It’s an interesting time for energy in Chicago: Coal plants providing power to the city have been shuttered. Massive programs are underway to retrofit old buildings. Smart streetlights and electric buses will soon transform neighborhoods.
Chris Wheat, the city’s chief sustainability officer, is at the center of it all.
Previously a member of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s innovation team, Wheat was tapped as the sustainability chief after the departure of Karen Weigert in February 2016. He’s long championed the use of data and analytics to help manage city government, and he’s now tasked with applying that to the city’s ambitious sustainability plans.
Wheat led the Retrofit Chicago Residential Partnership, a program to advance efficiency for residential properties. The initiative won the Energy Star Partner of the Year Award from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy for promoting efficiency measures in 2017.
Read more (Midwestern Energy News)
If we want a livable climate for future generations, we need to slow, stop, and reverse the rise in global temperatures. To do that, we need to stop burning fossil fuels for energy.
To do that, we need to generate lots of carbon-free electricity and get as many of our energy uses as possible (including transportation and industry) hooked up to the electricity grid. Electrify everything!
We need a greener grid. But that’s not all.
The highly digital modern world also demands a more reliable grid, capable of providing high-quality power to facilities like hospitals or data centers, where even brief brownouts can cost money or lives.
The renewable energy sources with the most potential — wind and solar — are variable, which means that they come and go on nature’s schedule, not ours. They ramp up and down with the weather, so integrating them into the grid while maintaining (and improving) reliability means finding clever ways to balance out their swings.
Read more (Vox)
Enter the search term “100% renewable energy” into Google and you will find fierce debate. Is the possibility of 100-percent-renewable energy a myth? Or is the world already close to achieving this goal?
This debate tends to underemphasize energy efficiency. But recent research makes a case that energy efficiency is important in any discussion about 100-percent-renewable energy.
In August 2017, International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) published a working paper, “Synergies between Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency.” IRENA finds that energy efficiency can enable a more rapid shift to renewable energy in all countries and sectors.
“Our Renewable Future: Laying the Path for One Hundred Percent Clean Energy,” a 2016 book by Post-Carbon Institute fellows Richard Heinberg and David Fridley, makes a similar argument for holistic energy planning that considers energy efficiency and citizen buy-in.
To approach any 100-percent-renewable energy scenario, improved energy efficiency is needed in both energy-supply sectors and energy-consumption sectors. More than 60 percent of energy produced in the United States in 2016 across all sectors was wasted, according to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, so there is plenty of room for improvement.
Read more (Clean Energy Finance Forum)
The antique-style lamps that are fast becoming a design necessity for retro bars, hip restaurants and chic homes from New York to London are helping to save the Earth—and keep people buying.
The old-fashioned bulbs, which look like the inefficient incandescent technology patented by Thomas Edison in 1878, could encourage people to change their lightbulbs more than once a decade, even as the world moves to greener lamps.
By rearranging LED chips onto a strip inside the bulb instead of in a clump, bulb makers found they can satisfy the innate human desire for warmer, natural light, which the first generation of LED bulbs failed to offer.
“People are looking for that sparkle and the cozy and warm effect that you see in incandescent bulbs,” said Kristof Vermeersch, head of global product management of LED spots at Philips Lighting NV.
Read more (Bloomberg)
For most of the United States, this is going to be a frigid winter. With temperatures on the East Coast registering, in some places, colder than Mars, and areas in the south getting snow for the first time in 28 years, this is shaping up to be a historic cold spell. Keeping your home warm and comfortable will be paramount. Of course, buying the most efficient appliances and devices – such as those with the ENERGY STAR label – is a sure-fire way to build in energy savings for the long run. But for everyone in a pinch right now, here are five easy, inexpensive tips for a warmer, more efficient home or apartment:
Heating Problems. There’s no way around it: staying warm is a priority during the winter. But did you know that heating typically makes up about 42% of your utility bill? By combining proper equipment maintenance, upgrading your insulation and changing your thermostat settings, you can save roughly 30% of your energy bill, while also reducing carbon emissions. Even if you can only do one of these things – like lowering your thermostat when you’re away or sleeping – you can see impressive monthly savings.
Read more (Alliance to Save Energy)
Extreme cold weather from the “bomb cyclone” is affecting a large swath of the country this week from the South through the Northeast. More energy than usual is needed to heat homes, and in regions where many houses and residential buildings are heated through electricity, this has meant increased electricity usage (36 percent of U.S. households use electrical heating). Spikes in electricity demand can strain the grid and test the limits of available supply; in Tennessee, South Carolina and Virginia, for example, utilities urged residents to take measures to reduce power use at peak hours.
