Lowering my Energy Use Step 1: Where is it going now

I recently had an energy audit done by a company who shall remain nameless (their service after the audit has been embarrassing). Despite their post-visit incompetence, I did learn a few things, and I started a project to evaluate where my energy goes. Here's a quick summary*:

First: Yes I am ashamed of our electricity usage. I have been trying to change the family behavior but it is a losing battle. I'll not go into detail because I value the relationships with my wife and children. I suspect that in the fall, when two go off to college, our electricity usage will drop dramatically and we'll see a bit of a drop in gas usage.

Second: Notice that our heating energy usage is three times our electricity energy usage (in BTUs) yet the cost is about the same. That's right, I purchased more than three times the energy from the gas company but it cost me about the same as my electricity. In other words, electricity per unit energy is more than three times the cost of natural gas. (If there were an efficient way to generate electricity with gas, I would consider doing it.)

Knowing these numbers, I can now begin to evaluate options for energy reduction because I can determine the costs and benefits of many different actions and pick the most effective ones. For example, I now know that every kilowatt-hour I save is worth about 11% of a therm (11,000 BTUs). Or every 100,000 BTUs of gas (1 therm) I save is worth just over 87 kilowatt-hours.

What direction will I go?

Electricity: After switching all of our light bulbs to compact fluorescent and upgrading to Energy Star appliances, the next major leap on the electricity use reduction is behavior change or kicking out some of my family. Since I have two starting college in the fall, kicking out is easy (though expensive). As I've found over the years however, getting people to change behavior is not.

Gas Usage: Cooking is a relatively small portion of our gas usage. The bulk is heating. I've put in the auto-setback thermostats and added insulation to the attic. I'm just getting started on tightening up the house. I believe that the biggest bang for the buck will be reducing the passive loss of heat. Here are some steps I'm considering:
1. Remove fiberglass insulation in attic, spray foam on the ceiling, seal all electrical and other penetrations, replace the fiberglass. This will reduce air leakage to the attic.
2. Seal around all electrical boxes (outlets, switches)
3. Spray foam insulation at sill plate (transition between foundation and house)
4. Seal around all windows (remove moldings, and foam between window and framing.
5. Remove siding and put up rigid foam, tape joints, reattach siding
6. Put 2" of rigid foam insulation on exposed concrete that abuts living spaces
7. Insulate walls between garage and house (garage is unheated).

Granted some of these projects are "small" (#2) and some are huge  (#5). I'll be starting small. First and foremost, I'll be addressing air leaks. (#1 and #2)

-Mark


*Electricity supplied by Hudson Light and Power. Gas supplied by NStar. I divided the total bill by the total usage. Therefore delivery charges etc. are averaged over each kilowatt-hour or therm.

Thermo Bio-pile or heat from compost - Part 1 - Project Background

Back in the fall of 2010, my son Russell was looking for a science fair project. He wanted to enter the regional HS science fair competition. After discussing several ideas, he remembered a web page we discussed about getting heat from decomposing material.

I first learned of the idea from one of my solar customers. She was a long time reader of MotherEarth News and sent me this link right after we installed her solar electric system. (FYI, this customer has a 1,500-watt solar electric array which zeros out here electric bill each month and she grows about 50% of her food on an 8,000 square foot lot (including the house) in Jamaica Plain (Boston).

The link takes you to an article about Jean Pain. In the 1980s Pain built piles of compost and threaded them with piping to capture the heat of decomposition and the methane. It was an early example of someone attempting to live sustainably off renewable energy. Pain's heat capture method was based on water, and, in effect, worked the same as a solar hot water (solar thermal) system.

After getting approval from his Science teacher, Russell began his plans. The key difference between his system and Pain's system was that he wanted to heat air rather than water. He felt that an air system would be easier to build, less costly, and less complicated. I agreed.

