The window testing facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (Photo: LBNL)

Windows may not be as sexy as solar panels or electric cars, but they play a major role in energy efficiency. Buildings are responsible for 40% of the country’s energy use, which is why researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are trying to improve windows by making them smarter.

As Berkeley Lab engineer Howdy Goudey demonstrates in his lab, studying windows involves some pretty complex physics.

“So we use an infrared camera to study heat transfer in windows,” he says, pointing to a normal-looking video camera that senses heat instead of visible light. Goudey uses the camera to study how windows lose energy.

For the most part, windows simply aren’t good insulators. They leak heat in the winter when we want a warm house and they let heat in during the summer. Many homes still have single-pane windows, which were the name of the game in the 1940s and 50s when California was booming.

That changed when energy prices sky-rocketed in the 1970s. Double-pane windows became common. And then came double-pane windows with invisible coatings, which are twice as efficient. Today, they make up more than half of windows sold.

Measuring Low-e Windows

Goudey demonstrates how they work by turning on two heat lamps. “You’ve seen them in a diner keeping food warm," he says, putting them behind two identical-looking double-pane windows.

We stand in front of one window, which feels like standing in the sun. “But if you hold your hand to other one, compared to this one, it’s very dramatic,” Goudey says.

An infrared image of two windows during winter conditions, as seen from the inside of a room. The window on the right has a low-e coating while the window on the left doesn't. Warmer temperatures mean a better insulating window. (Image: LBNL)

The second window is cooler because it has a low-emissivity coating, or low-e, as its known. It’s an invisible layer of metal on the glass that acts as an insulator. And it does one more thing.

When sunlight shines directly through a window, it provides both light and heat. Most of us want light coming in, but heat is the last thing we want on a hot summer day. So, the coating on the window blocks the heat from the sun (in the form of infrared light), while letting in the visible light. This is known as solar gain. (Check out this guide for more on what to look for when buying windows.)

“If you have a few windows in a room with direct sun on them, its equivalent to running a little space heater. So it’s significant energy,” says Goudey.

However, on a cold winter day, the extra heat from sun would be helpful. “You’d actually like that solar energy to come in and help heat the space,” he says.

That’s why researchers are working to develop a “smart” or dynamic window that can change based on the weather or temperature.

Using Nanotechnology to Make Windows Smarter

At Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry, Delia Milliron grows tiny nanocrystals that will eventually become a window coating.

“Nanocrystals are very small,” says Milliron. “Way smaller than you can see with your eyes. And so that’s why when we spread them out in a coating on the window, you don’t see anything.”

Milliron’s coating is dynamic. In one setting, it lets in both the light and heat from the sun. But, apply an electric charge of a couple volts and the window blocks the heat from the sun, while still letting light in.

Ideally, these windows would be controlled by your heating and cooling system, which could adjust them based on the weather. Milliron and her team are currently working on the coating itself. Their next step is to build a full-scale prototype. Other companies also have similar kinds of dynamic windows in the works.

Windows as Energy Suppliers

This changes the conversation about windows, says Stephen Selkowitz, head of building technologies at Berkeley Lab. Before, windows were energy losers. Now, windows could actually make buildings more efficient. And that means big cost savings.

“If we add up all the energy and economic impact of windows in the US, it costs building owners about $40 billion a year. And I’d rather have the $40 billion in my pocket than sort of sending it out the window,” says Selkowitz.

Smart windows could start appearing in larger projects like office buildings next year and should be more widely available to homeowners in three to five years. But they could be twice as expensive as today's windows. Selkowitz expects the cost coming down as manufacturing ramps up.

“The biggest expense in replacing windows is often the labor of replacing the window. And if you already decided to put a new window in, the marginal cost of going to a much better window is almost always worth it,” he says.

So, while it may be only a few tech-geeks that spring for smart windows at first, Selkowitz says that leads the way for the rest of us – and for new buildings codes, where technology can have a much broader impact.

