Archive for the ‘efficiency’ Category

The future of sharing, sharing for the future

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

Earth2Tech’s Katie Fehrenbacher offers her take on Rachel Botsman’s forthcoming book What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. Fehrenbacher highlights the positive environmental impacts of peer-to-peer sharing and how the Internet is enabling the practice.

The article gets to the heart of the matter:

In the U.S., Botsman says “80 percent of the items people own are used less than once a month,” and collaborative consumption is “the reckoning of how we can take this idling capacity and redistribute it elsewhere.”

The ultimate idea is to have our economy value units of usage over units sold, and then the notions of “eco-efficiency and business efficiency align,” explains Botsman. In that world, sustainable design and longevity of goods become much more important in the production process. Car sharing might represent one of the largest available efficiency gains and Botsman says that “one car share gets approx 7-8 vehicles off the road.”

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US energy use down, efficiency too? UPDATE

Friday, August 27th, 2010

The numbers are out on how much energy the country used in 2009: less than we did in 2008. This isn’t surprising given the economic situation.

We’re also using more renewable energy, particularly wind power. This isn’t surprising either, given the growth in the wind energy sector in recent years and the stimulus funding.

The numbers, from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, show the same trends as last year.

Energy efficiency has also stayed consistent. The US lost 58% of the energy it generated in 2009 and 57.5% in 2008. Transportation energy losses were 75% and electricity sector losses were 68% in both years.

However, look a few years further back and you’ll see that our national energy efficiency is declining. The US lost 56% of the energy it generated in 2006. Transportation losses were 71% and electricity sector losses were 65%.

I combined the 2006 categories cars, freight and aviation into the equivalent of the 2008 and 2009 transportation category, so there could be a discrepancy there. But as far as I can tell there haven’t been any methodology changes.

So what’s the story? A couple of percentage points might not seem like a lot, but it represents a huge amount of energy. That’s about 2 quadrillion BTUs, which is nearly double the combined amount of wind, solar and geothermal energy the US generated last year. More importantly, it shows we’re moving in the wrong direction.

If anyone has an explanation or more details, let me know.

UPDATE 8-31-2010

Turns out there are some changes in how the numbers were derived from 2006 to 2008 and 2009, particularly the electricity generation numbers, according to A.J. Simon, an Energy Systems Analyst at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

But the main reason for the apparent drop in efficiency is a shift in where we spend our energy.

“The slight decline in efficiency that you calculated is due to the slowly changing distribution away from the industrial sector and towards transportation,” said Simon.

This helps put in perspective the importance of efficient transportation.

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Digital energy equals visible energy

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

I had a good conversation today with Chris Mines, head of Forrester Research’s green IT market research practice. We talked about how businesses are coming to grips with energy and carbon issues.

A key point Chris raised is the institutional gap between IT and facilities departments. The IT department is responsible for the flow and management of data, and the facilities department for the flow and management of energy.

Does IT bear the cost and facilities gain the benefit of bringing the two together? Chris said it’s a hurdle organizations have to overcome as they work out how to lower their energy costs, secure their energy supplies and manage their carbon footprints.

This brought to mind an article I cowrote for Network World over a decade ago about tying embedded systems into organizational networks. One of our examples was the University of North Dakota, where they used the campus network to integrate environmental sensors into the school’s HVAC system.

The university saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by using the campus network to tie in the sensors. But what jumps out at me now is that the university saved $750,000 a year — 25% of its energy costs — by having automated real-time control of its heating system.

The project was run by the university’s physical plant department. Facilities departments today can buy these technologies from environmental control vendors like Honeywell, Johnson Controls and Siemens.

IT departments are addressing the energy issue by getting their own houses in order and becoming more efficient energy consumers. Green IT is largely about more efficiently powering data centers and reducing computational loads through virtualization.

So what does it mean to bring information and energy together?

I think it boils down to bringing efficiency and conservation to new heights. People are motivated to protect the environment and organizations are motivated to cut costs, but we know that it’s difficult for people to change their behavior when they can’t see the consequences of their actions. Telling people to remember to turn off the lights only goes so far.

If we can come up with effective, unobtrusive ways of monitoring our energy and carbon budgets in real time, most of us will probably spend more wisely.

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Smart metering and me

Thursday, January 15th, 2009

A major motivation behind smart metering is that giving people information about their energy use leads them to change behavior and reduce energy consumption. An Earth2Tech story highlights the latest development in the field: linking smart metering to online games. The idea is to provide additional incentive for reducing energy use by introducing competition via a points system.

This gives me the opportunity for two personal-point-of-pride plugs.

The first is a precursor to this idea in use at my alma mater, Oberlin College. The school has set up a Campus Resource Monitoring System that displays each dorm’s energy use online — green for below average, yellow for average and red for above average. This allows the dorms to compete with each other to reduce their energy use. The school recently installed indicator lights in dorm lobbies so students can see their dorm’s energy use status as they come and go.

The second is a story by my wife, Kimberly Patch, back in 1993 for PC Week (today’s eWeek) where she started the magazine’s Internet coverage. The story (alas, eWeek doesn’t have stories that far back online) was about the local power utility in the town of Glasgow, Kentucky, which used its cable control network to provide television and Internet services to the community.

The company broadcast the community’s overall power use in real-time on a spare cable channel and found that people changed their behavior; they shifted the times they used energy-intensive appliances to avoid contributing to peak demand. The change was enough that the utility avoided building a new powerplant. Here’s a report (pdf) about the proto smart metering that the utility prepared for the Department of Energy in 1999.

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LEDs can be smart as well as green

Monday, December 29th, 2008

Solid-state lighting — lightbulbs made from light-emitting diodes — dramatically reduces electricity use and greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s also poised to usher in an era of smart lighting. You’ll eventually be able to control properties of light, such as polarization and color, on-the-fly in indoor lighting, microscopes, computer displays, headlights, telecommunications and greenhouses.

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