Recent articles in USA Today and California’s Flex Your Power e-Newswire discussed the phenomenon known in energy efficiency circles as “take back” or the “Snackwell Effect” (see “Consumers Can Sabotage Energy-Saving Efforts,” and “The Snackwell Effect: Consumers Sabotage Energy-Saving Efforts“).

Stanley Jevons first described the take back effect in 1865, so this is nothing new. Jevons observed that new efficient steam engines decreased coal consumption, which led to a drop in coal prices. But the lower prices meant that more people could afford to use coal, and so coal consumption increased.
The “Snackwell Effect” takes it’s meaning from the habit of people on diets who eat lots of low-cal snacks that add up to many times the calories of a regular snack. The example given in both articles mentioned above is a West Virginia couple that bought an energy efficient washing machine to replace their old inefficient one. Their energy bills were no different after the conversion. Turns out they were doing more loads of laundry, even washing one piece of clothing in one load, because they were lulled into complacency by their energy efficient purchase.

I asked Jim McMahon, the head of the Energy Analysis Program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), about the Snackwell Effect and appliance energy use. I recently heard him speak about the great efficiency gains made between the first energy crisis brought on by the Arab oil embargo in 1973, and today. Those gains are significant; refrigerators today use about half the energy on average than they did in the 1970s. “This effect [Snackwell Effect] has been studied for a long time, [it was] formerly called the rebound or take back effect,” he says. One 2001 study concluded that for every gain in energy efficiency, about 10% is taken back by an increase in energy use. Greater air conditioner efficiency, for example, may mean that people lower their thermostats, since they expect their energy bills to be lower, and this eats into the efficiency savings. “I think that there are a number of energy-using devices where consumers do not exhibit the Snackwell effect, such as refrigerators or televisions. In those cases, in my view, the usage behaviors are unrelated to the cost of energy, at least for most households in the United States,” says McMahon. He does admit that more study is needed in this area. A 10% take back effect is significant, but certainly not a barrier to serious energy efficiency improvements.

Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez, a sociologist, studies human behavior and energy use for the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE). “The relationship between energy efficiency and energy consumption is not as straightforward as it may initially appear and as some people like to portray it. The trends show that: 1) residential energy consumption increased by roughly 57% between 1970 and 2005; and 2) residential energy consumption per capita increased by only 7%”.

According to Ehrhardt-Martinez, a bigger problem than the 10% of energy lost due to the take-back effect-or the Snackwell Effect-is the proliferation of energy using, albeit more efficient, devices in American homes; lifestyle choices, such as the dramatic increase in the size of homes while families got smaller; population increase; and the “invisible” energy, such as standby power or phantom loads, that is hidden from consumers. “However,” says Erhardt-Martinez “if we were able to combine efficiency improvements with better lifestyle choices (i.e. smaller, more energy efficient houses), smart purchasing behaviors, and improved information mechanisms that allowed consumer to actively manage their energy consumption, then we could have a much more dramatic impact on both household level consumption as well as state and national level consumption.”

Do you remember the last time you felt that the Federal Government was on your side? I know; it’s been a while. One function of government, to protect consumers from fraudulent claims by manufacturers, may be making a comeback.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), which develops product testing for the Energy Star program, recently reached an agreement with LG, one of the world’s largest manufacturer’s of appliances and consumer electronics, over some LG refrigerators that failed to live up to the Energy Star label.
DOE allows manufacturers to test their own products. Some LG refrigerators were tested with their icemakers turned off and earned the Energy Star label, meaning that they are among the most energy efficient refrigerators on the market. But consumers don’t generally turn their icemakers off. The LG refrigerators in question, with French doors and through-the-wall ice and water dispensers, can use up to twice as much energy than is reported on the refrigerator labels.

