The New York Times published story today on the National Parks Service’s response to an inquiry about Nantucket Sound, finding that is is eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. The site has not yet been listed, and if it were it could further hinder the beleaguered renewable energy development, but it would not be an insurmountable impediment. Continue reading
After a series of public hearings, the Cambridge City Council adopted the stretch energy code on December 21st. The stretch code is about 30% more efficient than the baseline building code and has different requirements for both the residential and commercial sectors. Visit the city’s website to learn more about the stretch code, which includes a summary table that outlines the new requirements.
By passing the stretch energy code, the city of Cambridge demonstrates its continued commitment to reduce its carbon footprint, by requiring higher efficiency standards for buildings, which produce 80% of all carbon emissions in the city. In addition, the city of Cambridge has now met one of the requirements of the Green Communities Act, that may provide grant funding for efficiency and renewable energy initiatives.
The stretch code is not without controversy, as expressed in the E2.0 July blog post. The city council weighed in feedback from the community and received recommendations for the code’s adoption from the Climate Protection Action Committee and the city’s Green Building Task Force. The new building code will go into effect on July 1, 2010.
For people who use real Christmas trees, the question comes up each year—should they switch to artificial? Our general rule is that reusable is better than disposable, but in this case, it’s not that simple.
The consensus (based on at least one peer-reviewed study) is that real trees are the way to go. Continue reading
Cross-posted on pragmaticenvironmentalism.com
For the past seven weeks, college students from around the region have been camping out on Boston Common on Sunday nights calling for Massachusetts to run entirely on clean energy by 2020. After a final, snowy sleep-out last Sunday, the demands of The Leadership Campaign were answered, sort of.
On December 7, state officials introduced a bill to create a task force charged with proposing ways to get Massachusetts to 100% clean electricity by 2020.
The resolution seems like a nice way of saying we’ve heard you, now bugger off, but then again Massachusetts relies on coal for only 25 percent of its electric power (about half the national average) and has set a goal of 20 percent renewable electricity production by 2020.
I wonder what it would take for the state to get to 100 percent “clean electricity”—the Leadership Campaign seems to include fossil fuel plants that use waste heat capture and recycling in its definition of clean—by 2020.
Image Credit: Ian Maclellan for The Leadership Campaign
This weekend we went on a cooking/cleaning binge, and one of the things that needed cleaning the most was the filter in our dishwasher. It was surprisingly easy to remove, but so disgusting that Jason and I took turns washing it out—neither of us wanted to deal with it for long. It definitely hasn’t been cleaned in the year we’ve lived in our apartment and, from the looks of it, for years before that, either. I didn’t even know it existed until I read Don’t Throw It Out!
Since the length of most dishwashers’ cycles depends on how much dirt they’re sensing coming off the dishes, cleaning the filter can make them more efficient. Although many newer dishwashers have self-cleaning filters, it should be one of the first things you check if your dishes aren’t getting completely clean.
I know what some of you are thinking: Why are you using the dishwasher in the first place? Isn’t washing dishes by hand more efficient?
People can be very proud of their particular dishwashing methods, but the best study to date, from the University of Bonn, has shown that a full dishwasher load washed by hand takes an average of 27 gallons. Even the most efficient handwashers used 8 gallons of water. By comparison, an Energy Star–qualified dishwasher uses less than 5.8 gallons per load.
Water conservation isn’t a big deal in the Northeast, but in this case the most energy is used in heating the water, so water consumption is a good yardstick. I probably wouldn’t run out to upgrade a five-year-old dishwasher just to improve its efficiency, but a 15-year-old dishwasher uses twice as much water as a new one. While some people argue that the production of the dishwasher makes it less efficient than handwashing, studies have shown that over a 15-year life cycle, energy use accounts for 95% of its environmental impact.
You could argue that with all the variables, it’s impossible to say exactly how your particular hand-washing stacks up to my particular dishwashing. But even with the benefit of the doubt given entirely to the by-hand proponents, it’s a wash, and in that case it’s much like the paper or plastic bag debate—not worth arguing about (except to say, use less of them). I’m not a big fan of handwashing dishes to begin with, so the dishwasher’s my choice. I’m just happy that my laziness is justified by facts.
Things we can do to make our dishwasher even more environmentally friendly include:
And, by the way, federal dishwasher standards are changing in January, and Energy Star standards are changing in July 2011, so if you’re planning on buying a new dishwasher, you might want to wait for the more efficient models. Check out Consumer Reports’ eco-site Greenerchoices.org for more buying tips.