NOTE: This was a purely empirical experiment. Russell does not yet have the background to go deeply into the thermodynamics of a system like this and determine beforehand what to expect. Instead he relied on common sense and a bit of  input from me (Dad, a recovering nuclear engineer). I did play a relatively small roll - as the rules of the science fair dictate. (Though after going to the science fair, I'm doubtful that everyone followed that rule.) I also had to play "reminder of the budget limitations" and reminder of the stated objective - "To learn if useful heat could be captured from decomposing material using an compost-to-air-based heat exchanger."

Next Post - Part 2 - Experiment Design

Today's Theme - Limits to Economic growth

I don't pretend to understand all of this but ...

Here is a research paper that treats energy limits on organism growth as an analogy to energy limits on economic growth. The parallels are enlightening. http://www.aibs.org/bioscience-press-releases/resources/Davidson.pdf

Here's an article on "Tainters Law." His thesis is that social structures generate negative returns when they become too complex. http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/03/31/tainters-law-where-is-the-physics/

Solar Hot Water Numbers in for March 2011

Now that we have a solar hot water system, I've been computing the contribution to the water heating load. My house is at 42.5 degrees latitude in eastern Massachusetts. My solar panels are tilted at 45 degrees and the roof azimuth is 250 degrees (south is 180 degrees, southwest is 225 degrees, west is 270 degrees). I have three Schuco Slimline panels.

• In January, the panels were buried in snow. The solar contribution was 0.0%. 
• In February they were in snow for 6 days. The contribution was 7.6%. 
• In March, the contribution was 19.5%. 

On the best day, the system captured over 18,000 BTUs (British Thermal Unit). A BTU - raises one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit. My tank is ~120 gallons or about 1,000 pounds of water. Therefore, if we didn't use any hot water on that day, my tank temperature would have gone up about 18 degrees.

Priceless!

Energy Use as a Predictor of Bankruptcy?

Try this game. See if you can figure out what types of businesses will go away first as energy gets more and more expensive.

The demise of Harry & David (You know, the company that packages up the best looking fruit and ships it all over the place for big bucks...) got me thinking that we might be able to do this. FYI, in a high-cost-of-energy world, wouldn't shipping pretty pears across the country seem insane? (For that matter, it's insane even when energy is cheap.)

I thought of an approach - construct a ratio of "Value provide" divided by "energy use" for each company or industry. Companies with small ratios would be closest to extinction in an energy-expensive world.

To test my approach, I raised the question in the office this morning. My business partner immediately suggested "NASCAR." We all agreed that NASCAR uses lots of energy. What we couldn't agree on was the "value provided." Another co-worker joked that we should count gallons of beer consumed. If beer consumption is valuable, then NASCAR is going to be around a long time. On the other hand, if we base value on "helping mankind survive in a low-energy world," NASCAR's gonna score pretty low.

How would you value a business or industry? What industries do you see going away first in a high-cost-energy world?


Here are some I came up with:
Indoor sports arenas for amateur athletics (big heated shells so kids can play soccer indoors when it's lousy outside)
Carwashes
Dollar Store crap manufacturers
Ski areas
Malls and Big Box stores

Middle East Madness - So True...

Our Energy Future?

Here is a comment from a recent post at "The Archdruid Report." The comment, by Bill Pulliam, shows, I think, a deep understanding of our energy future.
 

The real paradigm that needs shifting here is the idea that peak oil is a "problem" to be "solved." Peak oil is no more a problem in search of a solution than is the autumnal equinox. The equinox happens no matter what you do, and winter is coming no matter what you do. This is just a phenomenon, a circumstance, an inevitability. It's not a challenge with an answer that will eliminate it.

Energy conservation is not a choice. In the fairly near future, it won't be a matter of choosing to use less energy; there just will be less energy whatever your "choices" might be. You WILL live with less energy (unless you die first), that is just a fact, same as the fact that you WILL live with shorter and colder days in the winter. But, of course, this will be a permanent winter, so you WILL figure out how to live with that forever. There is no choice here, there is no solution. There is adaptation, accommodation, that's it.

Those who actually have been taking in [The Archdruid's] recent writings and their intention should have noticed this. He is not talking about solving peak oil or making optional lifestyle choices. He is presenting methods to adjust to and deal with the inevitable pressures that are impinging on all of us no matter what our choices might be.