A "smart" demonstration home set up by Southern California Edison. (Photo: Lauren Sommer)

California's electric utilities have installed more than 11 million smart meters in homes and businesses around the state. Which means for the first time, customers can see how much electricity they're using every hour, instead of once-a-month when the bill comes.

Consumers use less energy, studies have shown, when they can see that real-time data. But getting customers to pay attention in the first place may be the biggest hurdle.

Digital smart meters provide a stream of energy use data, which industry analysts say has the potential to remake our homes. That's evident just outside of Los Angeles, where Southern California Edison has set up a "smart" demonstration home.

"Above us we have photovoltaic solar panels to the left used for generating electricity and a solar thermal water heating system," says Cynthia Miller as she leads a tour of the "Smart Energy Experience."

"You might notice that we have some nice appliances," she says, pointing to the kitchen. The house is a green gadget-lovers dream. There's an electric car in the garage, LED lights, and a "smart" washing machine that communicates with the dryer.

"They're able to talk to each other so the washer can tell the dryer what its washing and the dryer can determine the optimal heat setting for that particular load of laundry," Miller says.

There's also a small screen in the kitchen that shows how much power the house is using at any given moment. Miller demonstrates what happens when you turn the toaster on. "And we'll see a jump here… and there we go. The jump happened and it's 1.7 kilowatts at 41 cents per hour."

The real intelligence of this house is its ability to communicate with the electric grid through its Home Area Network. So on a hot summer day, when SCE is cranking out power, the utility could send a message to your house that kicks your home into conservation mode.

"You notice my lights have dimmed, the ceiling fan turned on, the shades are coming down," says Miller. The thermostat turns up to 73 degrees and the air-conditioning shuts off. SCE would offer this as a voluntary program with financial incentives to sweeten the deal.

"You know, what we anticipate is the awareness is really going to drive a change in behavior for our customers because this information is compelling," says Miller.

Swimming in a Sea of Data

Of course, our homes today aren't quite as advanced. That's evident every time I log into my PG&E SmartMeter account.

My home energy use on PG&E's website.

My account shows charts of my home's daily and hourly energy use. But, for the average consumer like me, it doesn't tell me a lot. I see a few spikes in the chart where clearly my husband and I used more electricity, but what caused it? Neither of us could figure it out.

"For most people, including for me, that really is not very useful information," says Jim Sweeney, director of the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center at Stanford University.

Studies have shown that consumers reduce their energy use by as much as 10 percent when they have smart meter data like mine. Sweeney says they also studied that with a group of Google employees.

"The results have been very disappointing. In the first month, there was a significant reduction of energy use, but by end of three or four months, they were back to the same amount. This becomes an interesting toy or gimmick for people at first, but then they get tired of doing it and they revert right back to the old behavior patterns," Sweeney says.

No One Said Change Was Easy

Sweeney says using electricity in our homes is a lot like going grocery shopping in a store with no price tags. "There are flank steak and chuck steak and hamburger. But you've never seen a price tag ever in a grocery store. How good a shopper would you be with that little information?"

There are reasons to pay attention to energy, whether it's to reduce your carbon footprint or save money on your utility bill. But even though electricity may seem expensive, Sweeney says it's only a small part of the average household's income.

"We use 2.3 percent of our disposable personal income for electricity, natural gas and all other energy in the house. So if you have work hard to save that, you're probably not going to do it," he says.

Sweeney believes the key is to attach a price tag to the decisions we make the second we make them. So, if you turn up your air conditioning, the thermostat tells you how much more you're spending.

The technology to do that isn't far away. Today's smart meters already have the capability to talk to your house through a home area network. The California Public Utilities Commission also recently ruled that utilities must make customers' energy use data available to third-party companies that sell home energy management systems, if a customer purchases one.

But utilities have a long way to go to get customers to think this way. Only 20 percent of PG&E customers have set up online accounts. And according to one study, consumers interact with their utilities for only six minutes a year on average.

