacture, 1950-1990. Global Biogeochem.
Cycles 10, 419-429. Available at: http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/1996/AndresMarland.html
(accessed August 25, 2004).
11
Billion metric tons of Carbon Dioxide
30
Billions of Metric tons
25
20
15
10
0
1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
Year
So, worldwide in the year 2000, about 25 billion metric tons of CO2 were
produced, making the US share about 25% -- right in line with our share of
overall energy consumption5. It appears that only about half of this CO2 is
absorbed by growing plants, the ocean, and geological formations of various
types, leaving the rest to remain in the atmosphere. One would expect to see a
5
At this point, its probably worth pointing out that even “experts” get the data on CO2
production wrong. The most common mistake by far is confusing tons of carbon
dumped into the atmosphere with tons of carbon dioxide. Either is a fair measure, of
course, but almost always you’ll find in any book on environmental impact of human
activity a phrase like: “humans produced 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide that went into
the atmosphere. That’s just wrong. They meant to say (but probably didn’t know it)
something like this: “Humans produced 25 billion tons of carbon dioxide, which
contained 6 billion tons of carbon”. The conversion from one to the other is very, very
easy. A single atom of carbon weights “12” atomic units. Oxygen weights 16. Thus,
CO2 weights 12 + 16 + 16 = 44 atomic units. So, a molecule of CO2 weighs about 3.67
times as much as an atom of carbon. If we multiply 6 billion “tons of carbon” by 3.67 we
get about 22 billion tons of CO2. Put another way, very little naked carbon is dumped
into the atmosphere (there is some, to be sure, in the form of coal dust and soot), but it is
the CO2 that is important (and much more voluminous and massive) as a greenhouse gas.
I hope this clears up the confusion that many careful readers of environmental
publications have doubtless noted. And, I’ll put in an appeal to writers to be more
careful.
12
rise in over atmospheric CO2 levels as a result, and that is precisely what
measurements (starting in the 1950s) demonstrate. The most recently published
data shows an unmistakably continuous upward trend6:
The yearly cycling up and down occurs as a result of plant (and probably ocean)
absorption of CO2 with the arrival and egress of summer. Identical cycling and
trends have been seen in measurements done near the equator (in Hawaii) and in
many other places as well.
A careful statistical analysis of this data shows, in addition, that the rate of rise of
atmospheric CO2 is also increasing: that is, not only is the overall trend in an
upward direction, it is going upward ever more quickly. Many possible
explanations for this rate of rise are offered by geophysicists and atmospheric
scientists, including deforestation (thus removing one massive storage “sink” for
new CO2 produced from fossil fuel burning), saturation of the ocean’s ability to
sequester CO2 beyond a more-or-less fixed rate per year, and of course the
emerging prosperity in heavily populated countries like China and India. As a
general rule, as people become wealthier their energy use increases7. Indeed, the
6
C.D. Keeling and T. P. Whorf. Atomospheric carbon dioxide record from Barrow
(Alaska). Available on line at: http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/co2/sio-bar.htm (accessed
August 25, 2004).
7
It is also true that as income and wealth become sufficient to take care of comfort needs,
educating one’s children, and providing for retirement, attention begins to turn to
13
rise in the price of oil in the year 2004 is, in large measure, attributed to
increasing demand in China (primarily for fueling the massively increased
number of private automobiles). Chinese oil imports increased by 25% in 2002,
30% in 2003 and are projected to increase by nearly 40% by the end of 2004. This
is but one example of what happens when people have more discretionary
income and wish to enjoy the same creature comforts that so dominate life in the
United States, Europe and Japan. Thus, it is far more likely than not that the
accelerating trend in CO2 production illustrated above will continue for decades
to come unless we change our energy use patterns.
What does all of this mean and why should we care? In the year 1996, the US
passed an important milestone in its energy use. For the first time in our history,
we used more than 100 “Quads” of energy or 100 Quadrillion BTUs, or if you
prefer 100,000 Trillion BTUs or 100 million billion BTUs. Since there are about
300 million of us Americans, that translates into about 330 million BTUs per
person, which in turn converts into roughly 100,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity
equivalent per person per year.
Since there are about 9,000 hours per year, on average we Americans are
consuming – either directly or indirectly – the equivalent of the energy burned in
100 standard sized incandescent light bulbs, 24 hours a day, seven days a week,
365 days a year. It’s an enormous amount of energy to be sure, and as you’ll see
in this book, a good deal of it is simply wasted. With a little patience and some
common sense, we can fix that and maybe save a bit for the next generation or
two.
environmental quality. But, there’s a lot of energy to be burned in moving from poverty
to what we in the West regard as a comfortable standard of living.
14
Chapter 1: A little more background and a few surprises
By way of introduction into the subject of practical steps for reducing energy
consumption, let me say this: I’m no environmental “wacko” (the view from the
political right) nor am I a conservative-focused-solely-on-economic-growth (a
view often expressed from the political left). Rather, I am a scientist who readily
admits that the judgment isn’t in yet on global climate change but finds the
trends harder and harder to ignore. A little prudence seems to be in order, and
as I hope to make clear in this book, there is so much energy wastage in our lives
(Americans are particularly awful in squandering energy at this, but Russians are
even worse on a per dollar-of-GDP basis and even the Europeans and Japanese
could do better) that we can easily grab the “low hanging fruit” of energy
conservation without seeming too extreme to the extremists on both sides of the
political spectrum.
In short, we probably have a serious problem on our hands (which I’ll loosely
define as environmentally damaging, fossil-fuel based lifestyles in a new era of
dwindling –or at least more expensive -- fossil fuel resources) and its solution
requires a little bit of thought. Instead of thinking, we have on both extremes of
the political spectrum, a whole lot of “attitude”. Everyone has a “position” these
days (or so it seems), but few people have chosen to employ their intellect.
Surely we can do better than this, but if you’re ineluctably wed to your particular
version of political grandstanding you might as well stop reading now.
So, without apology to name-callers on the wacko right (“The American way of
life is not negotiable” – President G. H. W. Bush) and the wacko left (“We must
make the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for
civilization” – Vice-President Al Gore) I’ll base my analysis and
recommendations on the science that is known and processes that are truly “no-
regrets” in terms of their benefits (and their absence of apparent costs of any
kind). We begin not with big-bad-industry, conspiratorial government operating
in undisclosed locations, nor mantras suggesting that we give up bathing,
television, electric lighting and travel but rather with individuals. And there is
no better place to assess the choices that individuals make than by looking at
what they consume directly at home (we’ll get into “indirect” energy
consumption – your share of everything from street lighting to the diesel fuel
burned in trucks to bring you exotic fruits and cheeses from around the world
later).
Residential energy consumption accounts for approximately 33% of all energy

use in the United States. There is doubtless significant waste of energy via
unnecessary lighting, heating, poor insulation, and failure to take advantage of
solar flux in the winter and natural shade (e.g. from trees) in the summer.
Overall, Americans consume about 75% more energy than citizens in western
Europe, Japan, and Australia; we’re anything but “typical” in our energy use
compared to our nearest economic competitors in the rich world, let alone the
poor places that remain home to most of mankind. But, as energy demand
increases in the developing world – primarily China and India – we will
probably have an international energy (mostly fossil fuel) crunch on our hands.
Surely we can do better, even if we don’t all agree that global climate change is a
15
clear and pressing threat that needs to be addressed. Even without climate
change worries, there are huge pressures on prices; after all, billions of people in
developing countries want the convenience of automobiles, refrigerators and
computers. They also want the comfort provided by air conditioning, larger
homes (that require more cooling and heating), and big screen TVs.
At my household, my wife and I realized long ago that we were “part of the
problem” in that we, too, squandered unconscionable amounts of energy. About
two years ago, we decided to do something about it. We’re not wealthy, but
certainly live very comfortably – which is to say that our behavior is responsible
for pollution far and above the world’s average, and thus perhaps not very
environmentally responsible. We began by simply plotting our electricity and
natural gas consumption, comparing it to Albuquerque averages, and computing
the rough amount of CO2 we were producing (as an approximate measure of our
own “pollution index”). The results from these simple graphs (which appear
below) were quite eye-opening.
In addition, we changed our driving habits. I’ve long been a daily bicycle
commuter, but we also traded in our older vehicles for a hybrid (Toyota Prius) in
2001 (we were the second family in New Mexico to have one). While the typical
New Mexican family owns 2 cars (or so) and drives in excess of 20,000 miles per
year, my wife and I put about 9,000 miles per year on our Prius and perhaps
1,000 miles on our second car. Thus, instead of consuming some 1,000 gallons of
gas (given the “fleet” average of about 20 mpg in the US and New Mexico), we
consume about 250 gallons of gasoline. We plan our trips – for shopping and
errands – a lot better now than we did a few years ago when we realized how
much gasoline we were using, and how much pollution that caused.
In this book, I’ll compare our utility use and costs with the Albuquerque
residential market, and you can do the same for the community where you live.
The average Albuquerque home is about 2,000 square feet in size; ours is a
somewhat more generous 2,700 square feet. Even so, as the data clearly
documents, our electricity use is less than 30% of Albuquerque average; our
natural gas use about 75% of average, and our water use about 40% that of the
typical Albuquerque household. None of this was particularly difficult to do; I
provide a summary of the simple (and very inexpensive) steps that most people
can take immediately to duplicate our experience. Not only is it practically
painless, the satisfaction from practicing some prudent environmental kindness
returns countless – and invaluable – satisfaction.
Our desire is simple: maybe we can leave New Mexico’s environment a little bit
better off than it otherwise would have been (it would be a hard task to make it
better than we found it, given the growth of population and steady increase in
average wealth. More people with more money means more cars and roads,
more homes and energy and water consumption and more pollution in general) .
Albuquerque is, in many ways, an “average” American city. Median household

income is very close to analogous the national figure, and most couples work,
drive about 20 miles a day (each) and have jobs in the service industries. It’s a
16
little hotter but less humid here than in most places in the US, and winters are
plenty cold in the high desert. While the city and its suburbs are growing
steadily, they aren’t quite “booming” like in central Florida or southern
California. So, just about all of the lessons we’ve learned in managing our own
energy consumption (and contribution to pollution) are probably applicable to
your home as well.
Make no mistake about it, energy use is a big expenditure of middle-class

