More About My Electric Bill

I talked in My Home Uses How Much Power? about how much electric power my home has been using, the lion's share for powering my Heating-Ventilation-Air Conditioning (HVAC) system. I just got my December electric bill, and it was a disappointment. Considering that I have long since deployed my storm windows (not deployed last year) and have been assiduously conserving electricity devoted to room lighting (a departure from last year), I thought this December's bill would be lower than last.

Wrong.

It's higher.

In Dec. '07's electric bill, I used 2,630 kWH of electric power, 82.2 kWH per day. In Dec. '08, fully 2,757 kWH, 86.2 kWH per day!

True, Dec. '07 had an average temperature 3° higher than the 37° F. of Dec. '08, here in Baltimore. But I would have thought the storm windows, plus not wasting heat in closets and bathrooms on the cold side of my town home, would have offset the difference.

Wrong.

After the shock of receiving the new bill wore off, I determined to figure out why keeping the house at a comfortable 72° is so costly.

Doing that is a tall order, because it depends in part on how much time my HVAC system is on during the course of a month. I have no way to measure that. But I can measure how much power it draws when it is on.

To do that, I look at the large, horizontally mounted spinning wheel in the meter. I time how many seconds it takes for the wheel to make one revolution. (If the wheel is spinning fast, I time ten revolutions and divide by ten.)

The I plug S, the number of seconds per revolution, into the formula:

Watts = ( ( 3.6 x 7.2 ) / S ) * 1,000

3.6 is a constant which makes the formula work. 7.2 is the kH figure from the face of the meter; your meter might have a different kH figure.

First, I turned off my HVAC system and took an S reading: 53 sec. Using the formula, that gave me a baseline wattage of 489 watts. All the things in my house which were on and drawing electricity were using 489 watts of power.

Next, I turned on the HVAC system and set the thermostat so that just my outside heat pump and the indoor air blower were on. The indoor backup resistance-heating coil was off. This was "stage 1" of my two-stage heating system. It gave me an S reading of 8 sec. The formula said that 3,240 watts (3.240 kW) were being used.

Subtracting the baseline 489 W, I determined my heat pump and blower were using 2,751 W (2.751 kW) of electric power. That's more than 27 100-W incandescent bulbs.

Next, I kicked up the thermostat a few degrees until the indoor heating coil came on to supplement the heat pump — "stage 2" of my two-stage system. Now, S was 2.8 sec., and my power usage was 9,257 W! In addition to the 2,751 W the heat pump/blower were using, the resistance heating added fully 6,506 W to my overall power consumption.

For my final experiment, I switched the thermostat over to "emergency heat," a setting which cuts out the heat pump entirely. If the heat pump is broken, you supposedly can use this setting to bypass the crippled "stage 1/stage 2" kick-in sequence.

When I did that, my S was just 1.5 seconds! The formula spit out a whopping 17,280 watts, or 16,791 W more than my baseline. 17,280 - 9,257 = 8,023, the number of watts the emergency heat setting used above and beyond stage 2's usage of the heating coil. Apparently, the heating system doesn't drive the resistance coil as hard for stage 2 use as for emergency heating.

And that came as a surprise to me. I have been told by service techs that I should switch over to emergency heat when the outside temperature is well below freezing. Rationale: running the heat pump is a waste of power when it's bitter cold out. It can't squeeze enough heat out of the air to justify spinning its mechanism.

Yet I now find that spinning the heat pump plus using stage-2 coil heating uses just 9,257 - 489 = 8,768 watts, while running in emergency mode uses 16,791 watts. That's nearly double!

True, the latter mode gives me more heat quicker than the former, since the doubled power usage presumably makes the coil twice as hot. So the system doesn't have to run as long each time it is activated. If it runs half as long each time, I'm using the same number of kilowatt-hours per day or month.

But if emergency-heat mode is less efficient overall than stage-2 mode when the mercury is subfreezing, I could be wasting power and money by switching to it (something I did more than once during a mid-December 2008 cold snap).

