Waste not want not : Energy Efficiency and Conservation

This deep recession has people looking for new ways to protect or increase their income. Increasing the energy efficiency of existing buildings is an obvious way to do it. For owner /operators, its the way to increase profits and be more competitive. For families it saves money and leaves more to spend on more enjoyable things.

Its amazing to me how the media hardly mentions energy efficiency. They are obsessed with the supply side. Drill for more oil and gas, fracture the bedrock, build more pipelines, strip the hills, and keep spewing pollutants.

The politicians and their masters (Big oil) are the worst. They are responsible for this supply side nonsense. 30 years of observation tells me they are stupid, dishonest, and probably both. We need to remove these idiots, no doubt.

Buildings consume around 45% of our national energy budget. Most of it from coal burning electric plants. Only 1/3 of the btu content in coal actually reaches the grid, its a low efficiency technology. (the rest is waste heat) It based on the mid 20th century paradigm of cheap and dirty. The waste is staggering.

Because we waste all this energy, we do not seem to have enough. But we really do have enough. Windows, roofing, better AC units, better lighting and better control of them. Better yet, measure and account for the inefficiency. Its amazing how easy energy can be saved. Putting in a 365/24/7 timeclock or photosensors to turn lights on and off is easy. How many millions of buildings still leave all their lights on all night?

Blame and politicians, not us engineers and scientists. There is a stupid and dishonest narrative promoted by Big oil and Big government. The TV talking heads swallow and regurgitate the supply side story over and over. Never the demand side. They unconsciously support more consumption.

The political clowns who call themselves conservatives are conservative in name only. They are not conserving and they do not promote conservation. Let us review the real facts, not the psuedo-facts. We struggle because we did not do our duty to conserve over the last 30 years.

We can save lots of money NOW without more energy production. Fact: U.S. annual energy budget is approaches $1 trillion. We use $450 billion/year just to light, heat and cool buildings and homes. With the retrofits I mentioned, we could easily cut $150 billion/year. We could add 2 million jobs with that annual revenueEasily. Not doing this is truly a waste. The political crooks say we need to cut waste, why not energy waste? Big oil hates this, it does nothing for their profits.

This is easy stuff. They call it low hanging fruit. My partners and I do it every day in our business, one building at a time.