Clean Tech Companies Search for the Secret Recipe

"We have to get it right when we have those six minutes," says Dan Yates, CEO of Opower, a smart grid technology company that's trying to find the secret sauce of behavioral change. PG&E has hired Opower to redesign the website I was looking at. (Check out a preview here.)

"People don't want data, they want insights. So, I always joke that my mom is my litmus test. And I know that she would never spend a minute looking at raw energy data. But what she would love to find out is that her freezer is very energy intensive," he says.

Working with other utilities, Opower says their program has helped households cut their energy use by one to three percent and the change sticks. They do that by showing customers how their energy use compares to similar homes in their neighborhood. (More about what motivates us).

"It's not shame. It is really just recognizing an addressable opportunity to reduce usage. And then when you start to have people's attention, the key comes down to have relevant, targeting insights," says Yates.

Yates says for utilities that are used to dealing with hardware, working with behavioral science is a new challenge. But it's one with the potential to remake the way we consume energy. PG&E's redesigned SmartMeter website will be available by the end of the year.

How one climate model breaks the planet into a 10,242-cell
spherical geodesic grid. Source: Prabhat, LBNL.

In my QUEST radio story this week, we learn about how faster supercomputers will help scientists run climate simulations. One of the trickiest aspects of that is dealing with clouds. To find out why, I sat down with Bill Collins, head of Climate Science Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

How important are supercomputers to climate change science?

We understand the climate by making observations using satellites and ice sheets. But the only crystal ball we know about, short of a time machine, is the supercomputer.

We started with by running simple climate models on supercomputers that included simulating the weather, rainfall, and carbon dioxide. In the last 20 years, the complexity of models has vastly increased. They now include ocean dynamics, glaciers, sea ice and the exchange of carbon dioxide between the ocean and the land, known as the carbon cycle. All of that has required an immense increase in computing power.

Climate models today simulate the atmosphere and carbon cycle by breaking up the planet into a grid and running the calculations in those segments, right?

Right, in modern climate models, we simulate the weather every two to five minutes and then average that to see how the climate is going to change across that grid. We simulate the weather in segments that are 25 kilometers wide.

Our goal is model something the size of San Francisco County, which is about 10 kilometers wide. Once we get to that scale, we're going to be able to provide local projections of climate change. We're honing in, but we're not there yet. We need bigger computers to get there.

The other reason is we'd like a higher resolution is that we're having to make educated guesses about certain things, like clouds. And those educated guesses are a source of uncertainty. Cloud systems can be very large or very small. We don't know how they work at the large scale, but we do know how they work at the small scale. So the trick is to simulate them at the small scale.

What role do clouds play in the climate?

Clouds stabilize the climate. They reflect sunlight, so they act like a sun shield. But they also trap heat from the Earth. They both heat and cool, but their net effect is to cool the planet. So the question is, what happens if climate change makes the cloud cover decrease or increase? Understanding how clouds will be affected by climate change has become a critical question.

Where clouds form in the atmosphere makes all the difference. High clouds reflect sunlight, but they're mostly very efficient blankets. Clouds low in the atmosphere aren't very good blankets. They act as a big sunscreen, reflecting energy.

How do climate models today treat clouds?

Models today represent clouds throughout statistical methods over large areas. That models their effect, but not really how they work. And you don't want to assume how they work now is how they'll work in the future. We want to get to a level of physical modeling of clouds.

To do that, we need to be able to resolve them at a small scale. The current Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projections use a 50 kilometer grid, but that's still not good enough. The scale we need to get to is about 10km or so. So once supercomputers can get us there, we'll be on a much more solid footing to predict how clouds might be affected by climate change.

If we tried to run climate models at that resolution now, it would simply take too long. The rule of thumb is that we'd like to simulate the climate a thousand times faster than it happens. So simulating three years in a day is our rule of thumb. If we increase our resolution from 50 kilometers down to 10 kilometers, that increases the computation demand by a factor of 125. At that point, you're doing 9 days in a day. We can't afford to do that and make the kind of projections that policymakers need in the next century.

Climate model resolution of California. Source: LBNL.

What will we learn about California with better climate models?