If you own one of the notorious refrigerators–go to the LG special web site to find out–then LG will send someone out to make some modifications, and hand you a check to cover all the hidden energy charges for the life of the refrigerator. Home Energy’s Senior Executive Editor Alan Meier estimates that LG will be spending around $150 million on home visits and energy rebates.

Is LG the only manufacturer to circumvent performance standards? Probably not, so we are watching the news for more DOE settlements.

Do you know how to spot hidden energy guzzlers in your house? If you get your gas and/or electricity from PG&E, you can compare your home energy use over time and spot those peaks and valleys that indicate something is wrong, or something is right. If your electric bills shoot up soon after buying a new refrigerator, TV, or other appliance, and it isn’t due to a change in the weather, you can easily spot the culprit.

If you have an online account, login, click on the “Billing” link, and then click on “Usage History”. What’s really cool, at least for energy geeks like me, is that you can pull up graphs showing two years of electricity use, gas use, and electricity and gas charges. And you can pull up a graph that superimposes your gas and electricity use with a graph of “heating degree-days” and “cooling degree-days”. The degree-days give you a snapshot of the load on your heating and air conditioning systems–more on that later.

We planted several young trees at our home in October, including a Mission Fig, a Japanese Crabapple, a multi-trunk Magnolia, and a Copper Beech. Planting in the fall gives the trees a chance to put down some roots before the winter so that, in the spring, they don’t bloom spectacularly and then die from lack of a good grounding in the soil. We took out most of our lawn so that this spring we will use much less water. There is another fall activity that I keep putting off–changing our furnace filter. I think I am averse to climbing around in the attic where our air-handler resides, due to a fear of falling through the ceiling.

I feel good that those new trees are sucking carbon out of the air as we speak. But a recent talk at Berkeley Labs, where Home Energy’s offices are located, made me think much bigger. Vinod Khosla is the founder of Khosla Ventures and earned his chops as the founding Chief Executive Officer of Sun Microsystems. Khosla Ventures exists to “assist great entrepreneurs determined to build companies with lasting significance.”

Khosla, a tall, thin, 60-ish, short-grey-haired man who looks like he runs marathons, threw out some questions on a big screen to get us all interested. “What if more coal plants meant cleaner air? What if more driving meant less carbon? What if a million year crude oil production cycle were reduced to hours? What if engines were twice as efficient, cutting world oil consumption in half?” There are companies supported by Khosla Ventures that are making progress on those “what-ifs.” For example, a company called Pax Streamline is working on turbine designs inspired by natural forms that will significantly increase the efficiency of wind turbines, power plants, and HVAC systems.

Living Homes is creating cheap, prefabricated, highly resource efficient and really swell looking homes. Khosla talked about making flue gases from coal-fired power plants into cement or fertilizer (that’s how coal plants will someday clean the air).

The title of Khosla’s talk was “Extrapolating the past or Inventing the Future.” He thinks we need quantum leap changes in the way we design car engines, the fuel we use; how we manufacture cement, steel, and glass; and the way we build buildings. He spiced his talked with phrases such as “80% more efficient,” “3- or 4-fold increase in storage capacity,” and “100 miles per gallon diesel.”

This radical way of thinking and imagining is more possible given 1) the Obama administration coming to Washington, 2) the cost in treasure and lives for our fossil fuel dependency, and 3) the crash in the financial sector and the stock market. The same old way of doings things (think incremental steps and short-term gain) isn’t working anymore. Except for tree planting. That’s always good, even if having a small effect on planetary atmosphere. And I like figs.

(Go here for a video of Khosla’s talk. Then go plant a tree and invent the future.)

Architect Nabih Tahan’s home in Berkeley was built to Passivhaus standards. It needs no furnace or air conditioning and is comfortable year-round.

I missed writing my blog entry two weeks ago because I was at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers writing poetry with about 60 poets from around the country. We created community through expressing artfully what is almost impossible to express any other way.