I don't really have enough information to judge the relative efficiencies of stage-1, stage-2, and emergency-heat modes, for different outside temperatures and wind factors, given the propensity of my home to leak heat through its antiquated windows.

I do know that new, energy-efficient windows are on their way in January, as is a programmable thermostat that will let me keep the house cooler at night than during the day.

I also know that turning on any of the three heat modes makes my meter spin like crazy, and the stage-2 mode and especially the emergency-heat mode are true electron guzzlers. When my pocketbook can afford it, I'll have to look into installing a really efficient HVAC system. How else can I continue to call myself green?

Anyway, for quick reference, those numbers again are:

baseline: 489 W
stage 1: 3,240 W (incl. baseline); 2,751 W (excl. baseline)
stage 2: 9,257 W (incl. baseline); 8,768 W (excl. baseline)
emergency heat: 17,280 W (incl. baseline); 16,791 (excl. baseline)

In round numbers, the baseline is 1/2 kW, stage 1-plus-baseline is 3 1/4 kW, stage 2-plus-baseline is 9 1/4 kW, and emergency heat-plus-baseline is 17 1/4 kW!

My baseline of 1/2 kW of power usage generates 1/2 kW x 24 hrs./day x 31 days/month = 372 kWH/month of energy usage. As a rough guess, my non-baseline, non-HVAC power usage (TVs, computers, electric range, washer/dryer, water heater, interior lighting, etc.) probably brings that up to 1,000 kWH per month. Now, if I am in stage-1 heat pump usage half the time, but the inside resistance heating coils never come on, that comes to about 1,200 kWH a month. The total of the two comes to 2,200 kWH. When my Dec. '08 bill shows nearly 2,800 kWH used, there must have been roughly 600 kWH of "excess" HVAC use going on.

There are three possibilities:

• If it came from using emergency-heat mode, which happened on two or three occasions, 36 hours (600 kWH ÷ 16.791 kW) of heating in that mode would have accounted for it. A day and a half, or roughly 1/20 of the month.
• If it came from going into stage-2 mode, which may have happened without my becoming aware of it, 68 hours (600 kWH ÷ 8.768 kW) of heating in that mode would have done it. Approximately 3 days, or roughly 1/10 of the month.
• Of course, some or most of it may have come from being in stage-1 heating mode more than half the time, as opposed to the HVAC system being quiescent.

It is impossible to be sure which possibility predominated. Also, these calculations are rough estimates. Still, they make it clear that heating my house electrically is currently far too costly, both environmentally and financially. I desperately need to get the new windows, the programmable thermostat, and perhaps a more efficient heat pump going for me.

I also would like to find a way to record how much time I'm spending in the various heating modes. I know of no way to do that, at present.

My Home Uses How Much Power?

My town home used 19,828 kilowatt-hours of electricity between December 2007 and November 2008. The total amount BGE, the electric company formerly called Baltimore Gas & Electric, charged me for electricity was $2,876.61, less around $200 for a "one-time bill credit" and a number of small monthly "stabilization deferrals." Ignoring the credits and deferrals, I paid an average of 14.5 cents per kWh. This was noticeably higher than the cost-per-kWh cited for comparison purposes on the electric bill, currently shown as 11.82 cents per kWh, due to various charges, surcharges, and taxes.

When the A/C season was at its height in 2008, I was using up to about 1200 kWh per month. At the height of the heating season, I racked up over 3,300 kWh/mo. (My heat pump is much less efficient when it heats the house than when it cools it.) I wanted to try to find out how much electric power I was using for heating and cooling alone.

In order to do this, I decided to find out how much power my house uses when the heating-cooling system is completely turned off, along with all appliances, devices, and lighting not on 24/7. Now, I have a number of things that are always on. These include high-tech stuff: two computers, two TiVo digital video recorders, a cable-TV DVR, two Apple TV devices for pumping video and audio from iTunes to a TV, several Apple AirPort devices for wireless home networking, several hard drives, etc. There are also some fluorescent lights that I keep on about half the time to make my indoor plants happy. I turned half of these fluorescents off along with the heat pump-based heating-cooling system, and checked my electric meter to determine how much power my house consumes in "baseline" mode.


