Perpetual Innovation

Category: power usage

  • 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

  • Iris From Lowes. PowerMeter from Google

    Iris:

    Setting up a smart home gets a whole lot easier. This helps to monitor the home energy use as a kind of side benefit.

    One of the advantages of doing this security and home management stuff yourself (DIY) is that the likelihood of actually utilizing it, and utilizing it well increases.

    The cost is about $10 per month for more services and longer record times, however?

    This probably can’t replace the home monitoring system like ADT. They live-monitor and use the telephone line (not the INet); The Homeowner’s Insurance company likes that type of monitoring for home and fire.

    Consider using power monitoring with such visual monitoring tools as those provided free from Google’s PowerMeter: http://www.google.com/powermeter/about/

    Simply monitoring power is the key. Two studies reviewed by Google show that a community that engaged in power monitoring had a 71% residential engagement. In a pilot study in Dubuque, Iowa with IBM showed a community realized 11% energy savings simply from monitoring and metering their power usage using SmartMeters… Well, and usage/behavioral changes in usage, of course.

    Just thinking, a little energy savings now could save us all a bundle of money this year and every year thereafter. And, oh, by the way, it would save a lot of impact on the environment. Smart Meters sound smarter and smarter.

    The greenest kilowatt is the one never used at the meter, never distributed down the transmission lines, never generated in the powerplant and the full source never mined or pumped.

    Just thinking.

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  • Daylight Saving Time – Saving Time, Saving Energy… EE Efficiency…

    Daylight Saving Time – Saving Time, Saving Energy:

    Remember to move your clocks forward an hour today. Your laptops and cell phones should give you the right time. But, while you are at it, PONDER THIS….

    This is actually a pretty good play on energy efficiency and smart(er) energy policy.

    The idea is that spending more wake time when the sun shines will result less energy usage. The greenest possible killowatt is the KW saved.

    Although Daylight Savings Time was first mentioned by Ben Franklin it was a century later that it fully got its start:

    “Though mentioned by Benjamin Franklin in 1784, the modern idea of daylight saving was first proposed in 1895 by George Vernon Hudson [8] and it was first implemented during the First World War. Many countries have used it at various times since then; details vary by location. ” (Daylight savings time, 2012, para. 2).

    The savings turns out to be somewhat sporadic and not conclusive. But it ranges from 0% to about 4% for residential savings of electricity use. A California study showed only a modest savings of electricity (.4% to .2% for winter and summer) but a significant savings of money because of the peak-time shift in usage (California Energy Commission, 2011). The Department of Energy study in 2008 (related to prior years) estimated 0.5% savings. (But this study has several limitations.)

    With about 2.5% of the US GDP devoted to electricity, the savings over a year would be somewhere between $2B and $20B savings per year.  The back-of-the-envelope computations are shown in the following table.
    Electricity as % of GDP:
    2.5%
    Growth in US GDP:
    2.0%
    ($T) US 
    Est. Elect
    DST Savings
    DST Savings
    DST Savings
    DST Savings
    Year
    Economy
    Usage $B
    0.5%
    1.0%
    2.0%
    4.0%
    2012
    $15.30
    $382.50
    $1.9
    $3.8
    $7.7
    $15.3
    2013
    $15.61
    $390.15
    $2.0
    $3.9
    $7.8
    $15.6
    2014
    $15.92
    $397.95
    $2.0
    $4.0
    $8.0
    $15.9
    2015
    $16.24
    $405.91
    $2.0
    $4.1
    $8.1
    $16.2
    2016
    $16.56
    $414.03
    $2.1
    $4.1
    $8.3
    $16.6
    2017
    $16.89
    $422.31
    $2.1
    $4.2
    $8.4
    $16.9
    2018
    $17.23
    $430.76
    $2.2
    $4.3
    $8.6
    $17.2
    2019
    $17.57
    $439.37
    $2.2
    $4.4
    $8.8
    $17.6
    2020
    $17.93
    $448.16
    $2.2
    $4.5
    $9.0
    $17.9
    2021
    $18.28
    $457.12
    $2.3
    $4.6
    $9.1
    $18.3
    10-yrs Savings
    $4,188.3
    $20.9
    $41.9
    $83.8
    $167.5

    The 10 year savings is between $21B and about $200B savings for the US. Multiply that times all the northernmost and southernmost countries in the world, and the savings could add up.
    Of course this is a paltry amount of savings compared to something like switching away from incandescent light bulbs.
    TIP: When changing all the clocks in the house, it is advised to check/change the batteries in smoke detectors and pressure in fire extinguishers. Also, while at it, check all the electricity use appliances and replace the most frequently used incandescent lights with compact fluorescents… or even better with some of the new LED lights that use a fraction of the electricity.
    But let’s take our savings wherever we can get them.

    DST does help many retailers, so arguably it helps the economy in that respect if in no other!-)

    Shop ‘til you drop, starting when the sun comes up.!

    References
    California Energy Commission. (2011). Saving time, saving energy: daylight savings time: Its history and the reason we use it. Retrieved March 11, 2012 from: http://www.energy.ca.gov/daylightsaving.html
    Daylight saving time. (2012, March 11). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 14:31, March 11, 2012, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Daylight_saving_time&oldid=481293297

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