Cross-posted on pragmaticenvironmentalism.com
Cape Wind is still embroiled in politics, and CommonWealth Solar may soon be. The state’s grant program to promote solar energy is effectively bankrupt. On the plus side, if you already have a photovoltaic installation or other renewable energy system, you can now sell much more electricity back to NSTAR.
One of the first home improvements Rachel and I made when we purchased our condo here in Cambridge this spring was a solar hot water installation on our rooftop.
The system we had put in uses vacuum tubes, a newer, more efficient type of solar collector than the black box flat panels of old. As a writer covering energy and the environment in Cambridge and China, I’d spent the past three years tracing this new and exotic technology back to the factories and cities in China where they are surprisingly commonplace.
I first read about the tubes three years ago in a story in the Boston Globe. A family in Newbury, MA was using a massive installation to provide hot water and heat for their giant barn of a house. A photo that went with the story showed their installation covered in frost on a cold winter day. Somehow, despite the cold, the tubes were still kicking out 120 to 160 degree water.
The secret behind vacuum tubes that allows them to work just as well in winter as summer is, just as their name suggests, a vacuum space. The diagram at the right shows how the tubes work. Sunlight passes through a clear outer glass tube and travels through an evacuated space or vacuum where all of the air has been sucked out. The sunlight passes through this vacuum and then hits an inner black pipe that absorbs the sun’s rays converting the sunlight to heat. What’s key about all of this is that whereas light rays can pass through a vacuum space, heat can not. All of the heat is therefore trapped inside by this highly efficient, transparent insulator.
After I read the story in the Globe I found out that there are thousands of factories kicking out these tubes in China and roughly 1 in 10 Chinese people use them for their hot water.
Six months after first hearing of the tubes, I toured the R&D center of one of these factories in Beijing for a story I wrote for New Scientist.
The story also led me to Rizhao, a city on the coast between Beijing and Shanghai where 99 percent of residents get their hot water from the sun. Here is a video I made from a rooftop of the city while talking with Rizhao’s mayor, Li Zhaoqian.
By the time we had a chance to buy a place of our own I was totally sold on the technology and couldn’t wait to put the tubes in on our own place. Evacuated tubes are still hard to come by in the US, however, and most of the installers I spoke with insisted they were no better than the flat panel solar collectors that had been around since the 70s. The estimates I got for flat panel installations, however, were twice the size of what I figured I could get by with using vacuum tubes. Then I found Bruce, a contractor with New England Solar Hot Water, who, like his company’s name suggests, only does solar hot water installations. Bruce and his crew had been doing vacuum tube installs for years and were stoked to hear I’d actually toured some of the factories where they get their parts.
In mid June they installed the collectors shown on the right that heat all of our domestic hot water; the water we use for showers, laundry, and in our sinks. The system is backed up by natural gas but on a sunny day like today, its unlikely we’ll need it. At 9am, with an outside temp of 43 F, our tubes are already a toasty 95 F and climbing.
One of the coolest things about Thanksgiving? Unlike Halloween, it’s not about stuff. While Halloween wouldn’t be the same without candy, costumes, and décor, Thanksgiving celebrates giving thanks for what you already have. What a relief for your pocketbook and the planet. —treehugger
Imagine if I offered someone a 17% return on their investment, that would help to prevent catastrophic long-term environmental consequences and improve the comfort and value of their home. Now envision this person shrugging off this offer and spending their money instead on upgrading their car to a fancy SUV that immediately devalues over time. Would you call this action “rational”?
This was the crux of the Behavioral, Efficiency, and Climate Change conference I attended this week, that looked into the psychological motivations of human beings, exploring why they continually make poor choices and uncover the motivating factors to help people make better decisions. Opening keynote speaker, Dan Ariely author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions, is a behavioral economist who explores such questions as, “Do you know why we still have a headache after taking a five-cent aspirin, but why that same headache vanishes when the aspirin costs 50 cents?
In one poignant example, he shared his experience as a bomb victim in an Israeli hospital for 4 months. When he had to get his bandages removed the nurses wanted to rip them off quickly rather than a slow undressing. He argued for the latter, but they said that quick removal was the less painful option. This brought him down the road of behavioral psychology and through his own experiments with volunteers, using interesting pain inducing techniques, he found that people preferred slow prolonged pain rather than intense shorter experiences. He brought his evidence back to the nurses who cared for him and upon learning about his findings one nurse exclaimed: What about my pain of having to experience your screams or the pain of adopting something new?
