Home Energy Magazine Blog

May/June 2008 Editorial: Who Is Going to Build the Zero Energy Home?

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0500

You could easily have overlooked a quiet change in recent statements by the world’s leading climate change researchers. Everyone knew that the goals set forth in the Kyoto Protocol were baby steps on the road to achieving much greater reductions in carbon emissions. Even though only a few countries—and the United States is not among them—will achieve those goals, plans for even greater reductions are under way. Now most researchers believe that an 80% reduction in carbon emissions will be required to prevent massive climate change. This will mean a transformation in the way we think about energy consumption in homes.

Already the American Institute of Architects, DOE’s Building America program, and pragmatic regulatory agencies like the California Energy Commission are committing to the design and construction of buildings that consume zero or very little energy. Similar goals are being written into the building codes in Europe. Australians are talking about requiring all homes to be net energy exporters. These initiatives won’t take effect instantly, but zero energy homes are headed toward becoming the norm rather than the exception; building these homes will no longer be a fringe activity. Is the building and retrofitting industry prepared? No, and here are a few examples of the yawning gap between good intentions and reality. Let’s focus on the institutional barriers, rather than on the technologies.

Where do we look for examples of zero energy homes? Is there one in your community? City? State? Climate zone? This is problem number one. Without an inventory of documented successes—or even near successes—how can we establish a foundation of experience?

Who is going to design those zero energy homes? The number of architects capable of designing a zero energy home can be counted on the fingers of two or three hands. Leading architecture schools have only just begun offering courses in the design of low-energy buildings. These are typically not mainstream courses, nor are these courses required for graduation. The number of instructors qualified to teach such courses probably amounts to less than 1% of the number needed to meet the potential demand. We need to get at the production builders—then one architect is responsible for thousands of homes, and we only need to get to a few architects. This is the intent of the Building America program. Unfortunately, DOE (under instruction from the Bush administration) moved away from a focus on the “deployment” of thousands of energy-efficient homes, to “research” using only a handful of energy-efficient homes.

Even existing programs have limitations. Architects and contractors may understand how to cut heating and cooling energy usage down to practically nothing, but they typically ignore the appliances (except for the water heater), and energy-efficient lighting. (Sometimes they even rely on the inefficiency of the appliances to provide free heat.) True, you can slap acres of PV modules on the roof of almost any house (if it’s large enough), but that simply shifts the question to who can design an affordable (without enormous tax credits) zero energy home?

Who’s going to sweat the details? Energy consumption in homes is fragmenting into an increasing number of small uses. A recent study showed that in an average home, over 40 products are drawing power all the time. Who is in a position to ensure that every one of them draws as little power as possible? Other details that influence energy use and need attention include the quality of the construction and equipment and materials choices.

How do we deal with the “stovepipe” problem? It makes sense, initially, to address energy saving in each end use separately. But beyond a certain point, integration and coordination will be required to zero out a home’s energy use. The barriers between trades will need to fall and new specializations will need to be created to identify and exploit potential energy savings.

These are just a few examples of the institutional adjustments that must be made before we can effectively reduce emissions from homes. They aren’t impossible to achieve, but we needed to start yesterday in order to stay on schedule. And if you dislike these adjustments, read about what we will need to do to adapt to climate change in my next editorial.

One Part Perspiration, Five Parts Inspiration

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0500

ACI trains home performance professionals through national and regional conferences and through the Web. Last week I participated in my eighth ACI national conference. The annual conference is where I go to network; learn about all aspects of home performance; recruit authors for Home Energy Magazine; and best of all, be inspired. Here are a few of the people that I ran into last week who inspire me: Don Fugler does research through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. He developed the Garbage Bag Air Flow Test. He rides his bike to work year round in Ottawa, and wears suspenders. He has a dry sense of humor and has toppled any lingering stereotype I had about Canadians. He told a crowded room at the ACI meetings in Pittsburgh that the way we live in our houses, the way we use our cars, and the way we travel in the air contribute about equally to our carbon footprints. The way we eat contributes a lot also. A pound of beef is responsible for a heck of a lot of greenhouse gases released. I don�t know if Don is a vegetarian, but I think he probably is. Jim LaRue is a sort-of-retired home performance contractor from Cleveland, Ohio. He designed a really efficient and healthy house for a group of nuns in Ohio and wrote about it for Home Energy. He has also written for the Cleveland Green Building Coalition and for the magazine a Greening Your Home series of articles. I don�t know anyone who has worked harder to create healthy, efficient, and affordable housing in Cleveland. He�s retired but so far no one has noticed. Linda Wigington has been with ACI since its beginning and is now the manager of program design and development. At the ACI Summit on global climate change held at the Pacific Energy Center in San Francisco last summer, which she was instrumental in bringing about, she talked about how she lived one whole winter in her home outside of Pittsburgh while never raising her thermostat above 50 degrees Fahrenheit. She is passionate about finding ways (mostly not involving such personal discomfort) to drastically reduce the energy use in existing homes to reduce the nation�s greenhouse gas emissions. Kate and Paul Raymer, founders of Hayoka Solutions, a green building and green building advocacy organization, announced the Starting from Home Challenge at the ACI meetings, an annual contest for post secondary school students around the country to create 70%�90% energy savings in existing homes with real people living in them. Hayoka is a Lakota Indian word describing someone who causes others to see things in a completely new way. Paul is an expert in healthy home ventilation. Don�t get him started on attached garages. �Why would anyone park their car in their house?� Paul often wonders. I could go on, and on, and on. These are just a few of the people who inspire me. I hope they inspire you as well.

