Purple Line Politics Not Green Enough

"Rail Gains Momentum As Purple Line Pick" appeared in a recent edition of The Washington Post and impressed me with its obtuseness to "green" considerations.

Some background: rapid transit in the Washington D.C. area is provided by "Metro," aka the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. Metro runs Metrorail, as well as the Metrobus bus service. Metrorail is mostly a subway system in D.C. itself, an above-ground system outside the center city. The rail system has several lines, identified by colors: the Red Line, the Green Line, etc.:



Now comes a proposal for a new Purple Line:



The Purple Line is to link various locations in Montgomery and Prince Georges counties, in suburban Maryland just outside the District of Columbia. But will it be light rail (left), or bus rapid transit (right)? If the former, the cost to build it could be double or even triple the cost of implementing rapid bus service.

The Post article gives many of the ins and outs of making the choice ... but what it fails to do is tell which option is "greener"!

Light rail would be slightly faster, end to end. It would be more reliable than buses, since it can't get snared in traffic tie-ups. And it would foster more needed redevelopment in the increasingly seedy areas near its stations, since the bus route could always be changed and the rail route couldn't.

Also, light rail advocates say their choice would be "snazzier" and attract more ridership from the denizens of the depressed areas along its route, giving them more of what, in their own eyes, they deserve. A bus system would only reinforce to them that they are second-class citizens.

Fine, but it would seem to me that the clinching argument for light rail over bus is that electrically powered light rail would spew less carbon into the atmosphere than gasoline-powered buses. Or would it? The article doesn't even mention the topic. For shame, Washington Post!

Finally! Clean Coal in Germany

Clean-Coal Debut in Germany, from ABC News, documents the opening of the first "clean coal" power plant. Owned by the Swedish utility Vattenfall, the small 30-megawatt pilot plant in Spremberg, Germany, captures the carbon dioxide and water given off when electricity is generated. After being "scrubbed" of pollutants that make acid rain, the carbon dioxide is cooled to liquid form, at -28 degrees Fahrenheit, and stored temporarily.

The liquid CO2 will eventually be trucked to where it can be safely pumped 3,000 feet underground for permanent storage. And one day, it will be sent to its final resting place in a depleted natural gas field via specially built pipeline.

"Carbon capture and storage" (CCS); "carbon sequestration"; "clean coal": these are all buzzwords for the idea that we can still burn coal to produce electricity, if we minimize its huge carbon footprint somehow. We heard a lot about it in the recent presidential election, with John McCain advocating it and Barack Obama being less thrilled. Most of the relatively liberal advocates of reducing carbon emissions purse their lips at CCS, saying it hasn't really been tried. Well, now it has!

Vattenfall spokesman Staffan Görtz, according to a recent article in Discover Magazine that is as yet not available online, calls clean coal more of a bridge to better renewable-energy technologies than a final solution to climate change: "Using this technology will buy us time."

Greening the Ghetto

Greening the Ghetto is Elizabeth Kolbert's profile of Van Jones, an African American advocate of seriously addressing climate change, in a recent issue of The New Yorker. Jones wants programs that will help inner-city youth at the same time as they remedy global warming.

What Jones wants is "that kid on the street corner putting down his handgun, picking up a caulk gun." That is, he wants disaffected ghetto youths to be first in line for the new "green collar" jobs America is about to create: "weatherizing buildings, installing solar panels, and constructing mass-transit systems."

Done right, Jones is saying, the Green Revolution in America can be a twofer: it can get us on track with sustainable energy use, and it can reinvigorate our inner cities! What's not to like?!?

America's Untapped Energy Resource: Boosting Efficiency

Want to know what the best strategy for quickly reducing America's carbon footprint is? America's Untapped Energy Resource: Boosting Efficiency in a recent issue of TIME is must reading.

Michael Grunwald's article says we have untold opportunities to get more utility out of the energy we currently use, even if we don't intentionally cut back on the amount we use by lifestyle-denying conservation measures: turning off lights, driving less, turning down the thermostat. Efficiency, as opposed to conservation, reduces demand through "consuming less energy to get the same amount of heat for your shower, light for your office and power for your factory" (italics mine). Conservation is gritting your teeth and making do with a lesser amount.

It's all about eliminating waste: "Our power plants ... waste enough energy to power Japan. Only 4% of the energy used to run a typical incandescent bulb produces light; the rest is frittered away as heat at the plant, over transmission lines or in the bulb itself, which is why you burn your fingers when you touch it."

Utilities have to be regulated differently than most are today. Currently, they increase their profits by building more generating capacity and encouraging consumers to use it. Grunwald:

Let utilities make money saving energy. Six states have already decoupled electricity profits from sales volume to give utilities incentives to eliminate energy waste, and nine more may follow. Regulated utilities should also be assured a reasonable rate of return on their investments in efficiency improvements for their customers, just as they are for other capital investments.

This kind of approach complements the mandates, incentives, and standards for efficient generation and transmission of clean energy that we also need to put in place, but it has a quicker payoff. All environmentally conscious Americans should pay heed.

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.