America’s disposable-income. Let’s examine at a family of 3 or 4 who are living
reasonably well with a household income (from both spouses working and a
little bit of investment income) of about $51,000 – middle-class, but above the
middle of the middle-class. How do they spend and save their money? The
picture looks something like this:
Income Allocation: Typical American

Household
Taxes
Food + Dining + Clothing
$1,500 Energy/Utilities
$6,000 $12,042
Household Supplies and
$5,000
repairs
Insurance
Mortgage Interest
$7,500 $10,000
Entertainment/Vacations
$2,000
$3,000 $4,300
Depreciation
Savings
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the largest single expense that most of us face is taxes
(Federal, State, Property, Social Security, Medicaid considered together). Food,
clothing and Dining out are next, and mortgage expenses follow closely behind.
But energy use (electricity, gas, gasoline, water) is a whopping 8% of all income
(and in poorer household might be even more as a percentage of income). But
17
since taxes are unavoidable (if you’re honest), and we look instead at disposable
income (which is all of that available after taxes), more than 11% of the rather-
well off American income goes to energy and utilities. So, the picture looks more
like this:
Disposition of Disposable Income in a typical American family
Food + Dining + Clothing

Energy/Utilities
4% Household Supplies and repairs
15% Insurance
25%
Mortgage Interest
Entertainment/Vacations
Depreciation
Savings
13%
11%
19% 8%
5%
Check your utility and gasoline credit card statements: it’s a good bet that your
energy charges add up to more than $4,000 per year. If you live in a really cold
or really hot portion of the country, or drive more than about 20 miles a day back
and forth to work that number could easily double. Wouldn’t it be nice to
decrease that expenditure and maybe fatten-up that thinnest slice called
“savings”?8
But money is only one aspect to our energy consumptive ways (to me, it’s of
secondary importance, but most people put cost ahead of every other factor
when they make a decision). So, another way to look at this energy feast is to get
a rough idea of the environmental impact from all of the burning going on.
Scientists believe that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a “green house” gas – one which
traps some of the sun’s heat and light that would otherwise be reflected back out
into space. There are, of course, other pollutants from burning (such as oxides of
8
Actually, I’m being a little bit generous here with the “savings” part of the pie. As of 2003, the
average middle-class (or slightly above-the-middle-class) American family managed to save
about 3% of their disposable income, or about $1200. That compares to about 6% in Europe and
more than 10% in Japan.
18
nitrogen and sulfur that seem to result in acidification of rainwater, and many
hundreds of tons of heavy metals like mercury and radioactive matter like radon,
radium and uranium), but we’ll stick with CO2 alone so as to not overly
complicate the picture. So the question for the moment is: how much do our
individual households contribute to CO2 release into the atmosphere? Or, put
another way, if we use electricity (which in turn depends in part on burning
fossil fuels that have lots of carbon in them), burn natural gas for heating and
cooking, and burn gasoline in our cars, can we get a rough idea of our
environmental impact as individuals? (We’ll deal with industry and commerce a
bit later).
It turns out that in the United States, about 50% of all electricity is generated by
burning coal, 20% from natural gas, 20% from nuclear, 9% from hydroelectricity
and less than 1% from renewable sources (wind, solar, geothermal and biomass
burning); the latter is increasing to be sure, but it will be a long time before
renewables account for more than even 1% of all US energy consumption.
According to the Department of Energy9, taking this “mix” into consideration
(and noting that nuclear power, for example, releases no CO2 into the air), every
kilo-watt hour of electricity produced and delivered to the plugs in your house
results in about a pound of CO2 finding its way into the air10. Each “therm”
(100,000 BTUs) lets loose some 160 pounds, and for each mile we drive (at the US
average “fleet” efficiency of 20 miles per gallon – your car may do better or
worse) about a pound. Put it all together and here’s what we find as we tabulate
each energy source expended by the typical, somewhat-above-the-middle class
household:
Type of
Quantity Energy
kw-hrs of
14,118 electricity results in 9 tons of CO2
therms of
1,000 natural gas results in 0.8 tons of CO2
gallons of
1,027 gasoline results in 10 tons of CO2
9
The Department of Energy runs an very good web site out of its Energy Information Agency
(EIA), where all kinds of fascinating energy information can be found. The web site address is:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/mer/elect.html. You can download tables that reflect data
collected in your part of the country and start comparing your energy use with that of your
neighbors and friends. You’ll probably be amazed at what you find.
10
Interestingly, a lot of water is consumed in the process of making electricity as well, because
boilers have to be cooled and dams result in enormous amounts of water evaporation. On
average, about 2 gallons of water are vaporized (literally) for each kilowatt-hr in the US. That
turns out to be about 8 trillion gallons of water, or roughly all of the water that falls as rain over
the whole State of New Mexico annually.
19
So, your modest home dumps about 20 tons of CO2 into the air every year. And,
since there are about 100 million households in the US, about 2 billion tons of
CO2 come about just from activities of daily living – going to work and school,
shopping, and the occasional vacation. Yikes!
So maybe the basis for the following astounding fact is now clearer to you:
Americans make up about 5% of the world population, yet we consume about
25% of the world’s energy. But it doesn’t stop with residential consumption.
Each of us “consumes” albeit indirectly, our share of the energy used in industry
(where products are made), commerce (where products and services are sold)
and government services (which may not be worth what we pay for it, but that’s
the way it is). The DOE estimates that, taken together, American households use
about 40% of all of the energy consumed; industry takes another 30% or so, and
25% is used by businesses and 5 to 10% by government. (The latter includes
street lighting, traffic lights, and government offices and laboratories -- including
the massive defense labs that do cutting edge research and build nuclear
weapons).
So, put another way, you and your average-sized family are directly responsible
for 20 tons of CO2 generation (most of which ends up staying in the atmosphere
though some portion is picked up by plants). But, there is at least another
equally sized portion – that is, another 20 – 30 tons – that is your share of
commercial, industrial and government use. It’s hardly surprising that
atmospheric CO2 content has been increasing markedly for the past 100 years,
and it is now increasing at a faster rate than ever before in human history. You
can see why the climate scientists are wringing their hands wondering what this
will do to the weather and whether the weather might be set for a change a lot
sooner than we think.
Needless to say, much of this energy is wasted (and it is pretty much equally
squandered across these so called “sectors” of the economy: residential,
commercial, industrial and government). We’ll see what can be done about that
waste in the next chapter.
20
Chapter 2: Some easy, practical actions we all can take
First, let’s looks at natural gas and electricity consumption in the Zelicoff house
over the past three years and compare it to what the local utility monopoly
(Public Service Company of New Mexico) tells me the average Albuquerque
household uses. Note that we have a gas water-heater, a gas stove in the kitchen
and an electric clothes dryer
First, electricity use over the past few years:
Zelicoff Household
800.0
Electric Use by Month Ave. Alb. Household
700.0
600.0
500.0
kw-hrs
400.0
300.0
200.0
100.0
0.0
0
01
3
01
01
02
02
02
03
03
04
04
/0
/0
/0
0
/0
5/
5/
5/
5/
5/
5/
5/
5/
5/
5/
5/
5/
/5
/5
/5
5
/
2/
5/
8/
2/
5/
8/
2/
5/
8/
2/
5/
8/
11
11
11
11
Month
You’ll notice that since 2000 -- when we began first with a concerted but non-
fanatical electricity conservation practice at our home – we’ve been using less
than 40% of the Albuquerque average (and less than a third of homes the size of
ours which is a bit bigger than the mean). I’ll reveal these simple secrets in a few
pages, but I’ll first try to convince you that its worthwhile to think about doing
the same in your own home.
You’ll also notice that we had a sudden drop in electricity use in March 2004 – in
fact, we’re down to zero. There’s no trick here (and I won’t hold you in
suspense): we installed photovoltaic (PV) panels and started them up on St.
Patrick’s day of 2004. Since then, they’ve actually produced more electricity than
we’re using; I’ll have much more to say about PV panels and their benefit/cost
ratio later in this book. I realize that putting up PV panels seems pretty fanatical
(or at least not very “cost-effective”) to most people, but I’ll argue otherwise later
in this book.
21
Next, we’ll take a look at natural gas consumption:
Zelicoff Household
Gas Use by Month: Alb. Average
Ave. Alb. Household
vs. Zelicoff's Household
250.0
200.0
150.0
Therms
100.0
50.0
0.0
01
01
01
02
02
02
03
03
04
4
0
3
0
/0
0
/0
/0
/0
/0
5/
5/
5/
5/
5/
5/
5/
5/
5/
5/
5/
5
/5
/5
/5
/5
2/
5/
8/
2/
5/
8/
2/
5/
8/
2/
5/
8/
11
11
11
11
Month
In this comparison, the Zelicoff household doesn’t fair so well. Back in the
relatively warm winter of 2000, we consumed far more than the average (and
substantially smaller) house in our area (at least during the winter months), but
starting in the winter of 2002-03 and subsequently our use fell slightly below
average (even during the winter when most natural gas is consumed). The main
reason for this change was that we installed a new, more efficient gas furnace to
replace the 40 year old model that came with the house when we bought it.
Again taking into account the fact that the living area of our house is about 25%
larger than the houses we’re comparing it to, we’ve done pretty well by
upgrading our furnace. And of course we were grateful for the saving that
suddenly became rather significant when natural gas prices doubled – that’s
right, doubled – over the past two years.
But more important to us than the cost involved was our overall environmental
impact. As we’ve already seen, end result of most of the energy use on the
planet is CO2 production; only the small percentage of electricity generated by
nuclear and renewable resources produce no “green house gases”. So, in the
next chart, I have computed the total tons of CO2 per month produced by our
household (exclusive of automobile-related gasoline burning) and compared it
with calculations based on published average Albuquerque consumption:
22
Total CO2 (tons) for average Albuquerque

