Auto Fuel
There is one silver lining to the huge economic cloud that has been looming over our heads for a year and won’t be blowing away anytime soon. With high gas prices and then huge job losses, many people drove less this year. Less driving means less oil consumption and less carbon dioxide production. It also means less of a human contribution to global warming.
I personally purchased 9 fewer tanks of gasoline this year compared to last year. I get about 240 miles per tank of gas where I live in mostly city driving, so I drove about 2,160 fewer miles this year than last year. When gas prices were so high during the first 3 quarters of 2008, I made a concerted effort to combine trips and reduce the amount of driving we had to do. I didn’t change our “less driving” habit when gas prices dropped over the last 3 months. I plan to continue to keep the total number of miles I drive per year as low as feasible for environmental reasons. At first I did it for economic reasons, but we live just fine and drive less. We are going to continue to drive less.
Electricity
Many of us have begun to migrate to compact fluorescent light bulbs and increased the air conditioning temperature 1-2 degrees in the summer and decreased the heating temperature 1-2 degrees in the winter. A lot of us have also been more conscious about opening windows on temperate days instead of turning on the A/C. I know I’ve paid a lot more attention to fixing draft problems and making sure everything is sealed better than I ever have in the past.
I also made some small but beneficial changes in the way I do laundry. I wash the colored clothes in cold water, but I still wash the white clothes in hot water with a cold rinse. At the end of the spin cycle, I turn the dial around and run the load through a second spin cycle. Then I dry the clothes with my electric dryer using the automated sensor feature instead of timed dry, and I added two dryer balls to the dryer. The balls help fluff the clothes, cut static and reduce drying time. Between two spin cycles, dryer balls and using the sensor setting, we reduced the amount of electricity we use per month significantly.
I reviewed my electricity and natural gas consumption on our November bill and found we consumed on average 17.5 fewer kilowatt-hours of electricity per day in November 2008 than in November 2007, or 428 fewer kilowatt-hours in November 2008 than in November 2007.
We consumed the same amount of natural gas during the same time periods, so we didn’t see any savings there. It probably has to do with the fact that we have an old gas hot water heater. An on-demand unit would use far less gas and only produce hot water when it was needed.
Economically, our utility bill hasn’t gone down, but it hasn’t increased, so we are making significant progress in energy savings given that rates increased over last year.
Selling Power Back to the Electric Company
As soon as we can spare the money, I plan to install some solar panels on the back side of the roof and perhaps a small wind turbine on the back side of the garage to sell some power back to the grid during sunny days and anytime it’s windy. I also plan to replace my old windows with more energy efficient windows. My house still has the original windows it was built with in 1964. We also likely need even more insulation in the attics than we have now, and we have at least R-22. R-30 would be better. There is still plenty of room to add more.
If everyone installed just one bank of solar panels and installed one small wind turbine, the increased power available during peak daytime hours would mean that our electric power plants would not have to increase power generation to cope with the rising demand for electricity. New, more efficient, environmentally friendly technologies would then have more time for development and scale-up to handle our electricity demands in the future.
Electrical Grid Infrastructure
Infrastructure needs to be sexy starting now. Really sexy. I see an electrical infrastructure future that is much like our decentralized computing power. We used to rely on big, mainframe computers and we logged into them from remote terminals. Now our computing power is contained within the PCs that sit on our desks and in our homes, and spread worldwide around millions of servers that contain the internet. The company I use to host my blogs and websites, HostGator, converted to 100% wind power in 2008.
I see our electrical utilities able to grow more slowly if every new home is built more energy efficient and with power generation technology. Older homes need to be retrofitted to produce at least some of the power our households consume. If we all sell power back to the grid during the day, we take some of the burden off the centralized system. Eventually we may be able to take most of the burden off centralized systems and rely more heavily on local power generation on each building that uses power. In 100 years wind and sun will likely generate the vast majority of the electrical power we use.
We need to invest in America’s infrastructure, so if it takes sexy to make that happen, here is an audio attitude adjuster to help you get started:
Have a listen: infrastructure purr (By Rachel Maddow)
\\ tags: decentralized electricity generation, electricity consumption, energy usage, Environment, gasoline consumption, infrastructure purr, natural gas consumption, Rachel Maddow, solar panels, wind turbines
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