Consumption & Demand

Home Heating for the Hardy

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If you are on-board with the sentiment that we should strive to reduce the amount of energy we consume as a means to relieve pressure on a world suffering impending energy scarcity, then you probably want to know how one might proceed. In this post, I will describe the single-biggest energy-saving strategy I have employed in my home in the past five years, which slashed my natural gas consumption by almost a factor of five.

Power to the people; citizen and energy independence

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I’m a great supporter of community energy generation, but I want to talk about another form of energy, one which I consider to be an essential component of our future energy economy, and perhaps more importantly, one which could affect our fundamental sense of wellbeing.

I’m talking about food: human fuel.

China Coal Update

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World coal production and consumption data for 2011 are not yet compiled and published, but one key number is in. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology reports that the country’s coal output rose 8.7 percent from 2010 to reach 3.88 billion short tons last year. For comparison, US consumption in 2010 was just over 1 billion tons—and holding steady (mostly due to cheap natural gas prices). If the current trend continues, China will burn well over 4 billion tons of coal in 2012, four times as much as the US.

Sanity checking an energy improvement proposal (I)

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A few weeks back, I mentioned that I had an energy audit performed on my family’s home (a nineteenth century farmhouse on a stone basement in upstate New York, which we moved into last year). I outlined the findings and the proposals that my local energy efficiency contractor had suggested.

Since it’s a large commitment I set out to build my own model of the thermal performance of our house in a spreadsheet to make sure I believed in the improvements. In this post I am going to outline this model for the house as it functions at present. Then in a second post I will take up what the proposed improvements might do, and how the finances might work out.

Review: Petroplague by Amy Rogers

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We have a brand-new entrant to the oil-eating-bug-runs-amok tradition: the self-published novel Petroplague. It’s a Crichton-esque thriller written by microbiology professor-turned author Amy Rogers, who says she aims to “blur the line between fact and fiction so well that you need a Ph.D. to figure out where one ends and the other begins.” The plot involves a batch of experimental, oil-hungry bacteria inadvertently loosed upon Los Angeles, which proceed to wreak a near biblical swath of destruction. Part ecology lesson and part cautionary tale, Petroplague is an entertaining entrĂ©e into the subject of oil depletion and its implications for society, human health and the environment.

Renewable Energy – March 7

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-Sun, sewage and algae: a recipe for success?
-One of Largest Wind Farms Built in Ohio
-‘Germans Are Willing to Pay’ for Renewable Energies- Interview
-Wadebridge, the UK’s first solar-powered town – video
-Packing some power
-Controversial renewable energy report branded ‘shoddy nonsense’