House
CO2 production (tons per month) Total CO2 (tons) produced: Zelicoff
0.90
0.80
0.70
Tons of CO2 (permonth)
0.60
0.50
0.40
0.30
0.20
0.10
0.00
Nov-00 Mar-01 Jul-01 Nov-01 Mar-02 Jul-02 Nov-02
Date Mar-03 Jul-03 Nov-03 Mar-04 Jul-04
As is easily seen, our household is responsible for a bit less than 1/3 of the CO2
atmospheric production of the typical Albuquerque residence (and I’m not
including contributions from driving; the differences would be even more stark if
we added in our gasoline consumption – about 200 gallons a year because we
own a hybrid vehicle – and tacked on the typical household gasoline burning
(more than 1000 gallons per year). We’ll take a look at that later on in the book.
You’ll also note that when we installed our photovoltaic panels (sized
appropriately to produce all of our electricity needs on average, with excess
dispatched into the grid for others to use) that our CO2 pollution fell to near
zero.
Now for the key lesson: it wasn’t hard at all to cut back on electricity and natural
gas use. We accomplished these environmental (and dollar) savings primarily
through:
• The use of compact fluorescent lighting in the most commonly used lights
in the house;
• Turning back of the thermostat at night to 55 degrees in the winter;
• Replacement of our 50 year old gas furnace with a much more efficient
model (recovery time for cost is less than 5 years);
• Insulation of windows with cellular shades that are both elegant and
inexpensive;
• Disconnection of seldom-used electrical devices that continuously drain
small amounts of power, but which in aggregate accounted for well over
1,000 kw-hrs per year of electricity.
23
• Permitting solar gain through south facing windows in the spring, late fall
and winter and blocking it out with shades in the summer when the sun
would otherwise turn us into well done toast.
• Judicious use of small electric space heaters in commonly occupied rooms
(e.g. kitchen and our study/library) while turning down the gas furnace
thermostat for the rest of the house.
• Replacement of our 11 year old refrigerator (then a very efficient model)
with one that consumes approximately 1/2 as much electricity. Due to
technology breakthroughs, even a modestly priced refrigerator purchased
in 2004 is more than twice as efficient as the most expensive refrigerator a
decade ago.
Our lifestyle hasn’t suffered one bit. In fact, we’re even happier than we were
previously knowing that we’re doing something that cuts pollution a bit. There’s
no good reason that you can’t do the same.
If you look carefully at the charts above, it’s pretty easy to see that while our pre-
PV panel electricity consumption has been relatively flat (we’ve converted to
some local electric space heating because of higher natural gas prices this year),
Albuquerque households have clearly trended up in the “juice use” over the past
few years. This is probably due to (a) larger Mac-mansions scattered around
town; (b) more electronic devices left on for longer periods of time including big
screen televisions and computers; (c) and perhaps some increased outdoor
lighting costs particularly in “gated” communities. It may also be the case that
the variability in weather – more extremes of both high and low temperatures –
has resulted in more demand for electricity, but that’s hard to prove.
Finally, because for most people it’s the financial bottom line that matters, here’s
a comparison of our total electricity and natural gas costs compared to the
(smaller) average-sized home in Albuquerque:
24
Zelicoff Total Utility Cost
Cost of Gas and Electricity
TOTAL Average Albuquerque Utility
Bill
$250.00
$200.00
$150.00
$ Cost
$100.00
$50.00
$0.00
Aug-00 Aug-01 Aug-02 Aug-03 Aug-04
Month
In the winter, we spend about 30% less than the average Albuquerque house,
and in the summer about 50% less.11 To put it in clear dollar terms for the
parsimonious reader: in 2003 the average Albuquerquean devoted about $1,500
to electricity and gas costs, while we spend about $800 (pre-solar panels). For
2004, that gap will widen a lot more because of increases in the price of natural
gas and electricity. Your costs may vary as compared to the average
Albuquerque family if your weather is more severe (it probably is; New Mexico
has one of the mildest climates overall in the country) or if you live in a
MacMansion (a disturbing trend in suburban America).
So now you’re probably wondering about the details: just where does all of that
electricity and natural gas go in the typical house? What insights can we gain
from teasing this question apart?
11
The data for the utility use in the “average” Albuquerque household was kindly
provided by the Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM). I can only get this data
quarterly, so the pink line – representing that average city-wide use in Albuquerque – is
always a few months behind the data from my house (which I can get daily just by
looking at the gas and electric meters – and so can you).
25
Chapter 3: Energy Use in a Typical Household: Electricity and Gas
Think about your own home. Inside there are a multiplicity of electricity “sinks”
as the engineers call them (they mean by this “devices that use electricity”):
lights, televisions and radios, a microwave oven, your refrigerator, and if you
have them, freezers, portable phones, computers and a whole host of other items.
Of course, the size and age of these appliances and other modern conveniences
vary a great deal from house to house. But, it is very instructive to see what the
Department of Energy and my own surveys have shown about electricity use
breakdown. Roughly, it looks like this for the average, middle-class (or perhaps
slightly higher up the economic food-chain) household in America in 200412 (the
units are in kw-hrs)
Electricity per day per month per year

Refrigeration 3.0 91 1,095
Lighting 4.5 136 1,643
Heating (including blower
fans) 0.5 15 183
Airconditioning and cooling 8.0 242 2,920

Outside lighting 1.0 30 365
Dishwasher 1.5 45 548
Laundry - Washing 0.5 15 183
Laundry - Drying 2.3 69 834

Televisions 4.0 121 1,460
Chargers and Small
Appliances 1.0 30 365
Freezer 2.0 61 730
Microwave Cooking 0.5 15 183
Computers 0.5 15 183
TOTALS 29.3 886 10,689
And, since some people prefer pictures you can look at the distribution of
electricity consumption in a typical household this way:
12
It is necessary to read the information in this chart with a little bit of thoughtfulness.
For example, since winter and summer are so different in most parts of the world (not in
Florida, Singapore or the tropics in general of course), there is no such thing as an
“average” day. In Oklahoma (I’m not picking on them) the summers are hot and the
winters can be brutal. Air-conditioning is the rule in Oklahoma homes (have you ever
been in Oklahoma in the summer? Yikes, it is hot and steamy!), so on a July day, a
typical house might consume 30 – 40 kilowatt hours of electricity – that’s right, in just
ONE day, mostly for cooling. So, the averages tell only a “summary” of the story, but it
is still a rather compelling picture of our prodigious energy use in the US.
26
Where does all that electricity go?

Use (in kilo-watt hours per year) by category or device
Refrigeration
Lighting
834 1,460 Heating (including blower fans)
183 365
548 Airconditioning and cooling
365 730
Outside lighting
183
183
Dishwasher
Laundry - Washing
1,095 Laundry - Drying
2,920 Televisions
183 1,643 Chargers and Small Appliances
Freezer
Microwave Cooking
Annual kilowatt hours = 10,689 Computers
Annual cost = $855
If you check your own electric utility bill (and it is surprising how many bill-
payers don’t; they just write the check or have it withdrawn automatically from
their bank account), there’s a very good chance that you’ll be within about 10%
of the totals and individual categories. If you live in a part of the country that is
particularly hot and humid most of the year (Florida or southern Texas) or even
hot and humid for only 4 or 5 months a year (most of the eastern and central
portions of the US), you’ll use a lot more electricity than this. But then, so much
more the opportunities to cut down on waste as you’ll see shortly.
My house wasn’t a lot different from the national average. But starting about 5
years ago, we decided to see if you could put our actions where are
“environmentalism” was (or at least was supposed to be). We realized that we
were leaking far more electricity (as waste heat) into the surroundings than we
were actually using for useful gain inside our house. For example, we had an old
freezer (kept in the steaming hot garage, of course) that held a few cans of orange
juice and one freezer-burned package of fish. We were using about 1,000 kw-hr
hours a year for that privilege alone. We noticed that we left on our outside
lights, had all sorts of small items plugged in that drew current (like cell phone
charges, dustbusters, clocks, and the like) but which we seldom used. And, the
last time we replaced our refrigerator was 10 years previously (and we bought a
not-very-energy efficient one to save a few bucks which turned out to be not-
very-smart).
27
So, we got rid of the freezer, unplugged the little loads (that added up to a lot of
total load), bought an EnergyStar™ rated refrigerator and replaced the five or six
incandescent lights we tended to use a lot (like for reading) with modern
compact fluorescent units. We stopped using our electric dryer and hung up our
clothes outside to dry (clothes last much longer with non-tumble drying, by the
way; where do you think all of that lint comes from?) Within a month, our
electricity consumption had fallen by almost half. Then we insulated the attic,
replaced leaky single-pane windows, and put solar-powered lights outside along
walkways.
Our electricity use fell even further as a result, and most of the savings came
from doing very simple and inexpensive things that paid for themselves almost
immediately (including buying an energy efficient refrigerator). So, as of two
years ago and going forward, our electricity use has fallen by 2/3. Our costs are
about $200 per year (the average local household pays almost $900 and wealthier
household pay much, MUCH more), and we have the satisfaction of knowing
that we are doing something more helpful for conservation and the environment
than merely whining about it. You can get an appreciation for the difference
between our household use and the average household’s consumption in the
chart above. But the main point is this: there is LOTS of energy to conserve in
your home, and the vast majority of it can be done easily (that is, with a
Electricity Use in the Zelicoff House:

