Perpetual Innovation

Category: electricity

  • Cree Likes its LEDs… Helps colleges and others save lots of money & energy.

    San Diego Community College District – San Diego, CA

    San Diego Community College District is the recipient of the APPA’s 2015 Sustainability Award recognizing and advancing sustainability excellence in educational facilities. An CREE want a little school credit. The upgrades used Cree® LED lighting upgrade with SmartCast® Technology.

    Looks good.

    In the meanwhile, Ikea stores are moving to only selling LED lights by 2016. Read here about Idea’s LED ideas.  They argue that about 20% of electric energy use in the world comes from lighting. So if LED lights can reduce that by about 85%. That is a BIG Woo Hoo for the environment too.  The savings of energy/electricity are really only a small part of the savings. Other lights produce huge amounts of heat, which generally increase air conditioning costs. It takes time and money to buy replacement bulbs, install the new and dispose of the old. The costs to a business are huge. Whereas the LED light will not be replaced in many of our lifetimes. 

    LED lights now have much better light quality, and many are dim-able. 

    Oh. And if you love CREE’s products and services, be careful buying the stock of the company.  Even with all their patents and proprietary technologies, this is an overly competitive market. 

    Very cool. 

    ‘via Blog this’

  • Off-Grid Electrification

    This is a very impressive video conference hosted by the Climate Group.

  • Day Light Savings Time… And Energy Efficiency… and Sustainability

    While you are are staying up late, thinking about saving time and saving money…
    Give a look at the past blog post here on EE and DST and California’s discussion about Daylight Savings Time.

    This is the heart of sustainability: things that we can do right here, right now, to move toward more sustainability. Some of them might be only small changes, like adjusting the clock to start earlier in the day, when sun gets up earlier…

    One other idea is to move to LED lights. If 10% of our utilites comes from lighting, and LEDs will save us about 70%…. That cuts about 7% of our electric production. if utilities are about 2.5% of our $16.15T GDP… That’s $28B per year. Every year. As a perpetuity at 5% interest that would be a half trillion dollars ($565B). These are rough numbers, but the concept holds up nicely.

    GDP Factor $16.15
    		 T
    $ Energy 2.50%  $  
    403.75     		B
    % Lights 10%  $    
    40.38     		B
    Savings 70%  $    
    28.26     		B
    Perpetuity 5%  $  
    565.25     		B

  • Natural gas, the media’s failures, and you « The Cost of Energy

    Natural gas, the media’s failures, and you « The Cost of Energy:

    Ouch!

    “The Cost of Energy” Lou Grinzo blogs (and reblogs) about how unclear NatGas really is. It all has to do with the Methane released from the fracking.

    See the reprint of the blog at EthicsAndClimate.org from Dr. Brown.

    Sadly NatGas may really not be cleaner than Coal. How dirty is that!

    Here’s my comments over to Lou’s post.
    Okay, as always, your blogs are extremely informative, with lots of facts that are well substantiated. The Dr. Brown article is a real eye opener on fracking.

    Ouch! This is ugly. So we really don’t gain anything from NatGas except maybe fuel independence — and a wonderful improvement to our US trade (im)balance!:-(

    The question I have for all of this NatGas is here and now. Half of the NatGas in the US is flared. So when we say that NatGas is 50% cleaner than coal, do we count the other 100% that is flared in the making? Oh, wait, we aren’t saying that NatGas is actually cleaner than coal. It may not be!

    Don’t get me wrong, there’s a safety and a transport issue here with flaring…

    Good news is that much of the flaring is probably methane, right? So it could be worse, there might not be as much flaring. Simply releasing the methane would be a hefty magnitude worse?

    And, of course, the point is that there should be no (short-term) plan to switch to NatGas without some follow-on plan to switch completely to sustainable fuel/power.

    Much like our US energy policy, if there is one, the short-term plan is the only plan, even though it is based on exhaustible resources. That is, the plan is broken as designed.

    Non-sustainability, over time, has a way of giving a wicked whiplash effect. And somehow, everyone with this broken short-term plan feel warm and cuddly about it.

    Double ouch!

    ‘via Blog this’

  • NextEra Energy Resources commissions its 10,000th megawatt of wind energy – 12/18/12

    NextEra Energy Resources commissions its 10,000th megawatt of wind energy – 12/18/12:

    NextEra (FPL by an older name) now produces enough Wind Power to run a city the size of Chicago, or it will.

    Rather cool is to check out the company’s Sustainability Report. http://www.nexteraenergy.com/news/index.shtml

    This will give you an indication of what power generation companies should be talking about in terms of their production capacity and their carbon footprint.

    For example:
    “In 2011, 52 million tons of CO2 avoided
    from zero-emitting generation and
    customer energy efficiency programs.”
    And, compared to the industry, FPL — I mean NextEra — had:
    “90% lower SO2 emissions,
    80% lower NOx emissions, and
    51% lower CO2 emissions.”

    This is compared to the industry, so the “industry, may or may not be pretty…
    By NextEra is looking pretty pretty, by comparison.

    It appears that this will put NextEra firmly in the leadership position of Wind Generation in the USA.

    ‘via Blog this’