One Example of Why We are Addicted to Oil....

On or about January 7, 2011 my Solar Hot Water (SHW) system was activated. The system, pictured below consists of three 4' x 7' flat-plate solar collectors and an electric backup, 120-gallon water storage tank with a single heat exchanger.

SHW Collectors on High Albedo Roof

The panels are located on the southwest roof of my home. The tank is in the basement. The tank and panels are connected by two insulated flexible stainless steel pipes. One is for hot fluid off the roof, the other returns the cool fluid to the roof. The fluid is a mixture of water and propylene glycol (also known as antifreeze). The solar panels, water storage tank, circulator, and electronic controller were manufactured by Schuco of Germany. (To understand how a solar hot water system works, see the first footnote.)

Since my company sells and installs solar hot water and solar electric systems, I felt it would make sense to add some monitoring so we could see what the system was doing and validate what we tell our customers. To monitor the electricity input for the electric heater and circulator pump, we installed a traditional glass-front kilowatt-hour meter. To monitor the sun's input, we installed a SunReports monitoring system. The kilowatt-hour meter measures electrical energy added to the system and the SunReports system logs roof-to-tank inlet temperature, tank-to-roof outlet temperature, and circulator flow rate. Using these three measurements, we can compute the sun's energy contribution to the tank. 

Shortly after finishing the installation, it snowed - a lot. Within two weeks, we received about 3 feet of snow. My panels were buried. To make matters worse, the northeastern winds blew much of the snow  on the northeast side of my home over the peak on to the southwest side - further burying my panels. Recognizing the risks, I decided to wait for the snow to melt. Unfortunately, my roof (recently replaced) is covered with EnergyStar rated shingles. These shingles are light in color and highly reflective (high albedo) therefore, they don't heat up the way traditional dark shingles do. This meant that the snow melt was really slow - and making matters worse, it was a particularly cold January.

Finally I gave up waiting. I had one of my crew members bring me a ladder and the snow rake and I manually cleared the panels of snow (See snow clearing warnings below). The clearing day was February 6, 2011, one month after the system go-live date.

The system collected measurable amounts of solar energy for 25 of the next 34 days. However, most of the days the system collected energy for less than one hour. In those 34 days, the system collected and stored 139,848 BTUs* of thermal energy.

What's this got to do with our oil addiction? Quick question: How much usable energy can be extracted from a gallon of oil? Quick answer: Depending on the "quality" of the oil we can expect about 138,000 BTUs of heat energy when we burn a gallon of oil.

Yes, that's right. It took one winter month for my solar hot water system to collect the equivalent amount of energy stored in a gallon of heating oil. How big is a gallon of oil: There are 231 cubic inches in a gallon. One gallon is a cube of 6.1" x 6.1" x 6.1". Oil is portable, relatively cheap, easy to burn. No wonder we haven't broken the oil habit yet.

But I keep trying.
-Mark


How Solar Hot Water Systems Work

Antifreeze is heated in the solar collectors on the roof. When the antifreeze temperature exceeds the tank water temperature by more than ten degrees (F) the pump controller turns on the circulator pump. The heated antifreeze is driven to a heat exchanger in the bottom of the water storage tank where it transfers its energy to the stored water. When the temperature difference between the roof and the tank water drops to five degrees, the controller shuts off the circulator pump.

Clearing Snow from Solar Panels
Don't do it.
I'm not going to tell you how I did it so you can't blame me when you get hurt.

BTU
The amount of energy required to raise one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit.

Replacing Nuclear Energy with Solar (or Wind) Energy?

I am in an unusual position. I actually know something about what's going on in Japan at the Fukushima reactors.