The easy way to do this, if you, like me, have a typical (non-digital) electric meter, is to look at the spinning wheel below the five dials on the meter's face. This wheel is mounted horizontally in the meter such that you look at it edge-on. You can time how many seconds it takes the wheel to make one full revolution, then plug the result into this formula:

kW = (3.6 X Kh )/ no. of seconds per revolution

Here, 3.6 is a constant which makes the formula yield the number of kilowatts of power that is being used, and Kh is a numerical factor that is printed on the face of the meter, and is usually 7.2. (My Kh is in fact 7.2; it may be different, however, for your meter.)

I found in my experiment that my wheel revolved once every 58 seconds, so I determined that (3.6 X 7.2)/58 came to about 0.447 kW, or 447 watts. So my house draws approximately that many watts of electric power in its "baseline" mode. Multiplying that figure by 24 hours per day, my house uses about 10.7 kWh a day of "baseline" power, or (in a 30-day month) 321.8 kWh.

At that point, I decided it would be wise to up that figure just slightly to allow for "non-discretionary" appliances like my refrigerator and water heater that come on automatically at various times during the day, but were probably not on when I checked the meter. I accordingly decided to use 350 kWh per month as my actual baseline figure.


If I assume a 350-kWh baseline for everything except A/C and heat, my total yearly usage would be just 4,200 kWh. That means roughly 15,000 to 16,000 kWh (just under 80%) of my annual electric power usage goes to power (a) things that are occasionally on at my discretion during various waking hours or (b) supposedly non-discretionary heating and cooling.

Among the "discretionary" (a) things are:

• electric lights, which until recently were a mix of incandescent, halogen, fluorescent, and compact fluorescent — though I've lately been going around the house replacing incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents. I've also been more consistently turning off lights when I leave the room, instead of leaving them on much of the day. But during the last twelve months I was, I am ashamed to admit, customarily more wasteful
  
• my two computers in their "working" mode, with their LCD screens brightly lit, and not in their nighttime "sleep" mode with their screens off or dimmed
• my three high-definition TVs ... though at most one is typically on at a time
• my household appliances that are used only sporadically, such as my electric range, dishwasher, washing machine and dryer
  
• a space heater in my basement that I generally keep on all the time in the dead of winter, but off in spring, summer, and fall
  

In the past twelve months, my lowest electric bill (in September 2008) showed that I used about 750 kWh that month. September 2008 was a month of moderate temperatures here in Maryland in which I did not run my heating-cooling system much at all. I'm willing to assume for the sake of further discussion that I used only roughly 100 kWh for cooling my house during that mild month — meaning that my discretionary usage in September was about

750 (total) - 100 (cooling) - 350 (baseline) = 300 kWh.

Now, I know I can lower my discretionary power usage somewhat through such conservation measures as switching to energy-efficient lighting and turning lights off when I leave the room. Still, assuming a monthly baseline 350 kWh and a typical discretionary usage of 300 kWh during the last twelve months, I feel justified in believing that anything over the sum of those (650 kWh in any given month) was getting sucked up by my heating and air conditioning use.

650 kWh per month times 12 months per year is 7,800 kWh per year. But in the last twelve months I actually consumed 19,828 kWh of power, meaning that about 12,000 kWh went for indoor comfort — 1,000 kWh per month, on average. At 14.5 cents per kWh, I paid $1,740 in electric power charges just for comfort in the last 12 months. I paid just $1,136 for everything else I used electric power for. So 60 percent of my total electric bill went just for heat and air conditioning, while 40 percent went for everything else.

Now, these figures are very rough estimates, and they may be off by a considerable amount. Yet it's clear that my switching to compact fluorescent bulbs and keeping the lights off when I'm not in the room is not going to save terribly much on my electric bill. But if I can get my annual heating and A/C power consumption down by 65 percent, I'll save a whopping 650 kWh/mo. on average — enough to power everything else in my household "for free."