One of the highlights of the week was going on nature walks a few mornings with David Lucas, a naturalist. (He is the author of Wild Birds of California and revised the classic guidebook Sierra Nevada Natural History.) His insights about birds and other life forms found their way into many a poem written that week. Did you know that some bird species have more that 120 distinct tunes that they learn to sing in a certain order? I didn’t. The really hot singers can do a shuffle of songs but not miss one of the 120. Just before dawn, neighboring birds duel with one another with song variations. And their brains are so much smaller than ours!

Imagine memorizing 120 poems and being able to recite them all in a row, and then getting up early the next morning for a poetry slam where you mix and match stanzas; starting, for example, with some Wordsworth, then a little T.S. Eliot, mix in some Emily Dickinson, and end with some “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg.

So, What has this to do with green homes? Lucas showed us the force of nature that in all things wants to survive. At Squaw Valley we created poetry that in a short time connected us to one another. That feels to me like surviving in a culture that wants us always competing with each other. Creativity seems as natural as eating, and I think it’s how we are going to get out of the present environmental crisis we are in.

This morning I heard about some scientists at MIT who discovered a catalyst that could very well make the conversion of sunlight into hydrogen easy and inexpensive. And a few weeks ago I visited a house in Berkeley built to Passivhaus standards. The standards were developed in Austria but are new to the United States. The architect and occupant of the home I visited in Berkeley, Nabih Tahan, is bringing the concept in this country. A Passivhaus is so well designed that it doesn’t need a furnace for heating or an air conditioner for cooling, even in Germany. Because the house is so well sealed, it needs to be ventilated mechanically. That is done through a heat recovery ventilator, a device that pulls up to 80% of the heat from exhaust air and transfers it to the incoming, fresh air. These houses use very little energy.

The poets and the architects are doing it, and the birds are doing it with their tiny birdbrains. We all can learn to adapt creatively to different ways of thinking about our environment, different ways of building buildings, and different ways of living in them.

Yeah Alaska! Yeah Brazil! Yeah California?

The people of Juneau saved electricity in a hurry– when electricity
went to 55 cents per kilowatt-hour

In Juneau, Alaska, an avalanche on April 16th downed transmission lines and cut off the city from it’s cheap source of hydroelectric power; electricity prices jumped by 500%. Alan Meier-a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Home Energy Magazine’s Senior Executive Editor, and an expert in how to cut energy use in a hurry-was called in to help. Within a few weeks the city reduced its electricity use by 30%. Remember that we reduced our electricity use in California by 15% in response to Enron and other power companies manipulating the power markets in 2001? Alaska reduced its electricity use by twice as much and did it in a hurry.

How did the Alaskan’s do it? They lowered their thermostats. They bought out all the CFLs from the hardware stores and you bet they turned out the lights when they left the room-wouldn’t you if electricity cost 55 cents per kilowatt hour? They took shorter showers and used cold water to wash their clothes. The city ran out of clothespins since so many people were hanging out there clothes to dry (anecdotal evidence suggests it takes two days to dry jeans).

The people of Juneau bought power strips in record numbers, so that they could really turn off power to all those devices that still use power when they are supposed to be off, like TVs and stereos, microwave ovens and cell phone chargers. And there was a lot of talk from city leaders, on the radio, and among neighbors and classmates about the best ways to save.

(Note: You generally use more energy when you wash your dishes by hand rather than washing full loads in a dishwasher-not everything they did helped.)

We may not face rolling blackouts in California this summer, but we probably will in the near future. There will be other natural disasters like Juneau’s that spike the price of electricity or natural gas. How will we save energy in a hurry? And here’s a bigger question: How will we keep saving energy after the crisis is over?

The Juneau transmission lines should be up and running by June 8. Will the people who were used to cheap electricity fall back into old habits when prices decrease? Brazil faced a similar crisis in 2001 when severe drought shut down hydroelectric plants all over the country. They cut their electricity use by 20%, and they haven’t changed their consumptions habits very much since the drought subsided.