I have a BS and MS in Nuclear Engineering and, in a prior life, I worked as a Nuclear Engineer doing reactor physics calculations for some the nuclear power plants in the New England area. The plants I "got close to" were Maine Yankee (MY, Wiscasset ME, Closed), Yankee Rowe (YR, Rowe MA, Closed), and Vermont Yankee (VY Vernon, VT). I also spent a few weeks at VY and MY during one of their refueling outages and was given a great tour of Seabrook Station (Seabrook, NH) before it went on-line. In my present life, I install solar electric and solar hot water systems (NewEnglandBreeze.com). In that role, I often hear that we should "go solar." And while I'm all for this, there is one big issue - Scale.

The thing that most impressed me about the nuclear power plants was that everything on site is massive. For example:

• Inside each reactor building (the dome at Seabrook and MY, and YR, the "box" at VY), is/was a crane capable of lifting the reactor core into place. The crane sat idle most of the time yet had the capacity to lift hundreds of tons.
• The Reactor Vessel head is held on with bolts as big around as a 5-gallon bucket. Ten men couldn't turn the wrench for those bolts so it had to be crane operated.
• The backup diesel generators at Seabrook Station are enormous. 40 feet high, 50 feet wide and more than 100 feet long. If you are in the room without hearing protection when they start, you'll likely go deaf.
  

Everything about these facilities is huge. And there is a reason for this. These units generate/ed staggering amounts of thermal and electrical energy. To put these numbers in perspective, here is what it would take to replace the energy generated by Seabrook Station with solar for one year.

Seabrook Station is rated at 1,244 megawatts-electric. That means that its peak power output is 1,244 Megawatts.** Seabrook's capacity factor for the past three years was, on average, 88%. That means it operated at peak power for 88% of the 8,760 hours in the year (or some combination of below peak and peak such that the total annual production was 88% of the plant operating at 100% power for 8760 hours). Thus, the average energy output of the plant for each of the past three years was 1,244 MW x 8,760 hours x 88% = 9,622,439 Megawatt-hours.

A typical solar panel is around 200 watts of peak power (they range from tiny 10 watt panels to 300+ watts, but most "grid tied" applications use 180 to 240 watt panels). In MA, the solar capacity factor for an unshaded solar array is about 13%. That means for every 1,000 watts of solar panels, you'll get about 1,200 kilowatt-hours per year. When installing solar panels on "ground mounted" or "flat roof" arrays, we can fit, on average, about 7 watts per square foot (we have to space panels out so they don't shade each other).

If we want to generate 9.6 million Megawatt-hours in a year using solar, we need more than 40 million 200-watt solar panels. At 7 watts per square foot, those 40 million panels require more than 41 square miles (assuming no space for roads). And that only replaces Seabrook Station! (And worst of all, you'd only get that energy on sunny days. As my friends who are still in the Nuke business say, "Solar's all right, but Nukes do it all night.")

We (humans) use an enormous amount of energy (particularly in the US) and until we dramatically change our energy use habits, we are stuck with Nukes and all the other undesirable energy generating plants.

-Mark

P.S. As I finished this write-up, I realized I have the numbers for wind generation as well. The Hull MA Unit 2 Wind Turbine is a land based turbine rated at 1.8 Megawatts. It has a 200-foot tall tower and 130-foot blades. Its first year's capacity factor was about 26%. How many turbines do we need to replace Seabrook? Assuming a 26% capacity factor, a Hull-2-sized turbine will generate 1.8Mw x 8760 hours per year x 26% = 4,100 Megawatt-hours per year. Therefore, Seabrook's 9.6 million MWh/year divided by Hull-2's 4,100 MWh/year = 2353 Hull-2-sized wind turbines.

Cape Wind better get moving...
-M
** The unit "Megawatts" is a measure of power and is an "instantaneous" measurement. The unit "Megawatt-Hours" is a measure of energy or power over time. Your electric company bills you for energy. However some commercial/industrial sites also pay "demand" charges which are based on peak power usage.

Back to Blogging

In the four years of running a solar energy installation business, I've learned a lot and learned a lot more about what I don't know.

You don't know what you don't know until you know you don't know it. And then it's too late. -You can quote me on this.

Here I hope to share what I've learned over the years and share my observations about energy usage in my life, with my family.

Stay tuned.
Mark