So my first imperative would seem to be to do what I intended to do last spring, but put off: replace all 11 windows in my nearly-30 year old town home with windows that are super-energy efficient. My present windows are the "el cheapo" single-glazed aluminum jobs that the original builder installed back when energy was cheap and the term "global warming" was unknown. These windows don't have newer ones' two glass panes separated by a mixture of argon and nitrogen for greater insulating capacity. Plus, the metal they are made from conducts heat into the house in summer and out of the house in winter. Add to that the fact that they use old-fashioned, non-airtight storm window inserts and are themselves air-leaky owing to the house having settled over 27 years, and you have a recipe for terrible home heating and cooling efficiency right there.

I should also note with a great deal of sheepishness at this point that last winter I neglected to deploy the storm windows. Out of sheer inattention, I let ungodly amounts of indoor heat escape into the great outdoors through my windows' lower sashes that did not have their storm window inserts in place. Coupled with the fact that my heat pump is not nearly as efficient in heating mode as it is in cooling mode — and that when the outside temperature is well below freezing, I actually am better off using the "emergency" resistance heat from my indoor electric furnace — my failure to deploy storm windows boosted my power usage during the winter of 2007-2008, and thus during the entire period of the last twelve months, by an unknown but sizable amount.

Needless to say, I now have my storm windows in place for the onset of winter 2008-2009. Also, I have in fact arranged for all eleven of my windows to be replaced in late January 2009 with extremely energy-efficient ones. So my electric bills can henceforth be expected to be much lower than they were one year ago.

How long it will take for the energy savings of the window replacement project to offset my up-front costs of a little over $800 per window, installed, will comprise a period of six-to-eight years, according to the salesman. That guesstimate is probably on the optimistic side, but if the roughly $9,100 cost of the project generates just $910 a year in electric-bill savings for me, the whole thing will pay for itself in ten years.

$910 is roughly half my $1,740 current yearly outlay for heating and cooling. It's not the 65 percent reduction I'm ultimately looking for — and it remains to be seen whether that reduction can actually be achieved — but it's a start.


If you are thinking about replacing your windows, keep in mind that you can get considerably cheaper windows than I'm getting, if you go for vinyl or clad-wood replacements. The kind I'm getting from Renewal by Andersen are made of an extremely durable material called Fibrex that will deteriorate less quickly over time. Also, these windows never need painting or maintenance. I figure these high-end windows will add enough extra to the resale value of my house to justify the extra expense.

Also, whatever price you pay for replacement windows, as long as they meet minimum standards of energy efficiency, they can generate up to $500 of federal income tax credits, spread over three tax years. In my case, the credits amount to roughly five percent of my out-of-pocket costs. If you get fewer and/or cheaper windows, the percentage would most likely go up.


Once I get the windows replaced, my next moves will likely include:

• getting an "energy audit" to determine where else my house is wasting energy
  
• possibly adding more insulation in my attic, if the audit so indicates
• replacing my 15-year-old heat pump and backup heating system with one that hopefully will be more efficient, particularly in its wintertime heating mode
  

Possibly doing all those things will get me up to the magic 65 percent level of savings!

The Post-Oil Era Begins

"The Post-Oil Era Begins" is the lead story in Discover Magazine's January 2009 "100 Top Science Stories of 2008" — and is unfortunately not available online as of this writing. (Shame on you, Discover!)

The article, written by Ben Hewitt, asks what will save us from our reliance on the petroleum-based liquid fuels which form the lion's share of the 28 percent of our country's energy use which isw devoted to transportation today. Biofuels, such as ethanol made from corn? Though 9 billion gallons were made in 2008 and 36 billion gallons will be made in 2022, by current estimates, ethanol (whether made from corn or from other biomass) isn't the answer. It threatens the environment bigtime.