Use (in kilo-watt hours per year) by category or device
Refrigeration
Lighting
0 164 146 4 Heating (including blower fans)
365 146 Airconditioning and cooling
37
0
110 Outside lighting
73 Dishwasher
Laundry - Washing
Laundry - Drying
Televisions
730 402
Chargers and Small Appliances
219 Freezer
Microwave Cooking
Computers
Annual kilowatt hours = 2,390
Annual cost = $192
28
minimum of effort) and inexpensively (that is, with a minimum of dollars). If
you truly care about the environment (and let’s face it, most people claim to but
are unwilling to take action) you can make a difference with only a modest effort.
Now as for natural gas or propane (assuming you don’t use electricity, solar or
wood for most of your heating), the vast majority of residential consumptions
goes to heating your home in the winter (not in Florida, of course; the people
there are in air-conditioning mode most of the year. On rare occasions, its
necessary to have a little heat and just about everyone uses electricity for that
purpose, and for their water heaters as well). About 15% of natural gas is used
for heating hot water, and maybe 5% for cooking. But take a look at our
household’s gas use compared to the Albuquerque average in the graph in the
previous chapter: in the 6 or 7 months that constitute late spring and
summertime in New Mexico, we use about 3 “therms” (or 300,000 BTU) per
month whereas our neighbors are using about 20 therms (or 6 million BTUs) per
month. What accounts for that?
Simple: most people have their hot water heaters turned up to a scalding 140 or
150 degrees on the mistaken assumption that one needs that high of a
temperature for getting the dishes and clothes really clean. That’s just wrong;
your dishwashing machine (most people have them now) gets dishes clean by
the high-pressure scrubbing action of water and soap. Temperature has almost
nothing to do with it. And, if the water is too cold, most dishwashers will heat it
up to the appropriate temperature. It’s just not necessary to keep a huge 40 or
80 gallon tank of water at 140 degrees 24 hours a day to get sparkling dishes and
glasses.
With regard to clothing, the choice is even more stark: modern enzyme-based
laundry detergent works best at cold or cool temperatures. Very hot water not
only decreases the efficiency of the enzymes (they are literally derived from a
common soil bacteria called Bacillus subtilis), it wears out your clothes faster. So,
with the possible exception of those few things that you’d like to have whiter
than white (like a dress shirt or a blouse), boiling your clothing in the washing
machine makes no sense.
Then, think about where you use most of your hot water: its probably in the
shower (and if there are teenagers in the house, it is most DEFINETELY in the
shower). If you’re like most people, the water coming out of the showerhead is
so hot that you have to dilute it down with cold water, right? So, not only are
you wasting energy overheating the water (and keeping it overheated 365 days a
year), you actually then have to cool it down so you won’t burn your skin13!
You can avoid all of these problems (and, more importantly the energy waste)
but one simple maneuver: go to your hot water tank and turn the temperature
13
Hot water scalding is the single most common cause of burns in infants and children
and its one more very important rationale for turning the temperature down on your hot
water tank’s thermostat.
29
down from “VERY HOT” (where doubtless you currently have it) to “WARM”
which is 120 degrees or so – perfectly good enough for everyday use. More than
anything else, our decision to do this in our own house explains the difference
between our monthly hot-water gas use and everyone else’s during the summer
months.
Quite a bit of energy already inside the hot water in the tank can get lost when it
radiates out into the surrounding environment through the skin of the tank or
via piping (piping tends to be copper which is wonderful heat conductor – not a
good thing when you want to avoid wasting energy). You can prevent that by
doing two things: purchasing an inexpensive fiberglass-filled “blanket” for your
hot water heater (just about every hardware store or home improvement store
sells them for around $15), and by covering exposed hot water pipe coming out
of the hot water heater with very inexpensive pre-formed foam pipe insulator
which sells for less than a dollar per foot. Simply slice it lengthwise and wrap it
around the pipe. It’ll pay for itself in a few months or less14. And, if your hot
water pipes run a significant distance under the house to reach the bathrooms,
kitchen or other points-of-use, insulate those pipe runs as well. Much less water
will be wasted waiting for the temperature to rise to acceptable temperature
before jumping in the shower on a cold winter morning.
One more simple thing to do to save a lot of gas (maybe as much as a therm per
day) is to turn off the pilot light in your furnace in the summer15. Its worth a
service call from a trained technician to do this if you don’t feel comfortable
doing it yourself.
For some people who are too lazy to turn down the thermostat at night or when
they leave the house, a “set-back” thermostat might be worth its cost (around $50
depending on how complicated and sophisticated a programmable model you
might choose). My personal observations suggest that people don’t use these as
they should, nor do they bother adjusting them (as is almost necessary) when the
weather changes substantially; they simply hit the “over ride” button. But, if you
really are too busy to be bothered with taking 10 seconds to turn down the heat
(or cooling) before leaving the house for work, they are probably better than
nothing.
So let’s summarize the simple steps you can take at little or no cost to decrease
waste of energy and added pollution of the air:
14
The author would like to thank Richard Armstrong for suggesting the insulation on hot
water pipes.
15
Most furnaces purchased in the past 10 to 15 years have electric ignition, obviating the
need for a pilot light. But, you might consider disconnecting the power supply to the
furnaces electric transformer if this is the case. Just like other vampire loads, the cost of
keeping the transformer going when you don’t need (about 6 months of the year or more,
depending on where you live) is substantial (especially when measured in terms of
unnecessarily generating even more CO2 that gets into the atmosphere).
30
• To cut back on Electricity use:

o Turn off your air conditioning when you leave the house (it’ll take
only a few minutes to cool things down when you turn it back on
when you return – such sacrifices we make in America!)
o Measure the temperature in the freezer compartment and main
compartment of your refrigerator. The first should be no colder
than 4 degrees Farhenheit; the latter no colder than 38 degrees.
Adjust the thermostat in the refrigerator accordingly.
o Wash the dishes only when the dishwasher is full (every second or
third day instead of every day)
o Dry your clothes outside when possible
o Unplug the (multiple) “vampire loads” in your house
o Use natural lighting during the day
o Replace your four or five most commonly used incandescent bulbs
with modern compact fluorescent bulbs
o Junk your old freezer and think hard about whether or not you
really need one in the first place
o Buy a new refrigerator with an Energy Star™ rating if yours is
more than 7 or 8 years old (it will pay for itself in lower electricity
costs within a year).
o Install insulating shades in your windows (some product
suggestions and example pictures from our house can been found
in the appendix of this book). This will help immensely with
natural gas, oil or propane consumption if you use them for heating
in the winter as well.
• And for cutting back on natural gas or propane

o Turn down the temperature on the hot water tank to 115-120
degrees
o Turn off the pilot light in your furnace (have a professional do this
if you are uncomfortable doing so)
o Turn down the thermostat at night and when the house is
unoccupied to 55 - 58 degrees.
o If you have one of those silly outdoor gas lamps that run 24 hours
a day, turn it off and replace it with an electric bulb. Those gas
lamps easily consume 100,000 BTU a day (that’s right – 1 Therm
everyday) and costs you about $400 a year on your gas bill16
o And (I know this sounds silly, but it most certainly is not): when
you are boiling water in a pot on the stove (say, to make pasta) put
a lid on the pot while the water is heating up. If you do this
regularly, what seems to a trivial amount of energy savings turns
into something quite substantial. Or, you could just go on fouling
the environment with unnecessary CO2, the unavoidable end
product of all fossil fuel burning.
16
… and forgoes about 2 tons of CO2 production. Amazing how little we think about the
damage done from frivolous waste of energy.
31
So, let’s summarize where (and how much) the easy, almost painless savings are
in your home’s electricity consumption and the overall costs measured in kw-hrs,
dollars, and CO2 pollution of the atmosphere (you can pick your favorite metric;
mine is the latter):
Kilo-watt hours
Comparison in Average Kilo-watt hours
house (per in our house
month) (per month)
Electricity
Refrigeration 91 33
Lighting 136 18
Heating (including blower fans) 15 61
Airconditioning and cooling 242 30

Outside lighting 30 0
Dishwasher 45 14
Laundry - Washing 15 12
Laundry - Drying 69 0
Televisions 121 12
Chargers and Small Appliances 30 3