The four day conference explored many of the questions of why people make irrational decisions, all the while we think of ourselves as unbiased and objective. Take climate change, despite the evidence that our collective impacts are surpassing the worst case scenarios predicted by the IPCC, support for Climate Change action is on a decline. This can be primarily explained by humans being hard wired to deal with immediate threats. Here are a couple of other interesting reasons on why we do not shift our behaviors to fight climate change:
While many believe that the invisible hand of the market will save us, time and again this assertion has been proved wrong such as the recent collapse of ocean fisheries. Just last week, fishing nations agreed to a 30% decline in fishing yields, giving blue fin tuna a 60% chance of recovering in 15 years– tuna’s numbers have been decimated to 15% of their historical size.
Ultimately, some of the biggest findings from leading social scientists, economists, and industry experts revealed that humans are typically not moved by facts but by emotions. Our deeply held beliefs prevent us from integrating new, sometimes life saving information. I leave you with some exciting information provided by Hannah Choi Granade, lead author of the McKinsey report on “Unlocking Energy Efficiency in the U.S. Economy“. If our nation were to invest $520 billion dollars in upfront investments, we would capture $1.2 trillion dollars in energy savings– and that is without behavior changes. That would lead to a 23% decline in projected demand, saving enough electricity to power Russia and provide natural gas to Canada for a year.
Let’s hope our leadership comes through for Copenhagen and beyond!
In a previous post on this blog, I introduced the energy efficiency “Apathy Gap”. This follow-up describes the major roadblocks that stand in the way of bridging this gap.
Roadblocks on the Bridge
We need to bridge the Apathy Gap and we should start by clearing the major roadblocks: the reality that energy efficiency is not a social norm and the perception of energy efficiency as a “Big Brother” utility-backed priority. There are others, but these are particularly bad because they are fundamental obstacles to consumer recognition and internalization of energy efficiency priorities and because they can be broken down with the cost-effective digital media and social marketing strategies.
Energy efficiency is NOT a social norm
Consumers make decisions that align with social norms while home energy consumption largely exists in a vacuum. We don’t behave as if home energy is a scarce resource today because it has been delivered “cheap, reliable and plentiful” to us for generations. Obviously this needs to change if we are going to become a more energy efficient society.
Interestingly, academic research shows, and social marketing experience validates, that the most effective way to get consumers to change their behavior is to demonstrate that others like them already have. There are many ways to do this (see the “Big Brother” point below), but the most effective enable consumers to tell their own stories of becoming energy efficient on a real-time ongoing basis, ideally to a target audience that closely identifies with them, such as friends or self-selected peers, and already emulates them in other ways.
OPower (formerly Positive Energy) has taken another approach by analyzing utility company data and adding messaging to utility bills that compares customers to efficient neighbors. The company also gently prods customers to make no- and low-cost behavioral modifications to conform. The approach essentially transforms the utility bill into a teacher’s report card and well-meaning nudge, but I wonder how effectively it motivates consumers to deepen their commitment to energy efficiency, like by investing thousands of dollars in home performance renovations.
Perception of energy efficiency as a “Big Brother” utility-backed priority
In human communications, who is saying something is usually far more important than what is being said. Unfortunately, utility company brands are typically faceless, boring, and irrelevant. Decades of television advertising and direct mail campaigns in some states have trained those consumers to associate energy efficiency with utility companies. Consequently, consumers process conventional energy efficiency outreach as “the boring old utility company bugging me again.”
Instead of focusing on transforming their brands at this time of unprecedented concern over privacy and the environment, utility companies are taking on major reputation risks by treating their customers’ energy consumption data like it is proprietary, by pressuring their customers to conform to proprietary standards and by considering default control of in-home appliances and HVAC systems via smart grid technology.
All these strategies expose the already lackluster brands of most utility companies to significant reputational risk, principally in the form of customer backlash. Look no further than PG&E’s PR fiasco with its Bakersfield smart meter rollout. Utility companies need to learn to navigate today’s hyper-connected community networks if they aim to convince consumers to embrace smart meters and energy efficiency.
Alex Patriquin is a marketer, entrepreneur and energy efficiency advocate. Prior to founding his latest company, he worked for Compete.com, a digital marketing intelligence platform, as a market researcher for leading search and online media companies. His work at Compete was widely cited in media publications like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Wired.
Alex lives in Cambridge. He also blogs at DigitalVerdure, and can be found on Twitter.