Some of This Electricity is Actually Going Toward Heating the Outdoors
Houses and buildings vary widely in how well they contain heat. On average, 25 to 40 percent of heat produced in residences is leaked outside. And the residential sector accounts for about 20 percent of total U.S. energy use. We won’t hazard an exact number, but the point is that a good chunk of the extra electricity demand this week is going toward heating the outdoors, sending hard-earned dollars to the trash and generating emissions for no good purpose.
Energy Debate Focuses on Producing Electricity
Unfortunately, much of the energy policy debate this week concerning the cold weather turns a blind eye to these opportunities and instead focuses on the narrow question of electricity generation. The playing field for this debate is a rule proposed by the Department of Energy (DOE) concerning the resilience of the electrical grid; the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has through Wednesday of next week to announce a final action on the proposal. Unfortunately, the proposal failed to realize the grid resilience benefits of improved home weatherization. This focus takes the massive amounts of wasted energy as a given, as if it can’t be changed.
Read more (Alliance to Save Energy)
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) announced today the release of two documents designed to spur investment in commercial solar projects.
The first document is a contract that combines the benefits of a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) to provide customers with a valuable new financing option.
“The PACE PPA further builds out SEIA’s suite of model contracts so all solar transactions can be efficiently negotiated and financed,” said Mike Mendelsohn, SEIA’s senior director of project finance & capital markets. “Our goal is to broadly open the U.S. commercial real estate sector for solar deployment, and the PACE PPA is a valuable tool to allow that progress to happen.”
Read more (Solar Energy Industries Assoc.)
In an advance State of the State proposal released yesterday, Governor Cuomo committedto proposing “a comprehensive and far reaching energy efficiency initiative by Earth Day, April 22,” including a new 2025 energy efficiency savings target. This promise is an important first step to transforming the state into a national energy efficiency leader. Energy efficiency is fundamental for climate progress and integral to the state’s clean energy platform. The governor’s vision for New York to go big on energy efficiency comes at a crucial time, as President Trump and Congress pursue their agenda to try to decimateimportant federal energy efficiency programs. Of course, the devil is in the details and the exact energy efficiency framework that develops over the next few months will be crucial to making sure that New York fully delivers on the governor’s commitment. NRDC will be all-in working to make sure that the governor’s energy efficiency vision becomes a reality by Earth Day and that New York delivers a resounding victory for the forces of climate resistance in the face of the Trump administration.
Read more (NRDC)
When it comes to the interrelated topics of climate change and the country’s energy resources, politics tend to generate the big headlines. However, innovation and corporate initiatives provide for countless untold positive news stories about energy optimization, improved bottom lines and other economic, social and environmental benefits. One rapidly emerging innovation, efficiency-as-a-service (and the financing solutions it provides) is driving a host of efficiency projects and new private sector investment.
Regardless of current administration policies on climate change, the Clean Power Plan and the Paris Agreement, U.S. companies small and large – and many with global footprints – are attuned to the value of energy innovation, responsive to a range of local and national regulatory requirements and concerned with the ramifications of climate change. If corporate America is going to truly fill the leadership void, energy efficiency planning and spending must be integrated and massively scaled. There are still too many companies implementing change on an ad hoc basis and they are likely to experience deleterious effects down the road.
A recent survey of business leaders on energy innovation and business resiliency, conducted by Siemens and the Harvard Business Review, reveals some of the angst being felt by executives. Many respondents say they are improving energy efficiency in facilities, but nearly 50% of companies acknowledge they pursue energy reductions on an ad hoc basis, and only 28% have resiliency plans in place.
Read more (Alliance to Save Energy)
It may not have gotten a lot of attention yet outside the wonky world of energy efficiency.
But within that world, concerns are mounting that one of the key parts of the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda may involve the Energy Department’s appliance standards program. The program — low-profile, but quite consequential both to consumers and to the environment — sets rules governing the energy consumption levels of many familiar products and appliances. Think refrigerators and dishwashers, as well as many other pieces of consumer and industrial equipment.
The bottom line is rules setting standards for such common household appliances as refrigerators could be facing delays that, if they go on long enough, could spark litigation, uncertainty within the industry, and perhaps even an unnecessary cost to the environment.
The Obama administration pushed the standards program — rooted in the National Appliance Energy Conservation Act of 1987 and succeeding laws — into overdrive. As part of its ambitious climate policies, Obama’s team finalized more than 40 new standards. Each reduced U.S. energy use, as well as customer expenses and greenhouse gas emissions.
Read more (The Washington Post)