Freezer 61 0
Microwave Cooking 15 9
Computers 15 6
TOTALS (in kw-hrs) 886 198

Total cost in $ (approximate;
not including connection $71.76 $16.07
charges)
Total Cost per year in $ $861.09 $192.88
Total Enviornmental
impact per year (in 7.08 1.59
tons of CO2)
Notice that even though we use a relatively large amount of electricity for
heating, it is concentrated in the winter. Combined with installation of good
insulation in the ceiling, this spares our natural gas consumption quite a bit – and
there is no question that the lion’s share of gas use in residences in the US is for
space heating (only minimal amounts are used for cooking and hot water heating
if you’re a bit prudent with the temperature setting on your hot water heater and
keep it reasonably well insulated)
32
There is one more thing that our conservation efforts did for us, and it was
unexpected: because our consumption is so low, it made it possible for us to
consider installing our own solar photovoltaic (PV) system with the goal of
producing, over the course of any year, all of the electricity we use. In other
words, not only did we spare the environment the huge pollution loads from our
profligate behavior, we could envision having no net environmental impact at
all. It turns out that such an investment is intimately tied to the looming power
distribution “crisis” in the US (and maybe to an overall energy “crisis” as
opposed to a distribution problem alone). We’ll take a look at the pluses and
minuses (it’s mostly pluses) of installing PV panels on your home or at your
small business, but first let’s get an understanding of how we make, use and
waste electricity in the US. If you want to skip the next chapter, the major lesson
can be summed up in one line: we sure don’t want to see billions of people in
developing countries adopt our wasteful ways when it comes to making and
using electrical power. If they do, we’re in for a world of hurt.
33
Chapter 4: Electricity Production and Use in the US – and hopefully nowhere else
According to the US Department of Energy, the total US production of electricity
in 2001 was 3,800 billion kilo-watt hours. That means for a population of 300
million people, we consume about 12,600 kilo-watt hours per person every year .
Another way of looking at it is that since there are about 9,000 hours in a year,
each of us is continuously using about 1.3 kilowatts (the equivalent of a typical
electric space heater running all of the time – 24 hours a day, 365 days a year).
But of course, most of that electricity is not used “directly” by individuals (say by
turning on the light switch at home), but is roughly allocated as follows:
• Industrial use: 50.4% (about 3190 kw-hrs per person per year in the US)
• Commercial use: 24.3% (about 3063 kw-hrs per person)
• Residential use: 25.3% (about 3186 kw-hrs per person).
You may not believe that you are the recipient of the benefits of over 10,000 kilo-
watt hours of electricity and the 5 tons of coal it takes to make this amount of
juice17. But the data can be used to quickly check to see if it comports with your
own households’ electricity consumption. Let’s do the computation for
Albuquerque to see if the latter figure is in the right ball park (otherwise, we
might not believe it!) The average Albuquerque household of 2.7 people uses
something like 9,000 kw-hrs per year (directly). Note that 3,186 kw-hrs * 2.7 =
8601 kw-hrs. That’s pretty close to what the DOE says, and probably a bit less
than the national average because we have milder climate here than in other
places in the country where one would expect higher per capita electricity
squandering.
Now ignoring the commercial and industrial waste of electricity (we’ll get to this
later), let’s explore where electricity is used within a typical home. In order to
change bad habits, you’ve got to identify where the bad habits lay.
There are a couple of important (and, in my view, disturbing) trends for energy
use in the US that goes beyond our ever increasing importation of petroleum.
Specifically, natural gas consumption is rising at about 4 or 5% a year, primarily
because it is the “preferred” fuel for new electricity generating plants (no one
wants coal-burning plants because they are correctly perceived as dirty; and, no
one wants a nuclear plant because of the incorrect perception that having one
nearby is a dangerous potential source of radiation). This is a dangerous trends
as natural gas is becoming increasingly expensive and the historical relief in
prices during the summertime is disappearing, precisely because that is when
national electric demand is highest (for cooling buildings, including during the
16 hours a day when they are unoccupied – only in America!).
17
There’s a wonderful website called “How Stuff works” that you can find at:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/question481.htm for a detailed breakdown of the
required amount of coal to burn a 100 watt light bulb for a year. Its then easy to
extrapolate that amount of coal (a surprising 357 pounds!) into the four tons needed to
make 9,000 kw-hrs of electricity.
34
Here’s a nice illustration from the Department of Energy’s “Energy Information

Administration”18 (where all kinds of fascinating -- and terrifying -- energy use
data can be found) that tells us where our national electricity abuse really comes
from: the “primary fuels” that turn the turbines and power the boilers that make
the electrons that conveniently flow through the wires of your house whenever
you want them:
Amazingly enough, about 50% or so of all of the electricity generated in the US

comes from burning coal. Why? Because it is abundant and perceived to be
“cheap”. I use the word “perceived” because when we burn coal we put the
maximal amount of CO2 per kw-hr into the atmosphere. The chemists reading
this book understand this easily: when coal is “burned”, it is really combined
with oxygen to make CO2. In the process of forming the bonds between carbon
(99.999% of coal) and oxygen, energy is released as heat (which we see as a
flame). No chemical bonds are broken (except between oxygen atoms that come
from the air).
Nuclear power produces about 20% of all of the electricity in the US. It generates
no CO2 because there are no chemical reactions involved in the reactor. Rather,
atoms are literally split at their core (the “nucleus”), releasing heat. Of course,
there is a lot of radioactive waste created, but at least it is all in one spot. As
you’ll see in a minute, when we burn coal, we release many tons of radioactive
18
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/mer/elect.html
35
material into the atmosphere every year - out of sight and out of mind (and we
may be out of our minds to be doing this. I’ll give you the facts below and you
can decide).
It’s interesting to note that even though there hasn’t been a single new nuclear
plant built in the US for over 20 years, and even though our total electricity
production is increasing, nuclear power is holding its own in terms of percentage
of electricity generated. This has been made possible by much more efficient
running of the existing nuclear plants including the reduction of the time that
plants have to be shut down for refueling. In addition, the existing nuclear
plants that were originally planned for dismantlement after 30 years have been
granted licensing extensions for, on average, an additional 10 years or so. New
nuclear energy should be considered in the mix of future electricity resources, in
my view. The opposition to it is mostly based on politics and very little on
science; I’ll comment more on this later.
In recent years, natural gas has become a much more popular fuel to burn for
electricity, and the chart above shows that clearly. The vast majority of new
electricity generating plants built in the US in the past 5 years burn this fuel,
largely accounting for the doubling of natural gas prices over the same period of
time. Natural gas (NG) is heavily used as an industrial “feed stock” chemical as
well: most of the fertilizer in the US is derived in large part from NG, as are
plastics, medications and a whole host of other valuable chemicals. Many people
think that NG shouldn’t be burned for power and heat as this is an economically
wasteful use of the raw material.
But making matters even worse is that US electricity consumption continues to

grow at a rapid rate. The DOE’s Energy Information Agency web site tells the
tale with a simple chart:
36
(The “Industrial” line in the graph above represents in part the “co-generation”
done at large manufacturing plants where plant operators can capture steam or
other waste heat from industrial processes and use it for electricity production.
It’s a nice idea, but at least at the moment it is a trivial contribution to total
electricity generation in the US).
Roughly speaking, except in times of economic recession (as in 2000-2001 with

the slight, but perceptible “dip” in the graph above) electricity consumption is
increasing at about 2 – 3% per year. That might not sound like much but if you
consider that the total use is something like 4 trillion kilo-watt hours per year, a
2% increase works out to 80 billion kw-hrs per year. We’ll see how hard it is to
find even that much new electricity in a moment.
Because there is a huge lobby of anti-nuclear groups, natural gas is probably

going to be the “fuel of choice” for making most of the “new” electricity (that is,
the increase in demand) in the US. That, in turn means that NG use for electricity
will increase at about 5 – 8% a year. Regrettably, the US is already a net importer
of NG and will become more dependent on outside sources as time goes on
unless something changes. And, you can probably guess where most of that NG
comes from.
Well them, what might that “something” be? There are only two possible
answers: either we decrease our use of electricity (conservation) or increase
production from other sources. Many “environmentalists”19 believe that
19
I have intentionally put this term in quotes to make a sarcastic – but truthful – point. The vast
majority of people who call themselves “environmentalists” have no understanding of the
magnitude of energy use in the US and the primary sources used to make electricity. Thus, they
tend to over-value the potential contribution of renewable energy as a large segment of our
37
renewables can do the latter. The problem is that even the increase in US demand
(let alone the existing demand load) is so huge as to swamp even the most
optimistic assumptions about how many windfarms or solar panels we can build
and install.
Let’s take an example: in New Mexico, the local power company (Public Service
Company of New Mexico) in collaboration with Florida Power and Light has just
finished the installation of a 200 Mega-watt (peak production capacity) windfarm
in the high plains, about 200 miles east of Albuquerque and it is just about the
largest windfarm in the US. How much electricity does this windfarm make in a
year? The calculation is easy: from data published by the National Weather
Service, we know that the wind blows about 35% of time, on average, in and
around Tucumcari, NM where the windfarm is located. And, since there are
about 9,000 hours in a year we find that:
200 * 1 million watts * 9,000 hours * 35% = 600 million kw-hrs per year
Looked at another way, the US’ largest windfarm installation in 2003 makes just
under 1% of the increase in demand for electricity during that same year. Overall,
there were about 15 similarly sized wind-farms installed in 2003 in North
America. Thus, only 15% of new demand was met by renewable resources
(photovoltaic was, unfortunately, several orders of magnitude less contributory
due to costs). So even if you think that windfarms and other renewable energy
resources are a good way to make electricity (and I happen to believe this), they
aren’t going to make much of a dent in fossil fuel burning as the primary source
for our electricity.
The alert reader will have also noticed that hydroelectric power is completely
tapped out in the US, and due to drought – particularly in the northwest US and
some of Canada – its contribution has actually dwindled somewhat in the past
few years. There is no more hydroelectric energy to exploit in the US, and its
advertised attractiveness as a “clean” source of energy maybe a bit overstated
(considering the impact on fish, the fishing industry and even methane gas
production due to rotting plants that are drowned in rising reservoirs every
year).
electricity generation capacity. Make no mistake: I believe that renewable energy should be used
where possible (in fact, I’ve invested in it myself), but it will be a long, long time before
renewables make a significant dent in the US electricity generation mix.
Even worse, many self-appointed environmentalists oppose the building of windfarms (by far the
most productive, efficient use of renewable sources to make electrons) when its in their own
backyard. For example, Walter Cronkite and Robert Kennedy Jr. – “environmental activitists” if
there ever were any – are leading a lobby against the construction of an offshore windfarm at the
site of the single best wind resource in the US: off Martha’s vineyard in Massachusetts. Oh well,
so much for renewables in the most liberal state in the country; let someone else build the
windfarm.
38
Put another way, electricity generation from renewable resources can be a way of
sparing our increased consumption of natural gas for this purpose. But, it won’t
mitigate it by much.
So to summarize the electricity production pickle in the US: demand is increasing

