In December 1989, Clark Griswold’s impressive lighting display caused a peaking power plant to come on-line somewhere in Illinois.
Fast-forward to 2016, however, and the Clark Griswolds of the world (or at least of New York state) have switched to LED string lights in droves. The technology revolution of this seasonal staple has resulted in a substantial drop in energy use.
New York’s grid operator reported on Monday that holiday-light energy use has declined by about one-third from 2010, largely due to the switch to LEDs. This year, holiday lighting will add about 750 megawatts of load, down from about 1,150 megawatts in 2010.
Of course, the peaking power plant in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation was a Hollywood contrivance, as most regions of the U.S. have ample electricity supply in wintertime In New York, for example, this winter’s peak demand will only require about half of the available electricity resources in the state.
The move to LEDs is not limited to holiday season, however. (According to GE Lighting market research, that season begins around Veterans Day.) LEDs are now cost-competitive with compact fluorescent bulbs and often provide superior performance. People are also starting to understand that LEDs do not only come in the harsh white light that was the only option just a few years ago.
As for Christmas lights, the advantages of the low-powered bulbs are considerable. The minimal power needs — about 75 percent less than incandescent — mean that the lights can run off of battery packs, eliminating annoying cords for everything from window candlestick lights to outdoor displays. Some exterior holiday lights even run on solar power. Also, Energy Star-certified string lights can last about 10 times longer than traditional light strands, and they don’t heat up.
Read more (Greentech Media)
President-elect Trump should look to clean energy and energy efficiency if he wants to make good on his jobs promise to Americans. Energy efficiency already accounts for nearly 1.9 million U.S. jobs—ten times more than oil and gas drilling, and 30 times more than coal mining.
Energy efficiency has long been touted—rightly—as the easiest and cheapest way to cut climate-changing pollution, while saving customers money on their utility bills. And there’s plenty of evidence that it packs a really big punch—energy efficiency has contributed more to meeting growing U.S. energy needs in the last four decades than oil, gas, and nuclear combined.
But it also is a significant job creator as a new analysis by the nonpartisan groups Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2) and E4TheFuture shows, with 245,000 more jobs projected to be added over the coming year alone. That’s a 13 percent growth rate!
And the United States could create even more clean energy jobs. The analysis released last week shows that strengthened local, state, and federal efficiency policies, as well as increased utility investment in efficiency programs, could create many additional energy efficiency jobs–and further reduce harmful pollution from power plant generation, strengthen the electricity grid, and lower energy costs for everybody.
Read more (NRDC)
Billionaire philanthropist and investor Bill Gates is launching a $1 billion fund, called Breakthrough Energy Ventures, to invest in new forms of clean energy.
Gates has gathered a group of about 20 like-minded investors, including Silicon Valley venture capitalists John Doerr and Vinod Khosla, former hedge manager John Arnold, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, Bloomberg LP founder and former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg, Alibaba founder Jack Ma, and a handful of others to join him in the fund.
In a post on his Gates Notes blog, Gates said the fund will invest in “scientific breakthroughs that have the potential to deliver cheap and reliable clean energy to the world.”
“We need affordable and reliable energy that doesn’t emit greenhouse gas to power the future—and to get it, we need a different model for investing in good ideas and moving them from the lab to the market,” Gates said in his post.
Read more (Forbes)
Gwendolyn Christon, the 61-year-old owner of the IGA grocery store in Isom, Kentucky, has been working at the store since she graduated high school in 1973. This fact—plus her honeyed voice and warm nature—goes a long way toward explaining the effortless rapport she has with her customers. From her store’s local produce to its fresh fried chicken—the kitchen crew starts cooking every day at 5:30 a.m.—Christon’s IGA is a community hub: It serves 5,500 customers a week and employs 25 people. Christon considers these workers family, and she takes seriously her role in helping them make a living. She also saw jobs in the area disappearing, and that fewer jobs meant lower sales. So when she began looking closely at her profit-and-loss reports for a way to stay viable as sales shrank, her eyes went straight to the store’s $11,000 monthly electric bill.