For one thing, burning biofuels still adds to global warming, just as burning gasoline does; though the crops used to make ethanol do remove carbon from the atmosphere, the plant life the crops replace also remove carbon. Yet if ethanol is made from crops grown on land that previously lacked vegetation, copious irrigation must be done, and the resulting fuel costs "28 gallons of water per mile traveled, whereas conventional petroleum uses 0.15 gallon."

Moreover, unless biofuels are made from inedible crops such as switchgrass — for which "the technology is still largely confined to the laboratory" — growing crops for ethanol pushes up food prices around the world and makes nourishment unaffordable for the poorest of the poor.


So, if biofuels are not the answer, what is? Electricity, says the article. We need all-electric cars, and/or plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) that run on a battery until the battery runs out, then start up a gasoline engine to recharge the battery in mid-trip and keep the wheels turning.

In 2010, the Chevrolet Volt is expected to be introduced, a PHEV with a cruising range on its battery alone of 40 miles. All-electric vehicles will have cruising ranges of up to 100 miles. " ... if a market for lightweight hybrid and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles were developed," says the article, "the United States could cut its gas consumption by 68 billion gallons — about half our current fuel use — within 27 years."

If we do that, we won't need ethanol at all.

What we will need, though, is some assurance that all those electric car owners won't all recharge their cars in the middle of the day. They will need to "plug in during off-peak hours and allow their batteries to recharge at a modest 120-volt/15-amp rate [assuming] 50 million light-duty PHEVs would constitute a 25 percent market share by 2030." But if they all plug into the electric power grid at 5 PM when everyone is running their air conditioning full blast and, what's more, all use a "beefier, 240-volt/30-amp circuit" to halve their recharging time, "the grid would need 160 additional gigawatts of capacity, requiring the construction of 160 new power plants."


Clearly — though the article doesn't spell this out — we will need incentives galore to make this a reality. For one thing, we already know that GM is going to have a hard time bringing the Chevy Volt to market for less that $40,000. It is unlikely the extra cost of a Volt, versus a Toyota Prius non-plug-in hybrid at $25,000, will pay for itself in lower fuel costs unless the owner drives exactly 40 miles per day (the battery's cruising range) and gets at least a $5,000 tax break (the present amount contemplated by congressional legislation) from Uncle Sam for buying the Volt.

And that's assuming $4.00-a-gallon gas!

In reality, the government should give a much bigger tax break for the Volt. How much? I can't give a hard-and-fast figure, but it should be based on an analysis of the true cost to the environment of continuing to burn liquid carbon-based fuels (including ethanol), thereby failing to head off global warming.

Charged Up for Electric Cars

Charged Up for Electric Cars appears in today's Washington Post Outlook section. It's an interview with Shai Agassi, one of the leading proponents of all-electric cars. Agassi has recently entered into an agreement with the government of Hawaii (that's him with Gov. Linda Lingle at left) to roll out electric car stations statewide.

Agassi says, "President-elect Obama has to say that every parking spot in America [needs] to have electric power." It's not so much about electric-vehicle technology or battery technology, as some other advocates would have us believe, it's more about what will replace today's gas stations. He wants drive-through stations that look like car washes and will exchange your depleted battery for a charged one. You'll do this on a yearly plan that you buy for so much a year. You'll pop into one of these stations after you have exhausted the 100-mile cruising range of your car's existing battery. For everyday use, though, you'll just recharge your existing battery. Thus the need for every parking spot to have electric power.

"The cost of [installing recharging stations] is two months worth of oil," says Agassi. "And then it pays for itself again and again and again."

Won't all this overtax our existing electric grid and generating capacity? No, because "every electron we buy from the [electric company in Hawaii] will be matched with renewables [such as] 20 more windmills on Maui."

And we need to do this nationwide why? "The government cannot afford not to go off oil. Every time the price of oil goes up, the trade deficit goes north of $1 trillion. Every time the economy starts picking up, it will crash because the price of oil will go up again. So the only way to get the economy picking up is to get off oil."

TreeHugger

TreeHugger is another indispensable resource for budding green revolutionaries. For eco-conscious consumers, it hosts Buy Green. (You can also access Buy Green by clicking on Green Buying Guides in the TreeHugger masthead.)