by nearly 100 billion kw-hrs per year. No one wants coal burning plants in their
community, and there's no more hydro-electric power to exploit. Political
lobbies have nixed just about any possibility of nuclear power plants being
expanded or new ones being built. That leaves natural gas (which is increasingly
expensive) and renewables (which just can't catch up fast enough to do the job).
Without new “primary” fuels to make electricity, there's only one refuge:
conservation.
We've already seen how easy it is for residential utility users to cut back on
electricity use. It isn't very sexy (everyone would prefer some magic like
perpetual motion machines, nuclear fusion, and other miracles that are unlikely
to materialize and save us from having to wisely use energy) but it's easy,
inexpensive and available at your fingertips (and in your checkbook but with a
good return on investment) now. Can the same thing be done with business and
industrial consumption?
The answer is: unequivocally, yes. Until recently, I worked at a DOE national
laboratory (Sandia Labs, in Albuqueruqe) and I learned that there isn't a more
wasteful industrial site on the planet (ironically enough, owned by the
Department of Energy!) I saw large office buildings, huge laboratory and
production machines, auditoriums and libraries that were heated, cooled, and lit
even when the lab was closed for weekends and long holidays. This was no
small matter. Sandia's electricity bill (at discounted rates, no less) was $1.2
million per month or about $15 million per year (roughly 273 million kw-hrs or
about 1% of all of the electricity used in the entire state of New Mexico). Yikes!
So, I took it upon myself to start turning off lights at the end of the day
(particularly in hallways and bathrooms that weren't likely to be populated until
the next workig day); I turned off computer screens that were left on in my
building of about 250 people and left pre-printed notes suggesting that people
make a point of looking around their work areas when they left for the day (or
better yet, when they left for a 2 week vacation!) and turn off unneeded copiers,
fax machines, coffee makers, lights, radios, clocks, computers and a whole host of
other things that were doing nothing more than turning electricity into heat
(which further increased the heating load on the building, driving up electricity
use).
I talked with the building manager – probably the most important ignored guy
in the whole lab complex – and asked if he'd turn back the air conditioning on
the weekends in the summer and the heat in the winter. He agreed, and even
took it upon himself to look for places in our four story building where – believe
it or not – some offices along the same hallway were alternately being heated and
cooled simultaneously because someone turned up a thermostat too high or set it
too low.
39
Now no one likes being told what to do (even if it’s the right thing to do, the
economic thing to do, and the environmentally responsible thing to do), so I tried
to do it all with a sense of humor. I called myself “The Energy Nag”, and once a
month or so, I sent around a short e-mail newsletter summarizing our progress.
It was astounding; so astounding in fact that the management could hardly

believe it and agreed (easily) to reward everyone with a buffet breakfast once a
month. We saved over 50,000 kw-hrs every month in just one moderately large
building. That totaled to over $33,000 per year (remember this is the saving in
just one building that housed only about 250 workers) and, more important in my
view, more than 350 tons of CO2 not dumped into the atmosphere.
The “Nag” caught on. Other people started doing the same thing in other
buildings. Sandia's energy consumption started to fall – for the first time in its
history. But there was really nothing magic about it. There was so much waste
that saving energy was easy – a 30% savings was a simple matter.
The idea was simple: there's lots of “low hanging fruit” when it comes to energy
conservation – at home, at work, and in industrial plants and government offices.
When you think about it, 30% buys us about 10 – 15 years of electricity
consumption growth (at 2% a year) and probably about the same for natural gas
and other 'primary' fuels. That's a lot better than building new fossil fuel
burning plants and power lines to distribute all of that energy.
At this point, you're probably asking: so why don't we all get together and 'just
do it?' I believe it’s because of a combination of two things: cheap energy (and
it's cheap because it is heavily subsidized in the US as I'll demonstrate later) and
intetia (otherwise known as laziness, the nature state of most of us). Because
carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases are colorless (and generally
odorless) don't see (or smell) any damage from our profligate use of energy (yet)
or what we do see (such as war to protect oil sources) is something we'd rather
ignore or dismiss as happening to someone else, somewhere else. That's pretty
selfish thinking in my view and if you think the same, now you know that you
can do something about it – and maybe have a little fun and satisfaction when
you do – in your own homes and workplaces.
Even though we've covered a great many details about energy use, we haven't
thought about transportation-related consumption. And, for the moment at
least, that boils down to one commodity: oil. But unlike coal, uranium, natural
gas (mostly) and renewable energy sources, our own oil resources are no longer
abudant (and they are declining rapidly). More than 50% of US oil comes from
overseas, and from some pretty unpleasant places. And, several hundred million
newly wealthy Chinese and Indians in the roaring economies of Asia are about to
purchase automobiles and burn lots of gasoline in the process. It doesn't make
for a happy picture as we'll see in the next chapter.
40
Chapter 5: Energy Use in Transportation
Most people (well, many, anyway) have a pretty good idea about the mileage
they get in their cars. That's because they have to go to the pump an average of
once a week and shell out money to power their 15,000 miles of driving (per car)
per year. But, what most people don't realize is just how much energy they are
using to go down the block, around town or across the country.
A gallon of gasoline (about 7 pound of liquid) contains a huge amount of energy:

about 125,000 BTU or the same amount of energy contained 40 kilowatt hours of
electricity. If you drive an average, 20 mpg car or small truck in America, the
engine is capable of generating 200 horsepower (or more) when you slam down
on the accelerator. That’s 150 kilowatts of power, or enough to light 1,500
standard sized (and very inefficient) incandescent light bults (or, if you prefer,
more than 7,000 compact fluroescent light bulbs!). Fifteen thousand miles of
driving will consume about 700 gallons of gasoline over the course of a year, and
set you back more than $1,500 – not including the depreciation in value of your
automobile or SUV. You'll put out about 8 tons of CO2 from the tailpipe (about
as much as your home's share of CO2 from electricity use and burning natural
gas), and soot, oxides of nitrogen and sulfur (they're greenhouse gases too).
And your tires wear out by turning into invisible aerosols of rubber that people
then get to breathe in (I can't be sure, but that doesn't seem like a very healthy
thing to do). As noted many times, we ignore all of this atmospheric pollution
because we can't see it (unless you are behind a diesel-burning truck or car, stuck
in traffic somewhere).
If you do most of your driving in urban settings, you'll burn about 20% of the gas
in your tank while waiting in traffic jams and stop lights, or crawling along at 6
miles an hour (even though your car can do well over 100 mph) because all of
those cylinders in your oversized 4 liter engine have to be fed.
Put another way, going back and forth to work in just one day consumes enough
energy to light your home for two weeks (if you use energy-saving compact
fluroescent bulbs), power your refrigerator for a month, or heat a 2,000 square
foot home for a good part of a cold winter's day (if the house is well insulated).
There is one heck of a lot of energy in a gallon of gasoline, and that means one
enormous amount of carbon dioxide pollution for every gallon consumed
(around 20 pounds of CO2, in fact).
But that's not all. Since more than half of that gasoline comes from imported oil
there are US Navy ships protecting the sea lanes in unfriendly places, and every
once in a while a few thousand soldiers killed or permanently disabled going to
war to protect the sources of oil in the Middle East. About as often, a giant oil
tanker will collide with another ship, get caught on some rocks, or sink in bad
weather dumping millions of gallons of gooey crude into the sea and onto the
beach. Don't ever think that oil isn't subsidized; it is through the defense budget,
and through the economic “externalities” (for us laymen, that means “things we
can't directly see or feel”): increased respiratory disease in children in urban
areas, edifices crumbling from acidified rain that falls on cities, and untold
41
wasted hours in traffic that could otherwise be put to more productive use or
time spent with family and friends.
My guess is that the likelihood of conflict over oil is going to increase, if only
because of economic growth in China, India and much of the rest of Asia where
newly rich consumers are clamoring for cars. Last year China increased its oil
imports by 30%, and is set to import yet another 40% more this year compared to
last. China now imports more oil than Japan (formerly the second largest
importer behind the US). India will soon start doing the same, and most
observers believe that if we continue to have a transportation infrastructure
completely dependent on petroleum that China and India will surpass the US'
use of oil within the next decade or so.
None of this is to say that oil will run out anytime soon. But the costs of
recovering it, protecting the sea lanes where it is shipped, and propping up
governments that we'd otherwise wish away but for their fossil fuel resources are
rising quickly. And, it’s a very good bet that every time a thuggish dictator gets
overthrown or a “royal family” is assassinated, oil prices will shoot up. Because
just about all U.S. transportation is propelled by oil— with almost two-thirds of
the supply provided by imports— the prospects for severe economic impacts are
higher than at anytime since the oil crisis of 1973.
But there may be an answer to a big part of our energy worries: advanced
"heavy" hybrid vehicles. These are an extension of the already successful "light"
hybrids that have been running around highways in Japan and the United States
for six years, but with a twist. A new class of batteries results in much more
energy storage and no compromise in performance, while providing reductions
of 75 percent or more in gasoline consumption. The energy replacing inefficiently
burned gasoline comes from the electric grid.
Professor Andy Frank of the Mechanical Engineering Department at the