To solve the problem, she met with Les Roll, the enterprise development project specialist at the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development (MACED), a 40-year-old Appalachian advocacy group based a couple hours away in Berea. She had learned about a MACED program, Energy Efficient Enterprises, that does energy-efficiency retrofits on commercial buildings. Roll told Christon they could loan her the money to do the upgrade. Christon was incredulous that such a good deal was possible, but sure enough, with a $418,000 loan from MACED, she retrofitted her lighting system in 2015 and the HVAC this year, tasks that involve energy-saving changes like swapping in high-performance lighting and installing programmable thermostats. When the loan is paid off—she’s aiming to have it done in 10 years—Christon will clear an extra $3,300 in profit each month.
Read more (Fast Company)
NRDC filed a “friend of the court” brief on December 9th to support New York State in defending against a legal challenge that could have an impact on the right of New York and other states to adopt policies to promote clean energy.
Several fossil fuel power companies and related trade associations filed a lawsuit in October challenging a controversial part of the state’s groundbreaking new Clean Energy Standard: the contentious Zero Emissions Credit (ZEC) program to help keep several nuclear plants alive in order to preserve their low-carbon emissions.
They argue that under a federal law called the Federal Power Act, New York State does not have the authority to make decisions about the state’s electricity mix and that such decisions must be made instead by a federal agency—the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). NRDC doesn’t support the ZEC program, but we wholeheartedly disagree with this legal claim. Although their lawsuit is aimed only at the ZEC program, the fossil fuel generators’ argument, if successful, could create uncertainty for scores of state renewable energy policies in states across the country. With President-elect Trump considering climate skeptics to head key federal agencies, we need to make sure that states like New York can continue to lead on clean energy and climate.
The background
Thanks to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s leadership, New York has recently made quantum leaps forward on climate and clean energy policy. A key part of this progress is the state’s Clean Energy Standard, adopted by the state’s Public Service Commission in August, which requires that 50 percent of the electricity consumed in the state come from renewable sources like wind and solar by 2030. New Yorkers have expressed resounding support for that “50 by ’30” renewables goal.
Read more (NRDC)
Nine years ago the Commonwealth of Virginia produced a state energy plan that included among its objectives the cutting of electricity usage by 10% over ten years. That directive landed on the desk of Phil Powell, planning director for Dominion Virginia Power, Virginia’s largest electric utility.
After surveying a host of energy efficiency strategies, Powell focused on one called Conservation Voltage Reduction (CVR). The idea behind CVR is to save energy by reducing the voltage on electric lines.
Electric companies must maintain their tap lines between 114 volts and 126 volts. Keeping within the low side of that range saves electricity, but power companies err on the side of caution. Voltage varies by distance from the sub-station and local fluctuations in the electric load; dropping below 114 volts can cause damage to machines, appliances and other devices. If it were possible to measure voltage on the grid with greater precision, Powell knew, Dominion could eke out a meaningful reduction in electricity consumption.
Read more (Bacon’s Rebellion)
The forces driving clean energy are likely to continue progressing regardless of efforts by President-elect Donald Trump to reverse them, a leading expert in energy policy said last week at Stanford University.
“I’m not saying it’s a good thing. We’re going to lose a lot of good stuff, but it’s not as bleak for this purpose as one might expect,” said Hal Harvey, CEO of Energy Innovation—an energy policy research firm based in San Francisco—during a Nov. 28 lecture at Stanford. The Stanford Precourt Institute for Energy released video of Harvey’s lecture on Monday.
Harvey briefed the Stanford audience on a paper he published earlier this year, “Climate: How To Win,” in which he describes ten successful energy policies and the six qualities they share. The paper considers policies like efficiency standards for fuel and appliances, building codes and renewable portfolio standards, and it notes the shared qualities of successful ones: they set goals, reward performance, require continuous improvement, etc.
Read more (Forbes)
Five years ago, ACEEE found that energy efficiency could reduce projected 2050 US energy use by 40–60%. As a result, ACEEE established a strategic goal to reduce projected 2050 energy use by 50%. We thought it was time to check on our progress and ask whether our goal still seems reasonable. We find that energy use has been stable in recent years, reversing historical growth, a very positive development that is due in significant part to increasing our energy efficiency. But if we want actual declines in energy use, we will need to double down on our efforts.