Yahoo! Green

One of the problems I'm running into as a budding "green revolutionary" is the huge number of resources out there on the Internet that need to be investigated. So many of them, so little time. To the rescue, thankfully, comes Yahoo! Green.

That collection of green-related material hosts Lori Bongiorno's blog The Conscious Consumer, also worth checking out to help you consume in eco-friendly ways.

De-Cluttering Your Mailbox

De-Cluttering Your Mailbox in a recent TIME Magazine has tips on keeping snail-mail spam out of your mailbox. That's a green thing to do, since "paper spam eats up an estimated 100 million trees each year, with 44% of junk mail ending up — unopened — in landfills." Transporting junk mail to your mailbox and those of millions of others wastes gasoline by the tankerful. And I pity the poor postal workers who have to sort the likes of PennySaver and carry it to every mailbox in the United States, every week.

ProQuo.com can help you opt out of credit card solicitations, catalogs, coupon mailers, sweepstakes announcements, etc., etc., etc. You sign up for free, activate your account, then opt out of junk mail sources one by one, at your discretion. Some of the junk mail sources accept an immediate electronic opt-out which ProQuo generates for you. Far too many, though, make you mail in a form letter which ProQuo gamely feeds you. Then there are those irritating sources that make you leave the ProQuo site and enter their own ... where you have to figure out what to do on your own, with no further help from ProQuo.

As for catalog opt-outs, ProQuo ideally lets you just click on a catalog you want to stop receiving, fill in some vital information (including your customer number, so it's best to have a catalog in hand) and send the opt-out right away. If you don't know the customer number, you can so indicate ... but you get the feeling the catalog company may just toss out your request on the basis that they "can't find" your identity in their database. For that matter, there seems to be no law that any company has to honor any such opt-out request, no matter how complete the information you give them.

ProQuo has a paltry list of catalogs it knows about — though it lets you suggest new ones — so I found it better to go to CatalogChoice.org, where the list is huge. This is another free site, and the procedure is similar ... though the sheer number of catalogs makes locating one you want to cancel harder than at ProQuo. CatalogChoice ideally has gotten each catalog's sender to agree to honor opt-out requests in advance, though two of the three I tried to opt out of were shown as not having entered into such an agreement. CatalogChoice will still send these catalogs your opt-out request (including your customer number and/or source or key number if you know it) but there are no guarantees that the request will be honored. CatalogChoice also provides links to these nonparticipating catalogs' customer service and privacy pages so you can try to cancel them one by one the old-fashioned way. As with ProQuo, catalogs not in the CatalogChoice system can be suggested for future inclusion.

I haven't tried it, but the TIME article also mentions the pay site GreenDimes.com, which will charge you $20 per year to do the same kinds of things.

The article says 89% of poll respondents support the creation of a national Do Not Mail list that would be like the successful Do Not Call Registry, which bars commercial enterprises from phoning you out of the blue with their solicitations. So far, in none of the 19 states where such an initiative has been debated has it passed, owing to the fact that mail advertising works. The 56% of junk mail that does not go unopened gets enough consumer response, it would seem, to yield an estimated $646 billion a year in sales! Some of that lucre undoubtedly finances powerful lobbying that keeps state legislatures and the U.S. Congress from killing the goose that lays all those golden eggs.

Repower America

Repower America is all about exactly what its logo says it's about:

It wants America within ten years to burn fossil fuels no longer: coal, oil, gasoline, natural gas. We need to switch to wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, and other renewables; start building more nuclear power plants, which are much safer than they used to be; and convert our existing fossil-fuel power plants to capture and store their carbon pollution.

One of the initiatives Repower America supports is the Unified National Smart Grid. The grid which transmits electric power to your home or business from the plants that generate it needs updating. This is a so-called "infrastructure" project that needs doing anyway, as grid inadequacies currently cause blackouts and brownouts all the time. The inadequacies are "reported [see here and here] to cost the nation $80 billion to $188 billion per year in losses due to grid-related power outages and power quality issues."