March/April 2008 Editorial: Reflections on the Consumer Electronics Show

Tue, 4 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0600

The 2008 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is already ancient history, and the 140,000 participants, TV cameras, and bloggers have returned home to quieter lives. But it’s still worth reflecting on this most amazing assemblage of new products, trends, and controversies, all seen through the eyes of Home Energy.

First, the name CES could sometimes have been taken to stand for Consumer Environment Show, Consumer Efficiency Show, and of course Consumer Energy Show. Being green is in, and being carbon neutral is even in-er. One could sense that manufacturers and exhibitors had made the transition from being defensive about energy consumption to making a (well-publicized) virtue out of their products’ efficiency and greenness. Sometimes it worked—as when Sony displayed an incredibly high-definition TV that drew only 30 watts. In other cases, the arguments were a stretch—like the one that justified wall-size plasma screens as energy efficient. (As what, a radiant heater?) I liked a new Sony TV based on organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display technology, because it made watching a small screen a pleasure, which made it possible to do so in a small room with smaller speakers, and made it impossible to justify yet another upsizing of homes.

The sheer number of must-have products was as large as ever. From an energy consumption perspective, I spotted a few trends that I expect Home Energy will follow. First, the fraction of products drawing standby power continues to increase; indeed, products that drew zero power while off were the exception. The external power supplies proliferate madly. The good news is that many have become much more efficient (thanks to regulations in California and elsewhere and the Energy Star appliance-labeling program). The bad news is that they aren’t interchangeable, which prevents further economies through aggregation or even separate distribution networks. Worse still, a new class of products, wire-free charging stands, threatens to bypass the external power supply and undermine the efficiency gains.

Dimming TVs and computer displays is a simple new conservation measure. Most of these displays are shipped at maximum brightness, and consumers never think to reset them. We found that the power consumption of a new iMac fell 30% when we cut the screen brightness from maximum to a still-tolerable level (and also realized that we had kept it bright to counteract our overbright conventional lighting). Philips introduced a new TV that monitors ambient light levels and adjusts screen brightness. According to CNET, this feature can cut power consumption by about half.

Electronics—and the CES—is about information. The products exhibited receive, transmit, process, or display information. We now realize that handling information requires energy—sometimes a lot of energy—on a scale that rivals refrigerators, lighting, or clothes dryers. The industry is now gradually accepting the fact that its products’ energy consumption will be regulated, just like the energy consumption of refrigerators, water heaters, or lightbulbs. The challenge, however, is to manage energy use without constraining the handling of information. We don’t have much experience yet, but some guidelines are already clear. For example, design products to ensure that they aren’t processing information that isn’t used. This concept sounds obvious, but it is seldom put into practice (except in mobile products).

I must confess that I am already looking forward to the next CES. I want to observe whether communicating thermostats will become the next big thing, what new features will be offered in digital picture frames, and how they will squeeze game consoles into SUVs. And I am also curious: What will the “E” stand for next time?

January/February 2008 Editorial: The Afterlife of a CFL

Fri, 4 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0600

The CFL is a poster child for energy efficiency but sometimes in ways that we might not want it to be. To be sure, the CFL has a wonderful record of constantly improving quality, applicability, and reliability all the while falling in price. After faithfully saving consumers electricity for 6,000 hours, the CFL eventually flickers out and must be thrown away. That’s where the adventure begins. CFLs contain minute amounts of mercury, which qualifies them as hazardous waste (see “Understanding CFLs,” HE Nov/Dec ’07, p. 30).

In most communities this means CFLs must be taken to special sites. Here’s what one New Jersey family—early converts to compact fluorescents—found when they tried to dispose of a decade’s worth of CFLs. Princeton Township regards CFLs as hazardous waste and will not accept them. The (Mercer) County Improvement Authority’s recycling Web site just points to a Pennsylvania firm, which uses Fedex to recycle the bulbs. That might be reasonable for large businesses, but it’s expensive and inconvenient for individual households. The local lamp store refers inquiries to a company in Edison, New Jersey, but they serve only neighboring Middlesex County and charge non-residents $6 per lb to recycle CFLs. Mercer County’s Autumn 2007 Hazardous Waste Day literature did not specifically mention fluorescents as acceptable, and phone inquiries asking about this weren’t answered. The simplest option appears to be taking the expired CFLs to New York City, where there is no state or local law prohibiting residents from placing CFLs in the trash.