University of California-Davis has been building hybrids for 30 years. But over
the past 10 years, he and his students have turned out heavy hybrids in the styles
and sizes that most Americans insist on: large sedans and SUVs. Frank's Mercury
Sable, Ford Explorer and Chevrolet Suburban all go 60 miles— and at highway
speeds— on electricity alone before needing a recharge from a typical 110 volt
outlet (the batteries charge fully overnight). That's more "electric-only" range
than the daily commutes of 80 percent of U.S. drivers. When the batteries go low,
a small gas engine keeps them at about 20 percent of peak charge. And, when
combined with the mechanical, continuously variable transmission that Frank
has perfected, the gas engine maintains cruising speeds of up to 80 mph while
the batteries provide an additional 200 horsepower for the brief times needed for
passing or hill-climbing.
To the driver, aside from the noise reduction in the passenger compartment,
there is no perceptible difference in handling or acceleration. Even energy that is
normally lost as heat during braking is recaptured in the battery packs. It takes
about 15 kilowatt-hours to charge the batteries (about a dollar's worth of
electricity), and electric motors are six or seven times as efficient as internal
42
combustion engines. Thus, the fuel costs are about 1.6 cents per mile (as
compared to 7 cents per mile with gasoline prices at $2.00 in a sedan, and 10
cents per mile for an SUV).
Don't worry too much about where the electricity will come from. Even if
tomorrow 10 percent of all cars were plug-in hybrids, only about 1 percent of
U.S. electricity generation would be needed to power them. Multiple surveys
have shown that most (though not all) Americans would love to have such a car,
if only for the added benefit of being able to avoid going to the gas station every
week.
So why can't you go out and buy one now? American car companies don't want
to take the short-term risk. Professor Frank and many economists note that
because consumers would be willing to pay a few thousand extra dollars for a
heavy hybrid, manufacturers could make a profit on these vehicles, but not as
much profit as making the same product that they always have. Battery costs are
still high, but will come down quickly if hundreds of thousands of packs are
made a year, allowing car manufacturers to recover their investment.
Perhaps this is the perfect situation for a temporary federal subsidy: a two or three
year $2,000 tax credit for purchasing a hybrid (of any body size and style) that
gets at least 60 miles on a single electric charge before the gas engine kicks in.
This should be sufficient incentive for car companies to get over their risk-
aversion and for battery-makers to compete for the large, new market. It will also
stimulate research into yet better (and cheaper) batteries, making possible plug-
in hybrids with ranges of several hundred miles, eventually eliminating the need
for the fossil-fuel burning engines altogether. The money to pay for it can come
from scaling-back the fed's oversold hydrogen fuel-cell initiative or adding a few
pennies to the tax on gasoline. Or, we can engage in business-as-usual and just
wait for the Japanese to do it, watching as they capture another lucrative
market— the one made a sure bet by several hundred million Chinese and
Indians who— like us— want to drive cars, too.
But, for the moment we don’t heavy hybrids (although we love our Toyota Prius
and it really does get nearly 50 miles per gallon in town and on the highway), so
there isn’t much in the way of alternatives for driving – at least for people (like
me) who have come to expect near-perfect reliability and faultless starting of our
cars on a cold winter day. The US Congress has seen fit to subsidize the
production of alcohol – almost exclusively through the fermentation of starch or
sugar-rich crops like corn and sugarcane, but even after nearly 10 years of
subsidy, the ethanol industry is producing a mere 4.5 billion gallons of ethanol
for transportation use a year (about 2% or less of the US consumption). Corn is
also very resource intensive (my wife’s family farms corn in Minnesota, so I’ve
gotten many chances to see this up close and personal), requiring fertilizer (made
from fossil fuels) and pesticides (also made from fossil fuels) and lots of fossil
fuel for harvesting and transporting the finished product to the fermentation
facility (where once again lots of fossil fuels are required to heat the mash to
appropriate temperature and carry out filtration and other finishing processes).
In the end, there probably is a net gain of energy out (in the form of ethanol)
43
compared to energy in (in multiple forms including the fossil fuels already noted
and electricity – which in turn requires, for the most part, fossil fuel to generate).
But, in reality what we are really doing is taking some fossil fuel that we have a
lot of (coal, for making electricity), adding some additional energy content from
the photosynthesis of the plants that make starches and sugar, and getting a
transportation fuel out (ethanol). It’s probably worth doing, but there is a lot of
debate about it.
There is some promise from a new process that will ferment just about anything
with cellulose in it (the major building material of all plants, but difficult to
ferment into alcohol) based on a genetically engineered organism that can break
down cellulose (which is really an organic polymer) into its constituent parts and
then into ethanol. However, it is too early to know if this approach will be cost-
effective (although I am hoping it will be). If it is, one can envision planting not
energy-intensive crops like corn but easy to cultivate and harvest grasses (like
switchgrass and other high-cellulose, low starch plants) that might provide as
much as 20 or 25% of our transportation fuel needs.
But, no matter how you slice it (or how much of an optimist you may be), we’ll
probably still need a lot of oil for cars until heavy hybrids come along that will
enable us to use electricity to do most of our driving. It might make a lot of sense
to install photovoltaics or other renewable electricity generation systems to
power those cars, and we’ll finally get out of our oil-importation dependencies.20
In the meantime, if you’re in the market for a car, consider one of the light
hybrids now available, and every once in a while, carpool with friends, take the
bus, walk or ride a bicycle to work, and plan your energy intensive shopping
chores to minimize the time you spend waiting in traffic. It makes no sense to
burn a gallon of gasoline to save a few cents on a quart of milk or a slab of meat
at a grocery store 5 miles away (10 miles round trip, and maybe in gridlock)
when a nearby store within walking distance has the same thing at a slightly
higher price.
20
Many people believe that “hydrogen is the answer” to our transportation fuel constraints. The
subject (and acrimonious debate) is beyond the scope of this book (for this edition, anyway), but
the bottom line is this: hydrogen is not a primary fuel source as there is very little hydrogen on
the earth that isn’t bound up to something else (like oil, natural gas, or water). Hydrogen has to
be made (and that’s rather energy intensive), compressed (that’s VERY energy intensive) and
transported (that’s almost impossible in sufficient quantities to make much of a difference). But,
maybe clever solutions will be found. Then all we have to do is perfect fuel cells to use it and
make them reliable enough and small enough to fit conveniently into a vehicle. That is challenge
all of its own. I’m not holding my breath.
44
Chapter 6: Heating and cooling
Over the course of a year, those homes that use natural gas or propane for
heating and cooking expend something like 800 therms (or 800,000,000 BTUs)
annually. Because natural gas (and propane) have a lot more hydrogen in them
than carbon, the process of burning releases much less carbon dioxide into the air
than burning coal or wood. Indeed, this is the primary reason that NG has
become so popular for generating electricity, along with relative ease of
transporting the material (there is an extensive natural gas pipeline system in the
US) and its good safety record. But, that’s the same reason that the cost is going
up (it has nearly tripled over the past 3 years), and starting in about 1995 the US
became a net importer of NG for the first time in history. Since gas tends to be
co-located with oil (in fact, in many places the gas is “flared” or burned on site –
fortunately, that wasteful practice is stopping), you can guess that the NG we are
importing is from the same unsavory places where we get our oil: equatorial
Africa, Venezuela and the Middle East.
There is no question that home heating costs will continue to go up (unless

global warming really is real; then home cooling costs will go up), and it would
be nice if there was a system that could do both, with minimal or no fossil fuel
input. And, it turns out that there is: it is called the “Double-Play”, a system for
radiative cooling in the summer and radiative heating in the winter developed by
Steve Baer of Zomeworks, a famous and long extant Albuquerque solar-power
company. Baer is a thinker, tinkerer and probably a genuine genius. He’s a jack
of many trades, abhors subsidies for any kind of energy and gets real things
designed, built and installed. The first large prototype of this system, installed in
the studio (a converted garage, actually) of a local Albuquerque architect is best
described with the help of a couple of pictures:
45
This picture shows the homeowner sitting in his studio, and behind him are
water filled, vertically oriented PVC pipes. They are connected to a similar
arrangement of pipes at the other end of the room. You can envision that if the
garage were being built from the ground out, rather than retrofitted that the
pipes might be in the walls themselves or even in the concrete slab making up
the floor.
Now the pipes are further connected to a set of black metal and rubber panels on
the roof:
46
So, what’s going on here? In the summer, the water in the pipes absorbs heat
from the room, completely passively – there are no moving parts and no energy
input other than the heat generated by the sun – and they thus keep the room
cool (you’ll see how cool in a moment).
And here’s the amazing part: at night time, the warm water in the pipes (around
75 degrees) rises up into the radiators on the roof; the radiators are nothing more
than metal sheets with small water pipes running through them. As any
physicist will tell you, the night sky – particularly in the west and in high
mountainous areas – is very cold, much colder in fact than the surrounding air.
This explains why frost can form on automobiles and other good heat radiators
on a fall evening even though the air temperature never gets anywhere close to
32 degrees. And, in the same way, the panels on the roof in the picture above
radiate much of the heat in the water out “into the universe”. When the water in
the panels cools, it falls down into the pipes in the room, forcing lighter, warmer
water back up into the panels. By early morning, the temperature in the big
white pipes is down to about 60 degrees or even less.
Here is a graph of real data taken from the house above during the very, very hot
months of July and August in Albuquerque:
47
The light blue line shows the actual air temperature and you can see that many
days are above 90 degrees. The red line shows the temperature inside the
portion of the house that is cooled conventionally (that is, by using lots of
electricity to run pumps and fans). The black line shows the temperature in the
garage-studio which is cooled without any energy expenditure using Steve Baer’s
“coolth” cells. Even on the hottest days of the brutal Albuquerque summer, the
temperature in the studio rarely gets about 75 degrees (comfortable indeed in our
low humidity environment). No noise, no electricity consumption – just
wonderful “coolth”!
In the winter, the system is run backwards with the help of a small electric pump
that forces the warm water down from the panels during the day into the room
pipes. The pipes warm up and keep the room warm. Only on very cloudy days
(a rarity in the southwest in the winter) is any supplemental heating necessary.
Amazingly enough, the double-play system works in this 350 square foot room
even though it is rather poorly insulated (as is the case with most garages). In a
well-sealed room, its performance will doubtless be better.
Innovations like this one derive from Baer’s commitment to passive, simple
systems taking advantage of natural daily cycles. While there is no purchase
price yet on the system, Mr. Baer estimates that the cost is about $5 per square
foot, adding little to the basic construction cost of a home and returning its value
in a few years from savings in heating and cooling bills.
48
Chapter 7: Going to extremes
After we made the changes in our rather wasteful energy consumption, we
wondered: what next? Clearly we’d squeezed out the profligate waste and, after
all, since we do enjoy the many conveniences of electricity and natural gas we
know that energy use will never, ever go to zero.
There is a mantra from the pioneers of the Internet that goes like this: “think
globally, act locally”. In other words, when trying to think about your own
environment, think about the whole environment. My wife and I thought it
applied nicely to the general goal of moderating our own energy use .
We realized that there are problems beyond pollution that accompany energy
generation and use, that is that local problems caused much problems over much
larger geographic scales. In particular, in our part of the country, the long
distance transmission lines that bring electric power into Albuquerque from
about 200 miles away were completely “full” just about all of the time. Literally,
there is almost no more capacity to carry electricity into Albuquerque from the
big power plants to our north and at some times of the year (the summer, in
particular) the tranmission lines become so hot from carrying their maximal
capacity that the wires literally expand and sag. On several occasions, these hot
wires have sagged so low to the ground that they’ve touched off brush fires that
completely destroyed a section of the electricity system, while causing blackouts
in huge swaths of New Mexico. The grid system is stressed just about
everywhere in the US and is poised to fail with just tiny perturbations including
lightning strikes and bad decision-making at the power company. It was
probably the latter that was the final straw leading to the biggest blackout in
history in New York, Pennsylvania and New England in the hot summer of 2003.
So, it became pretty obvious that Albuquerque was suffering from a problem
plaguing much of the rest of the country and its electricity infrastructure:
insufficient transmission capacity. Further, since it virtually impossible to get
past community objects to build new powerlines, this “constraint” is likely to
remain in place for the indefinite future21.
The solution we – and many others before us – hit upon is “distributed”