We also thought it would be useful to look at potential savings in terms of cost-effective efficiency policies in order to more clearly outline what needs to be done to reach this 2050 goal. So today we release a new white paper with the results of our new analysis. These energy savings are important, because they can save the nation billions in energy bills, create domestic jobs, protect the environment, and yield numerous other benefits.
Thirteen policies we’ll need to ramp up
We applied 13 efficiency packages to the reference case projection of future energy consumption in the 2016 Annual Energy Outlook (2016 AEO), prepared by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration (EIA). The packages are:
- Appliance and equipment efficiency standards and complementary voluntary efforts
- Zero net energy (ZNE) new buildings and homes
- Smart buildings and homes
- Home and commercial building retrofits
- Behavior change in buildings
- Industrial efficiency improvements
- Combined heat and power (CHP) systems
- Light and heavy duty vehicle fuel economy improvements
- Reductions in passenger vehicle miles traveled (VMT)
- Reductions in freight transport energy use
- Aviation efficiency improvements
- Reductions in losses from transmission and distribution (T&D) systems
- Electric power plant efficiency improvements
Our analysis accounts for both overlap between measures, and direct and indirect rebound effects.
Read more (ACEEE)
On December 6, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced the launch of a new partnership to jump-start zero energy schools across the country and better enable states and school districts alike to design, construct, and operate these cutting-edge, energy-saving schools. The launch of the Zero Energy Schools Accelerator, part of the Better Buildings Initiative, brings together seven school districts, two states, and several national organizations committed to working collaboratively toward the goal of increasing zero energy design and construction in the education sector and among local communities across the nation. A Zero Energy Building is an energy-efficient building where, on a source energy basis, the actual annual delivered energy is less than or equal to the on-site renewable exported energy.
“Schools in this country spend about $8 billion each year on energy, about a quarter of which is wasted from inefficiency, which costs taxpayers and school kids alike,” said David Nemtzow, director, Building Technologies Office (BTO). “This Accelerator will help schools significantly reduce energy while also helping them save money, freeing up much-needed funding that could be rededicated to other learning priorities.”
The Accelerator was launched as part of an in-person tour of a recently completed zero energy school, the Discovery Elementary School located near the nation’s capital, in Arlington, Virginia. The tour, led by Dr. Erin Russo, principal of Discovery Elementary; John C. Chadwick, assistant superintendent for Arlington Public Schools; and Catherine Lin, energy manager for Arlington Public Schools, highlighted several design features including 100% LED lighting, solar thermal water heating for the school’s kitchen to reduce its energy load, low-flow plumbing fixtures to save water, and more than 1,700 mounted solar panels.
“Discovery is highly efficient because the effort to build it was highly collaborative from the start and continues to be today,” said R. Anthony Hans, CMTA, an engineering consultancy that worked in tandem with VMDO Architects as a part of the Discovery Elementary design team. “We track systems data in collaboration with the school to ensure that we can get in and fix anything that is malfunctioning on a weekly basis. Continuous collaboration is one of the main reasons that this schools is performing 10-20% better than our energy model.”
Read more (EIN News)
Declining costs of wind, solar power and energy efficiency is helping to drive a shift from fossil fuels generally — and coal in particular — to renewable energy and energy efficiency. From the first half of 2015 to the first half of 2016, renewable energy use rose by 9 percent while coal use in the U.S. dropped by 18 percent, according to the Energy Information Administration.
What does this shift mean for jobs? From 2014 to 2015 solar employment increased by 6 percent while employment in upstream oil and gas and support services dropped by 18 percent. This reduction reflects both declining coal consumption and continued reduction in labor intensity. There are now more jobs in the U.S. in solar than in either oil and gas extraction or coal mining.
What would a continued transition from fossil fuels — particularly coal — to renewable energy and energy efficiency mean for U.S. employment? The answer depends largely on how many jobs each sector creates — that is what is the employment intensity of each energy sector? The electricity sector involves millions of jobs, and arguments for one form of energy versus another usually involves claims about how many jobs investments in each form of energy will create.
Read more (GreenBiz)