The current grid in the U.S. is an antiquated patchwork that was anything but intelligently designed. If we're going to be forced to update it — and we are — why not spend the extra money that it would take to make it truly a marvel of 21st-century technology?

If we did that, then clean electricity generated anywhere in America — with an emphasis on the anywhere — could power homes and businesses across the nation. Homeowners and businesses could pick and choose among power sources nationwide, and could opt to buy some or all of their power from green/clean sources, even if it meant accepting a higher charge per kilowatt-hour.

To make that possible, national electricity "interstates" could be built to use advanced high-voltage power lines to move power to where it is needed more quickly and cheaply than is currently possible. There would also be high-tech power management facilities that could rapidly open up the equivalent of "extra lanes" in the interstate so that, say, "smart-grid operators can capitalize on a wind power plant with ample wind in the Dakotas when they expect rising air conditioning use on a hot day in Miami. Or hydropower storage can be quickly dispatched if winds are expected to temporarily subside."

Also, the local smart grids that feed into the national smart grid would buy and sell power from its customers' households and businesses. That's right: if you erected (say) a wind turbine or solar panel array on your property or building, and on a given day it generated more electric power than you were presently using, the excess power would move out onto the grid, where it would be sold at the going rate. The proceeds would go into your account at the electric company, where they could be used to reduce your electric bill. (Or it could be used for other purposes. Anyone see a merger between the local electric company and PayPal on the horizon?)

The ability to sell power back to the grid would depend on our switching our house or business to using a "smart meter [that] can spin both ways." With one of those, we could even sell back power that we had previously "downloaded" to a plug-in hybrid car.

Meanwhile, businesses and individuals would be able to monitor their energy costs in real time and make choices to lower their bills by adjusting their activities, allowing less stress on the grid and reduce electricity bills.

The Unified National Smart Grid is just one of the initiatives that Repower America supports in its bid to wean us off dirty, greenhouse gas-emitting energy sources in a decade. If you like their ideas, please consider joining the over-two million people who have already endorsed them by entering your email address and first and last name in the form on their home page.

It Won't Be Pretty ...

As I said in Code Green for America, America needs a new sense of national purpose. Thomas L. Friedman writes about it in his latest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America: We need to dedicate ourselves to cleaning up our energy act. Instead of continuing to use as much of the Energy from Hell as we do — CO2-emitting coal, oil, and natural gas — we need to switch to renewables: solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, biomass, and so forth. Even nuclear. Renewables are the Energy from Heaven.

If we clean up our energy act, we can sell the technology to the Chinese and other countries whose people are going capitalistic, entrepreneurial, and middle-class by the billions.

If we clean up our energy act, we can put petrodictators in the Muslim/Arab world out of business. That will promote their populations' going capitalistic, entrepreneurial, and middle-class — instead of breeding human cannon fodder for the Osama bin Ladens who'd like to tear down the polyglot modern world and replace it with repressive Islamist sharia.

If we clean up our energy act and get the rest of the world to follow suit, we can head off the worst that global warming bodes to inundate us with by the middle of this century, and manage the damage that it is already too late to avert.

If we and the world clean up our energy act, we can save species beyond number that would otherwise disappear — forever — after eons on this earth. Most of them are species we haven't even discovered yet. We need species diversity to provide new sources of lifesaving medicines, to keep the global ecosystem afloat, healthy, and resilient, and simply because for us to allow countless living species to perish just so we can keep our Hummers gassed up would be, frankly, beneath contempt. For us to let that happen to millions of species we have yet to discover and catalog would diminish us in our own eyes irretrievably.


Friedman makes all that abundantly clear in the first half of his book. In the second half, he gets down to brass tacks and tells us exactly what we need to do.

It's not pretty, folks.

Because it isn't going to come cheap.

Code Green, as Friedman dubs the green revolution we need to bring about, faces a steep uphill battle. Coal-oil-gas are so entrenched that we will need to systematically make big sacrifices in order to supplant them with solar-photovoltaic-wind-hydro-geothermal-biomass-(and yes even) nuclear.