generation; that is, making electricity near its point of consumption. But needless
to say, we didn’t want to be burning fossil fuels and running turbines in our
backyard. Instead, because of New Mexico’s abundant sunshine, we decided to
put photovoltaic panels on our roof. We could have done other, less expensive
things. For example, we might have put a solar hot water heater up instead, but
21
I’m probably not alone in noting that most people love the lifestyle that abundant
electricity permits, but most folks will complain mightily about proposals for a new
powerline in the communities. They complain even more loudly about a generation
source nearby (coal, nuclear, and perhaps less so for a natural gas burning plant), yet
complain loudest of all when the power goes out. Just as ex-Governor Grey Davis of
California; this scenario probably cost him his job even though he tried to get new power
plants built or force conservation via price increases.
49
we recognized that by far the most efficient thing to do was to just turn down our
water heater. Our gas bill is, at most, three dollars a month for making hot
water, so it didn’t make much sense to spend a few thousand dollars on a solar
hot water system that would be producing the hot water in the middle of the
day, when we need and use hot water in the early morning for showers.
Physicists will tell you that electricity is a “highly organized” form of energy.
That means that, unlike say the heat from a candle, it can be easily converted into
other forms of energy with a very high efficiency. For example, when you plug
in a small electric room heater (they’re about 1500 watts or roughly 5,000 BTUs),
essentially 100% of the electricity is converted into heat. The catch is that the
electricity itself is expensive and was generated in the first place mostly from
burning coal or natural gas (efficiencies of about 30 – 40%; flames are rather
“disorganized” forms of energy and aren’t converted efficiently into other types
of energy like visible light or electricity).
Thus, we reasoned that if we installed PV panels on our home’s roof, we’d

accomplish several things: first, we’d be generating electricity right where its
consumed, so there was no need for transmission infrastructure and there would
be no “losses” from long distance transmission22; second, we’d displace about 4
tons of CO2 production from our local power plants; third, we might generate
some interest from our neighbors in energy efficiency and might get them to
install a PV system of their own; and fourth, we could sell any excess electricity
to the local power company and reclaim it when we needed it. Since electricity
is, indeed, the most flexible and convenient of energy carriers, we decided that
all of these characteristics added up to a wise investment.
PV panels are made from high-grade silicon (essentially the scrap silicon from
the computer and semi-conductor industry), and silicon is what makes up sand
(pretty stable stuff, no?) Highly purified silicon has the peculiar property that
when it is struck by light of certain frequencies, electrons in the material are
energized and will flow through wires to do what more conventionally
energized electrons will do. In other words, silicon can directly generate
electricity.
Silicon PV panels aren’t particularly efficient: only about 8% of the sunlight that
hits them gets turned into electrical energy23. But, in very sunny areas (like most
22
Electricity transmission losses are between 10 and 15% of all of the electricity
produced at the powerplant, depending on the time of the year and the distance the wires
span from point of production to consumption. This amounts to some 800 billion kw-hrs
per year – more than enough to power New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago
continuously.
23
Solar panel manufacturers often quote efficiencies greater than this, but that’s because
they test the panels under ideal conditions in the laboratory. The most important factor
(other than the sunlight, of course) that determines solar panel performance is the
temperature of the panels, and they easy get over 140 degrees on a hot sunny, summer’s
50
of the western US), that’s hardly a problem. More than 2,000 kilowatt-hours of
sunlight energy falls on every square meter of the earth in our part of the US
every year. That means with about 14 square meters of panels, and allowing for
losses from reflection, clouds, and other inherent unknowables, we calculated
that we’d generate over 2,500 kilo-watt hours of electricity over the course of a
year – a bit more than we actually use. And, our experience has proven those
estimations to be just about exactly on target.
A single solar panel (there are many brands; we chose a local manufacturer
called Photowatt) looks like a blue piece of glass. Here’s one sitting outside of
our garage in March of this year, awaiting installation:
day. In the laboratory, panels are tested at a cool 75 degrees – hardly a realistic
simulation of outdoor conditions.
51
Obviously, to get the most sunlight, the panels should point to the south and it
just so happened that one portion of our roof was just about perfectly oriented24.
It looked like this before we started installation (you can see the Sandia
mountains in the background to the east of our house, so the southern sky is to
the right in this picture; that’s where the sun is of course):
Now silicon PV panels generate direct current (DC) and not alternating current
(AC) which is what your lightbulbs and appliances use. In order to convert DC
to AC you need a box called an inverter. There are a couple of companies that
make inverters for residential use, and since we wanted to sell our excess
electricity back to the local power company, we chose one from a company called
SunnyBoy. It looks like this (without the cover, so you can see the innards):
24
There are a number of very easy to use web-sites that help you to calculate the
production of a solar panel system based on your approximate location, tilt of the panels
and direction off of true south at which they might be oriented. One good one is:
http://solar.anu.edu.au/Sun/SunPath/. It includes a program that literally shows you the
path of the sun, and how your electricity generation will vary from month to month.
52

Saving Energy Without Derision :: One Household's Real (And Reasonably Painless) Experience in Energy Conservation

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Comments welcomed at: zalan8587@qwest.net

Saving Energy without derision*∗:

Practical Energy conservation experience in

The author welcomes comments, and plans on continuously updating and

Saving Energy without derision:

Addendum (in process):

Electricity is typically measured in kilowatt-hours which is a shorthand way of

Let’s think about that kilowatt-hour (abbreviated “kw-hr”). That’s enough

Ignoring the various surcharges and other complications of utility billing in

Totals 0.99 11.94

US Energy Mix by primary

Renewables (solar and wind) 2.3%

We can check this calculation by looking at measurements of world-wide CO2

Billion metric tons of Carbon Dioxide

Residential energy consumption accounts for approximately 33% of all energy

Albuquerque is, in many ways, an “average” American city. Median household

Make no mistake about it, energy use is a big expenditure of middle-class

Income Allocation: Typical American

Food + Dining + Clothing

Disposition of Disposable Income in a typical American family

Food + Dining + Clothing

Chapter 2: Some easy, practical actions we all can take

First, electricity use over the past few years:

Total CO2 (tons) for average Albuquerque

Electricity per day per month per year

Airconditioning and cooling 8.0 242 2,920

Laundry - Drying 2.3 69 834

TOTALS 29.3 886 10,689

Where does all that electricity go?

Electricity Use in the Zelicoff House:

• To cut back on Electricity use:

• And for cutting back on natural gas or propane

Heating (including blower fans) 15 61

Airconditioning and cooling 242 30

Chargers and Small Appliances 30 3

TOTALS (in kw-hrs) 886 198

Total Cost per year in $ $861.09 $192.88

Here’s a nice illustration from the Department of Energy’s “Energy Information

Amazingly enough, about 50% or so of all of the electricity generated in the US

But making matters even worse is that US electricity consumption continues to

Roughly speaking, except in times of economic recession (as in 2000-2001 with

Because there is a huge lobby of anti-nuclear groups, natural gas is probably

So to summarize the electricity production pickle in the US: demand is increasing

It was astounding; so astounding in fact that the management could hardly

A gallon of gasoline (about 7 pound of liquid) contains a huge amount of energy:

Professor Andy Frank of the Mechanical Engineering Department at the

There is no question that home heating costs will continue to go up (unless

The solution we – and many others before us – hit upon is “distributed”

Thus, we reasoned that if we installed PV panels on our home’s roof, we’d

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