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efficiency

Residential Efficiency, Operations, and Maintenance

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Last week, I received an email from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy with the headline, Housing, Energy, and Consumer Groups Applaud Senate Opposition to Raising Energy Prices for Americans. “In a bipartisan vote today, the U.S. Senate rejected an amendment to block a federal proposal that will lower household costs by ensuring more new homes are built to up-to-date energy codes.” In other words, the Senate supports a federal proposal to lower household energy costs. This additional quote hooked me, “Brand-new homes that waste energy saddle their residents with high bills for decades, so up-to-date codes are critical.”…
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Micro Rant Harvest

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It’s fall, and that means it’s harvest season. So, this week, we’re providing a cornucopia of micro rants and information. I’m Alexa, and I’m Here to Help This headline caught my eye, ‘Alexa, I’m cold’: Government teams up with Amazon for energy saving campaign. The world’s fifth largest company, dominant retailer, data center behemoth, and tech giant partners with the government to use its in-home listening device. What could possibly go wrong? I recommend 1984, the book. EV Repair Black Market The Wall Street Journal reported, via email, that totaled Teslas from Western nations are being shipped to Ukraine and a…
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Image shows graphic of a portfolio and text "Reorganize Portfolios and Redirect Incentives for 10X Impacts."

Reorganize Portfolios and Redirect Incentives for 10X Impacts

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A couple weeks ago, I quickly read this article, Cracking the Code - Aligned Incentives, on EnergyCentral.com. It concerns incentives for high-performance employees, but my read was about incentives for efficiency programs. It applies to that too.  Myopic Focus I wrote about short-term focus many times, including last week – if your lips are chapped, stop licking them – short-term gain for longer-term pain. Efficiency portfolio administrators, typically utilities, want long-lived measures, deep energy savings, and instant savings. The demand for instant savings is like harvesting the carrots at day 30 rather than at day 70 maturity. SEM Myopathy As…
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A Franchise Organization for Decarb

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About every six months, while participating in a strategic planning, leadership, marketing, or business development meeting, I hear “we should be doing decarb,” or “we’ve been talking about decarb for years, and that’s all we do is talk about it.” “We’ll be right back here talking about it a year from now.” Whoa! First, what is decarb? My guess is most people would say reducing the consumption of hydrocarbons in a catalytic process with airborne oxygen to produce heat which may be used for heating, power generation, or locomotion – while producing coproducts of gaseous water, carbon dioxide, and minuscule…
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Specious Beliefs in Code Gods

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I received a lot of feedback on last week’s Code Compliance Villains, which described blunders that occurred as part of my high-efficiency boiler installation. Such mistakes would likely erode 50% of the estimated savings claimed in a deemed savings document. Efficiency issues included: Improper outdoor temperature sensor location giving false inputs to the controls. High boiler water temperature setpoints resulting in lower operating efficiency. Heat exchanger piped in parallel, rather than counterflow, resulting in higher boiler water temperatures and less efficiency. The problem with efficient equipment and energy codes is that equipment is tested in the lab, and hands are…
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energy rant with doug scott

Special Rant Vlog with Performance-Based Ratemaking Guru, Doug Scott

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This week, we’re continuing our discussion on GEBs (Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings) with our special guest Doug Scott. Doug is the Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at Great Plains Institute and is a great resource for performance-based ratemaking which is a key component of GEBs for both customers and utilities. Check out our fun conversation with Doug!
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carbon reduction

Opening Salvo to Grid-Interactive Buildings

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To help accommodate intermittent renewable solar and wind power generation while minimizing grid and supply-side energy costs, the Department of Energy, its national labs, and our industry are exploring possibilities to use buildings as grid resources. The acronym de jour is GEBs, for grid-interactive, efficient buildings. What about the I? A focus group decided that gebs sounds better than giebs; therefore, GEBs. Potential GEB benefits include: Accommodating large penetrations of renewable energy by shaping loads to take excess power when it is available for use when it is not available. Decarbonization. Energy conservation. Less-expensive energy supply. More customer control over…
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Case Study in Energy Transition

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No one will confuse me with Simon Sinek, a great speaker, but one thing I can do is nail my timeslot. If I’m mindful of the time I have available, 20 minutes, etc., I will nail it – except one time. That was last fall as I was doing my fourth rendition of electrification for the Wisconsin Public Utilities Institute. I update my presentation every year for current data and trends because the audience deserves it. But I tried too much stuffing for that bird. After several practice runs, I was consistently 10 minutes over the time limit. I thought…
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Energy Demand Management

Energy Demand Management for Mad Dogs

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Does every decision boil down to a binary choice? A binary choice is a decision between two alternatives, like yes or no, and do or do not.  This applies to determining what ‘is’ and ‘is not’ a factor in decision making. For example, deciding that the color of a car you may be considering ‘is’ or ‘is not’ important is a binary choice. This is how we slice through the peanut butter, decide what matters, and get on with it. We narrow down and hone into what is essential. Binary decisions are primitive, as demonstrated in a December post featuring…
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zero net energy

Zero Net Cost for Zero Net Energy – Melt the Calf

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Have you ever thrown a cat into the deep end of a swimming pool? Neither have I, but I bet they wouldn’t like it. Likewise, status-quo program evaluators will not like what’s coming down the pike for several reasons, starting with one in this post for residential and commercial new construction programs. A few weeks ago, I read a post from fellow small-time blogger (speak for yourself, Jeff) Joel Gilbert. His topic was low carbon foods. He wrote, “But, I offer this observation :  I have never seen such a groundswell of enthusiasm around these ideas.  Perhaps it is being…
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