Many of the sacrifices will hit us in the form of new or increased taxes: "a carbon tax [directly on carbon emitters], a gasoline tax increase ... a cap-and-trade system that indirectly taxes carbon emitters" (p. 251).

Some of the sacrifices will hit us in more subtle ways. For instance, Friedman talks of a "renewable energy mandate." In Thomas Friedman Column: "Bailout (and Buildup)" I mentioned his calling for a U.S. government mandate that "every utility in the country ... produce 20 percent of its power from clean, non-CO2-emitting, energy sources — wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, biomass — by 2025."

Sounds good on paper, right? Well, until the alternative, renewable energy sources are "taken to scale" and head "down the cost-volume learning curve," they'll come at a premium price. Who is going to pay that price? It will ultimately be the consumers of the "clean electrons" these energy sources will provide — you and me.

Unless, of course, Uncle Sam subsidizes the clean electrons. Then it will be the taxpayers who'll bear the cost burdens — again, you and me.

Thomas Friedman Column: "Bailout (and Buildup)"

New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman's recent column "Bailout (and Buildup)" steadfastly refuses to sacrifice our "budding clean-tech revolution" on the altar of financial recovery. Friedman, whose latest book is Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America, rightfully worries that the return of gasoline prices to under $2 a gallon, after a summer of $4 gas, sends the wrong signal.

This was then:

Americans drove less, polluted less, exercised more, rode more public transportation and, most importantly, overwhelmed Detroit with demands for smaller, more fuel-efficient, hybrid and electric cars. The clean energy and efficiency industries saw record growth — one of our few remaining engines of real quality job creation.

This is now:

But with little credit available today for new energy start-ups, and lower oil prices making it harder for existing renewables like wind and solar to scale, and a weak economy making it nearly impossible for Congress to pass a carbon tax or gasoline tax that would make clean energy more competitive, what will become of our budding clean-tech revolution?

Today's bailout mentality compounds the problem ... but if the bailout is handled right, it could be a blessing in disguise:

“Is the economic crisis going to be the end of green?” asks David Rothkopf, energy consultant and author of “Superclass.” “Or, could green be the way to end the economic crisis?”

It has to be the latter. We can’t afford a financial bailout that also isn’t a green buildup — a buildup of a new clean energy industry that strengthens America and helps the planet.

To turn the panic bailout into a green buildup, we need:

• Mandated clean energy generation: by congressional mandate, that "every utility in the country ... produce 20 percent of its power from clean, non-CO2-emitting, energy sources — wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, biomass — by 2025"
• Consumer incentives to save energy: "that every state move its utilities to a system of 'decoupling-plus' ... getting paid for how much electricity or gas they get you to save," not how much they get you to use
• Tax incentives for clean energy technology: such that "any company that invests in new domestic manufacturing capacity for clean energy technology — or procures any clean energy system or energy savings device that is made by an American manufacturer — can write down the entire cost of the investment via a tax credit and/or accelerated depreciation in the first year"
• Stimulus package money to modernize building codes: "money from any stimulus package ... directly incentivize and support states’ efforts to implement and intelligently modernize their building codes to get already well-established national 'best practices' quickly into their marketplaces"
• Stimulus package money to do other things: "targeted investments in scientific research, mass transit, domestic clean-tech manufacturing and energy efficiency that will make us a more productive and innovative society, one with more skills, more competitiveness, more productivity and better infrastructure"

Oh, and President Obama should lead by example ...

... starting by reinventing the inaugural parade. Get rid of the black stretch limos and double-plated armored Chevy Tahoes inching down Pennsylvania Avenue. Instead, let the next president announce that he will use no vehicles on inauguration day that get less than 30 miles per gallon. He could invite all car companies to participate in the historic drive with their best available American-made, fuel-efficient, innovative vehicle.

That last one sounds like a tall order, Tom! Can the Secret Service get a Toyota Prius with bulletproof glass?