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Monthly Archives

June 2014

Steps too Far- Don’t Forget the Customer!

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant No Comments
I haven’t taken any marketing courses like I haven’t taken political science courses – but this does not mean I, or anyone else, can’t learn some things about these two, or any other, subjects. The one thing I learned about marketing, and have repeated a thousand times within our organization is: it doesn’t matter what we think or what our opinions are for certain matters. We must view things from the other side. What does the buyer think? What are their “pain points”, concerns, anxieties, problems and bottlenecks? I think it is safe to assume that the vast majority of…
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Cooling System Temperature Control- No Savings

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant 5 Comments
Let’s skip the energy supply side this week and talk about thermostats used for cooling. Let’s broaden the discussion to include both programmable thermostats and “smart” or “learning” thermostats. The Nest falls into the latter group. Speaking for the Nest, which I have controlling my heating and cooling, it will learn user patterns by when, and to what level, the user changes temperature setpoints. It also secretly learns the users’ occupancy patterns by keeping an infrared eye on them. For instance, if the thermostat is in a heavy traffic area, it will learn to expect a lot of traffic, and…
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The Nuclear Option – Show Me the Love

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant 2 Comments
The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) announcement a couple weeks ago to decrease carbon emissions from power generating plants by 30% has kicked up a lot of cheering, but also mudslinging and absurd statements. As an engineer, I am an emotionless number crunching, skeptical coot constantly in search of reality and facts – trying to illuminate others who are swayed by hype, 24/7 news, and the internet. Opinions may change, and should, based on facts that do not. Friday morning I was stretching in my hotel room and reading The Wall Street Journal on my iPad when I came across this…
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Carbon Abatement – Is that Pulp in Your Teeth?

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant 3 Comments
Easy peasy lemon squeezy, to repeat a phrase of one rant fan a while back – that describes carbon slayers’ victory laps in the past couple years.  I am talking about the natural gas boom introduced by the development to near perfection of the hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling methods used on private land, mostly east of the Mississippi River.  Pile on top of this last Monday’s release of the EPA’s carbon goals by 2030, and we have about three or four weeks of blog material.  So, let’s get started. Natural gas is a wonderfully versatile energy source.  It doesn’t…
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Energy Program Evaluation, Not Activism

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant 4 Comments
In my day, we didn’t have peewee soccer, football, gymnastics, or tee-ball.  We had to improvise and make up game rules to play two-on-two football.  We had no gear; not even the cheap plastic crap from Sears.  We set the lawn mower as low as it would go to cut the sidelines and goal lines and made up the rules as we went.  We were a bunch of hayseeds throwing a rubber football around, inflicting bone-on-bone pain to each other, pretending to be in the NFL – and we liked it!This may sound like the Grumpy Old Man, but it…
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