We are still dependent on a diminishing store of fossil fuels mostly located in politically turbulent parts of the world where even the hint of conflict raises oil prices. For Californians, Alaskans, Brazilians, and everyone else, it might be best if we permanently changed our energy use habits and considered every day an emergency that calls for conservation.

Each big storm with a high tide and an
onshore wind takes a big bite out of Sarichef.Photo By Shishmaref Erosion and Relocation Coalition

In an email this week from John Woodward, an Alaska builder and Home Energy author, he wrote, “I put together a working/management group to manage the relocation of the community of Shishmaref sustainabely. They live on Sarichef, a barrier island that global warming is wiping out.”

Shishmaref is home to a small community ofInupiat, a Native American tribe. John is working with the Inupiat Tribal Government, the City of Shishmaref, and the Shishmaref Erosion & Relocation Coalition, to salvage as much of the village as possible before it goes under water and move it, along with the island inhabitants, to a new plot of land in the interior of Alaska.

The Army Corp of Engineers gives the island about 5 or 10 more years of livability. But as the ocean and permafrost warm and the ocean rises, unpredictable storms take a heavy toll on the island. “Each big storm with a high tide and an on-shore wind takes a big bite out of Sarichef,” says Woodward.

The community is seeking funds for a comprehensive alternative energy plan, an anaerobic pump/methane generator, and the retrofit of all existing buildings, including more than 110 homes, community buildings and a school. The homes will be retrofit to use less than 5 Btu per square foot to heat. Heating load calculations can be pretty complicated, but in general, contractors recommend furnaces that can provide 30-50 Btu per square foot to heat homes in the Bay Area. To reach such a high level of energy efficiency, the Shishmaref homes will have the insulation installed on the outside of the structure, a technique that Woodward has successfully used in the past. The new village will have the look and functionality of the Inupiat culture as defined and designed through community planning.

“Our community planning process involves community charettes with the whole community gathered in the school gym,” say Woodward. “The goal of these meetings is the rough-out of a comprehensive community plan for sustainable relocation of the existing salvageable infrastructure and the development of the new village site.”

The Inupiat will build their new village to suit their needs and lifestyles, to be efficient, and to be in harmony with its surroundings-in other words, sustainabely. Let’s keep an eye on our northern neighbors, who may teach us some valuable lessons. How long before whole towns in California will have to relocate because of water shortages? We all witnessed what happened in New Orleans a few years ago. How long before towns and cities on the coast of California will have to move inland or be seriously reconfigured because of the rising Pacific Ocean?

You can e-mail John Woodward with questions, comments, ideas, and offers of help atpanuktuk@yahoo.com.

Your house may not be your biggest contributer to globalwarming. Credit: Jim Gunshinan.

My focus in this blog had been on green homes, but there are other areas of our lives that account for our total carbon footprint–how much carbon we are responsible for adding to the atmosphere–a measure of our contribution to global warming. Our houses and apartments, but also our cars, air travel, and the food we eat all contribute.

Don Fugler, who does research for the Canada Housing and Mortgage Corporation, estimated the amount each area of our lives contributes to our carbon footprint. He used a hypothetical family of four (two adults, two kids) in Ottawa, with a medium-sized house (2,400 square feet), and two cars (Ford Explorer and Honda Fit) to do the calculations. Both parents work and travel about 20 miles roundtrip to work each weekday. The kids travel a few miles each day back and forth to school. Both parents make a total of five trips to Toronto and five trips to other places each year for business, and the family goes on a yearly ski trip to Whistler by air travel, and back and forth by car to visit relatives in Nova Scotia once a year.

For us Californians, replace Ottawa with Oakland, Whistler with Lake Tahoe, add a trip to Hawaii, and subtract most of the energy used for heating a house, and I think we come close to the Canadian example.

