The Bigger Picture on Energy Efficiency Upgrades

And how exactly would you calculate a cost like that? There is no way to do such a thing.

Click to expand...

There certainly is a "way" to calculate many costs, probably not all, of a product which are not currently included in supply/demand price setting. The failure to include calculable costs and instead passing those costs on to society to pay, through taxes, health costs, environmental losses, etc., results in under-pricing of those products and consequently in demand greater than would result if the actual cost of the product was included in the price setting mechanism.

An example of many possible. A well known and common practice in the auto safety arena is the ability to reasonably calculate lives lost, injuries suffered, medical costs incurred, etc. as a result of not wearing seatbelts. Knowing those costs allowed for regulation requiring seatbelts, which raised the price of cars with seatbelts vs other modes of transportation without these costs. Ditto the multitude of other safety devices on cars. The elasticity of demand partly will determine the extent to which these price increases resulted in less demand for cars, but if demand was highly elastic, demand would have fallen for cars with these devices because of increased costs and probably would have increased for public transportation.

The ability to calculate the health costs of air and water pollution is quite advanced, and regulation has required some producers to add devices to reduce their pollution, which has raised the prices of the products of those producers. But other producers are not required to do so, which keeps their prices lower than the truer costs of their products. Instead, you and I, society in general, "pays" these costs rather than those who purchase the product.

This argument is soooo 2005.

Renewable energy was cheaper than fossils ten years ago when 'externalities' were applied, but the inability of people to understand the concept of externalities, or believe that their costs could be estimated prevented action at that time. Ten years lost.

Instead the goal posts were moved to just 'RE needs to be lower cost than fossils without incentives'.

Now that we are approaching that BS goal, and we all know that with any estimate of externalities' cost RE is 'stupid cheaper' for society, now we are going to argue about externality costs again? Really?

Some reading for those that need to be "dragged kicking and screaming" forward (and others):
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/02/17/cost-of-coal-500-billion-year-in-u-s-harvard-study-finds/

edit: I was thinking about the challenges to the coal industry and my neighbors in West Virginia. It seems the same state that may be most impacted by cutbacks on coal also has a great potential for RE. Lots of wind resources: http://www.wvcommerce.org/energy/renewable_energy/wind.aspx
and plenty of flattened mountain tops for PV, not to mention hydro. It seems ironic to me they are so mired down in coal.

If you want to plotz....my latest bill arrived and my usage for February was 5479 kWh.

My HP compressor died at the end of January, with ~15,000 run hours and 6.5 years of heavy use. It was done in (IMO) by a massive ice storm (about 1.5" of freezing rain, that entombed the unit) in mid-January. I usually check during those condition, but this time I didn't, and ran it frozen for ~12 hours. RIP.

So, coldest February in living memory, and me running only aux for heat for 10+ days!

woodgeek said:

If you want to plotz....my latest bill arrived and my usage for February was 5479 kWh.

Click to expand...

Wowzers! That's more power than I bought in all of 2014. One of my friends in VA was going through 120kWh per day during some of the cold spells. He occasionally sends me pictures of the readings on his TED 1001. His photos almost make me want to cry. House built in 1928, and added to multiple times.

Yeah. My 1960 house needed ~1100 gallons of #2, or 130 MMBTU per year, when I bought it in 2005. If I had heated with baseboards back then, that would have required 38,000 kWh. Of course, back then I could get winter power for 7.5 cents/kWh, so that would've only cost $2800, no so different from oil a couple years later.

As it is, I have dropped the heating load by ~50%, and heat with a heat pump that does about COP=2.1 on average, getting my usage for heating down to ~9000 kWh (when the HP is not down for repair ), costing about $1200.

When it got down to -1°F a couple weeks back, I still used 274 kWh in 1 day with the HP working.

woodgeek said:

I still used 274 kWh in 1 day with the HP working.

Click to expand...

And your neighbors were sitting in the dark?

That electric bill would cost me 847 bucks. F that.

14.7 cents a kWh here on the Jersey shore.

BrotherBart said:

Oil companies provide what oil users demand. They don't make anybody use it.

I retired from an oil major. And loved when protestors showed up at our headquarters. In cars.

View attachment 154174

Click to expand...

the "short bus"?

valuman said:

Taking the bus is a perfect example of this. While it still burns petroleum, it's much more efficient than driving alone in a car and quite likely the only viable option for many who are trying to reduce their use of it.

Click to expand...

this depends on several factors, first the busses are in constant motion where a single person may only use a fraction of the fuel in their "trip" now if the bus is constantly packed this being more efficient rings true, but if the bus is only transporting a person or two at a time in its route especially if it gets poor gas mileage its not really that efficient is it?

There are those who argue that an electric car charged by solar panels on your roof is still not green, so you cant please everyone.

stoveguy2esw said:

this depends on several factors, first the busses are in constant motion where a single person may only use a fraction of the fuel in their "trip" now if the bus is constantly packed this being more efficient rings true, but if the bus is only transporting a person or two at a time in its route especially if it gets poor gas mileage its not really that efficient is it?

Click to expand...

In the city near me, I have NEVER seen a bus that is more than 25% capacity. Often, there is only one or two passengers. Yet, city council refuses to disband the system because voters think it's important. It costs $1.50 for a bus token and the city kicks in just over that much again to subsidize the service. That's over $3. per ride. If they subsidized cabs and sold the buses, it would be cheaper and less environmentally harmful. Many of the cabs in our area are hybrids.
If a small city can't see the light, seems that we are all doomed.

The fact that bus transit exists is primarily because of social equity issues. There are many that simply can't afford a car or taxi.
As far as overall energy efficiency its not real good. At current passenger usage rates buses are actually less efficient per energy used per passenger distance traveled than cars.
However, as bus usage increases so does its overall efficiency.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transportation