In California, my nearest disposal site is 13 miles away (through one of the worst traffic jams in the United States) and is open for just 4 hours per day on 3 days per week.

We know how most people will respond in such frustrating situations: they take the path of least resistance. In this case, those CFLs are going into a landfill, despite the prohibitions. (A few environmentally minded consumers are slowly filling their garages with old CFLs, which creates another kind of hazard.)

I must confess that I pooh-poohed the mercury hazard when I first heard about it. Come on, I thought, let’s look at the huge benefits from reduced emissions compared to the tiny contribution to landfills. This was a no-brainer as far as I was concerned and I wanted to promote the next new energy efficiency measure. But the lack of proper disposal options for CFLs makes mercury a problem that won’t go away no matter the cut in other dangerous pollution.

I wasn’t the only one to ignore the problem. Utilities, government agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and even Wal-Mart were blind sided by the unpleasant reality of mercury in CFLs. To date, almost everybody from the federal government down to your town’s waste agency ducked the problem and offered useless pabulum like, “Check with your local or municipal government entity responsible for solid waste or household hazardous waste collection. You can also visit http://www.epa.gov/bulbrecycling/ to research your own state’s disposal laws and recycling programs.” If you undertake this “research” and follow the multiple Internet links, you will eventually discover that no convenient disposal opportunities exist in many communities.

So what should be done? First, it’s worth remembering that many organizations have developed fabulously successful strategies for convincing people to purchase CFLs. We need to harness these same delivery mechanisms to recover the used CFLs. Any institution distributing CFLs must also accept them for disposal. (Clever marketers should realize that this gives them a wonderful opportunity to sell consumers another CFL.) A few firms, such as Ikea, already collect CFLs, but they remain the exception.

In the future, there needs to be symmetry between the ease of acquiring a product and the ease of safely disposing of it. This problem will be arising with increasing frequency, from batteries to tires to electronic equipment. In the meantime I fear that part of my garage will serve as a temporary hazardous waste holding facility—not a problem I can ignore for long.

November/December 2007 Editorial: Energy Efficiency Pioneers

Sat, 3 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500

OK, there’s a new energy-saving product on the market. It might even be the fruit of government-funded research. But it’s expensive and available from only a few, small manufacturers (or perhaps just one manufacturer). The price would surely fall if economies of scale kick in. But investors don’t understand the energy efficiency market and are reluctant to supply the needed capital. Nothing happens. The country—indeed the world—needs dozens of these innovations if it is going to meet the ambitious energy-savings targets announced by presidents, governors, and speakers of inconvenient truths. The Business Schools talk of the “valley of death” between the prototype and widespread commercialization, where thousands of great ideas have foundered. This is (or could be) the story for the heat pump water heater, advanced glazing technologies, and ultra-high efficiency lighting technologies.

So how should the government promote these products? How does it create, first, a group of “efficiency pioneers” willing to purchase the device and, after that, convince a wider group of early-adopters to tolerate a higher cost and level of risk on the way to lower energy consumption?

If you can get the President’s attention, then the President can simply issue an Executive Order requiring all federal agencies to use this product. President Bush did just that and greatly accelerated the appearance of products with low standby power use. That strategy works well for energy-efficient office equipment or howitzers but the government is a small player when it comes residential water heaters or TVs.

If you can get Congress’ attention, then tax credits and other subsidies might stimulate consumer interest in the new product. But it will be years before Congress passes another energy bill and a small company will whither before then.

If you can get the Department of Energy’s attention, then it might be able to rewrite minimum efficiency standards to make the new product the most sensible compliance path. But the entire standards procedure will require years.

That’s why current discussions inside Energy Star are important. Everybody knows about Energy Star. Consumers recognize the Energy Star name and respect its endorsement. Giving these new products an Energy Star endorsement would give these emerging products immediate name recognition and legitimacy to propel them into the mass market. Mission accomplished.

But reasonable people can disagree. Consumers have expectations about Energy Star products, namely, that they should be widely available and be good investments. Selecting Energy Star should be a simple decision after deciding what kind of product to buy. Mixing these “early commercialization” products with the conventional Energy Star product line could undermine Energy Star’s reputation. What happens after a few recalls by manufacturers? Promoting obscure, risky products is simply not part of Energy Star’s mission. Nor are its partnership agreements designed for emerging products.

If not Energy Star, then do we need a new label for the efficiency “pioneer” products? It is certainly worth considering. This endorsement might be linked to special features, such as enhanced customer service, extended warranties, or perhaps special financial assistance. Whatever the features, potential buyers must understand that they will be early adopters and will accept the trials and tribulations. But these pioneer consumers will also have the satisfaction that they are personally assisting in wider efforts to save energy and improve the environment.