The folks who brought us the movie also gave us a niftycarbon calculator. Use it to measure the size of your carbonfootprint (go to www.climatecrisis.net/takeaction). Credit: www.climatecrisis.net

Our hypothetical family, according to Don’s calculations, emits about 13 tons of CO2 from their house, about 14 tons because of air travel, about 10 tons from their cars, and about 5 tons from the food they eat (including growing, shipping, and waste disposal). Notice that the highest amount is from air travel!

The folks who brought us the movie An Inconvenient Truth also provide an online calculator so that you can more accurately calculate your contribution to global warming–the site also gives good information on how to reduce your carbon footprint. Don recommends that we conduct more and more of our business using the Internet instead of traveling far from our homes, live close to our jobs in dense urban areas with good public transportation, ride our bikes a lot, and all become vegetarians.

These 5 folks are full of bright ideas. Image Source: PiccoloNamek

ACI trains home performance professionals through national and regional conferences and through the Web. Last week I participated in my eighth ACI national conference. The annual conference is where I go to network; learn about all aspects of home performance; recruit authors for Home Energy Magazine; and best of all, be inspired.

Here are a few of the people that I ran into last week who inspire me:

Don Fugler does research through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. He developed the Garbage Bag Air Flow Test. He rides his bike to work year round in Ottawa, and wears suspenders. He has a dry sense of humor and has toppled any lingering stereotype I had about Canadians. He told a crowded room at the ACI meetings in Pittsburgh that the way we live in our houses, the way we use our cars, and the way we travel in the air contribute about equally to our carbon footprints. The way we eat contributes a lot also. A pound of beef is responsible for a heck of a lot of greenhouse gases released. I don’t know if Don is a vegetarian, but I think he probably is.

Jim LaRue is a sort-of-retired home performance contractor from Cleveland, Ohio. He designed a really efficient and healthy house for a group of nuns in Ohio and wrote about it for Home Energy. He has also written for the Cleveland Green Building Coalition and for the magazine a Greening Your Home series of articles. I don’t know anyone who has worked harder to create healthy, efficient, and affordable housing in Cleveland. He’s retired but so far no one has noticed.

Linda Wigington has been with ACI since its beginning and is now the manager of program design and development. At the ACI Summit on global climate change held at the Pacific Energy Center in San Francisco last summer, which she was instrumental in bringing about, she talked about how she lived one whole winter in her home outside of Pittsburgh while never raising her thermostat above 50 degrees Fahrenheit. She is passionate about finding ways (mostly not involving such personal discomfort) to drastically reduce the energy use in existing homes to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Kate and Paul Raymer, founders of Hayoka Solutions, a green building and green building advocacy organization, announced the Starting from Home Challenge at the ACI meetings, an annual contest for post secondary school students around the country to create 70%–90% energy savings in existing homes with real people living in them. Hayoka is a Lakota Indian word describing someone who causes others to see things in a completely new way. Paul is an expert in healthy home ventilation. Don’t get him started on attached garages. “Why would anyone park their car in their house?” Paul often wonders.

I could go on, and on, and on. These are just a few of the people who inspire me. I hope they inspire you as well. 

I don’t think there is one big solution to our energy problems and the environmental problems related to the use of fossil fuels–there are lots of little solutions that in the end add up to a big solution.One of those little solutions I have been reading a lot about lately is a Drain Water Heat Recovery Device (DWHR). It looks like part of something you would find hidden in the hills and hollows of Appalachia that makes moonshine, but a DWHR device is a simple copper coil that you put around your shower drain that recovers some of the heat from your shower water. Cold water is circulated through the coils, gets heated by the drain water, and then flows into your hot water tank, or into your shower and hot water tank.The device is simple, effective, and doesn’t require much (like, no) maintenance. Drain water heat recovery devices contribute to large energy savings in laundries and in multifamily buildings, but will also work very well in single-family homes–as long as there is room under the showers. My one-story house in Walnut Creek is not a good candidate for such a device.

The simple workings of a drain water heat recovery device.Credit: gfxstar.ca, Inventroment Energy Solutions.

Canadian researchers from Natural Resources Canada tested the effectiveness of several DWHR devices at the Canadian Centre for Housing Technology.For an Ottawa household in which four people each take 12 minutes showers every day, a DWHR will save $150 a year in energy costs (at present, Canadian dollars are about equivalent to U.S. dollars). That’s about three times as much energy saved as the energy used to run an energy-efficient 20-cubic-foot refrigerator for a year. Over the 30-year lifetime of the DHWR, which costs about $800 including installation, the device will save the household close to $3,000.

The Canadian researchers created a Web-based Drain Water Heat Recovery-Energy Savings Calculator where building contractors, plumbers, and homeowners can go to estimate the cost effectiveness of several DWHR devices on the market. You just need to know the model of the device, the temperature of your shower water, estimated shower times, and so on. Right now it is set to work for Canadian locations. For U.S. homeowners, you have to pick a city in Canada. The calculator will be updated as newer technology is developed and tested.Here are some Web sites where you can find out more about DWHR devices that were submitted for testing at the Canadian Centre for Housing Technology:

• Power Pipe www.renewability.com
• ECO-GFX www.gfxstar.ca
• Retherm www.retherm.com

If a million households in the United States installed DWHR devices, we’d save a collective $150 million in annual energy costs, or about the equivalent of 1.25-billion kWh of electricity–or a ginormous amount of carbon dioxide in air from the natural gas not burned and electricity not generated.

Over the course of a week of working with concrete,this landscaping job produced only one bucketof wastewater. Credit: Ann Hutcheson-Wilcox

As a lifelong Catholic and former Catholic priest, I often find myself wishing that the Church would stick to what it knows best: the Sacraments. I wish the Pope would declare a 10-year moratorium on anyone with any authority in the Church saying anything at all about sexuality.

But sometimes the Vatican gets it right.

Polluting is a now a recognized social sin, along with another act that tends to wreck havoc on the environment, that is, contributing to the growing social and economic divide between rich and poor. The rich contribute inordinately to pollution and the poor suffer inordinately from it.

The Church has installed photovoltaics (PV) on the roofs of some Vatican buildings, and has recognized the scientific consensus that humans contribute to global warming. One of my teachers in the Divinity program at Notre Dame, Fr. Tim O’Meara, said that the Church responds quite slowly to crisis and change. “It spends twenty-five years denying the problem, twenty-five years quietly addressing it, and twenty-five years claiming that this is the way we’ve always done things.” So by historical standards, the Church is moving with lightning speed.

One of my coworkers at Home Energy told me that she viewed the new sin as another tool in the environmental education toolbox. Through her experience as an environmental organizer, policy analyst, and fundraiser, she has learned that individuals are motivated to take action on behalf of the environment due to personal belief or their own unique life experience. While working with contractors on her own home, she has often found it challenging to explain to people in the trades why she feels that it is her responsibility to go beyond business as usual. Last week’s announcement that “la contaminación ahora es un pecado” (pollution is now a sin) came just at the right time. The contractors she was working with to rebuild a retaining wall made primarily of reused concrete and found objects figured out how to avoid dumping any wastewater into her gutter, which empties directly into the local creek, a home for native rainbow trout. If pollution were not yet a sin, they may not have been as willing to consider the alternatives. Over the course of a week of working with concrete, they produced only one bucket of wastewater.

The new sins do present a challenge to the imagination of poets like myself. In Dante’s Divine Comedy there is no place in hell for unrepentant polluters. Now that the Vatican has named pollution a serious social sin, we may have to invent a punishment, and a metaphorical place in hell for polluters. Let’s see-tyrants, assassins, and warmongers swim in a river of boiling blood, and the wrathful tear each other to pieces with their teeth-maybe polluters will have to tread water in that twice-Texas-sized trash dump floating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for all eternity, or at least until we decide how to clean it up.