Temperature changes are happening faster in the mountains than in the valley. So climate change in California is locally specific. A big questions is how much snowfall we'll get in the future. That's going to hinge on what the temperature is at the peaks of the Sierras. So knowing how fast the temperature change is going to happen at the peaks is going to make a big difference to our water supply.

Local climate predications are really important for state and local policymakers. How should building codes be changed? How will local areas adapt? We need accuracy at the state and local level to pull off that planning.

If you can resolve clouds better in the future, will that change overall projections about climate change?

I'd be shocked if they did. The physics of climate change is really basic. We're not going to get out of global warming. We know based on the projections that we've had in hand for the last 20 years that the time to act is now. The longer we wait, the harder the solutions are to avoid dangerous levels of climate change.

What better resolution of clouds is likely to give us is a better idea of changes in rainfall. That's really important to our water supply, our forests, and our crops. Higher resolution will also give us better predictions of climate change extremes, like when droughts happen or the impact of downpours on rivers and dams.

We want to know about climate change that goes bump in the night. We're concerned about abrupt climate change – the type that occurs quickly over a large region, like the melting of the permafrost. We're also worried about extreme climate change – intense, highly-localized changes like heat waves, hurricanes and tornadoes. Both of those are stressors on society and the environment. They've been difficult to simulate since we haven't had the computing power. But now, thanks to advances, we're getting there.

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John Shalf of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab stands inside the Hopper supercomputer.

Whether its laptops or cell phones, computers are getting smaller for most of us. But for many scientists, they’re getting larger. Supercomputers have become a critical tool for analyzing complex problems like climate change.

But as supercomputers grow, so does their energy appetite. Researchers are trying to solve that problem by using a smaller, more pervasive technology.

Supercomputers have improved at a break-neck speed, especially if you look back to the Cray-1. In 1976, this six-foot tall tower of wires was the most powerful supercomputer the world had ever seen. It was installed at Lawrence Livermore National Lab for fusion research.

“If you needed an icon for a supercomputer, you would use the Cray-1,” says Dag Spicer, senior curator at the Computer History Museum, where the computer is spending its retirement. “It blew people’s minds. It was so powerful, so fast.”

Of course, in today’s terms, “It’s roughly equivalent to a first generation iPhone from Apple,” says Spicer.

Listen to the QUEST radio story The Future of Supercomputers

The reason we don’t play Angry Birds on a supercomputer today is thanks to something called Moore’s Law.

“Moore’s law is a predication made by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore in 1965 that the number of transistors – that is the little switches that make up a computer – the number of transistors incorporated in a chip will double approximately every 12 months,” says Spicer. Moore later amended that timeline to every 18 months.

What that means is computer chips have gotten smaller and faster at an incredible rate over the last 40 years. Which leads us to a supercomputer known as Hopper.

Today's Supercomputers

“This is our new Cray XE6 supercomputing system,” says John Shalf, a computer scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. We’re standing next to row after row of tall black computer towers inside a building in downtown Oakland. The sound of the computer’s massive cooling system is deafening.

“You have to keep it cold or it’ll melt. We’ll have a puddle of chips on the bottom of the floor,” says Shalf.

Hopper is the eighth largest supercomputer in the world. And right now, it’s chewing on some complicated problems. “Number one here is particle accelerator design. We have fusion energy and then we also have laser plasma inertial fusion simulation,” says Shalf.

“Science has just really been revolutionized by the speed of computers,” says Kathy Yelick, associate director for computing sciences at Berkeley Lab. She says scientists use Hopper to simulate everything from black holes to climate models. There’s a special term to measure this supercomputer’s power: a petaflop.

“So how fast is that?” says Yelick. “Most people can do probably about one arithmetic operation per second if they’re pretty good.”

Now imagine asking a billion people on the planet to do one math problem per second. To get to Hopper’s speed, “we would need a million earths,” she says.

A million earths, each with a billion mathematicians – that’s how fast Hopper is. But it won’t be long before a faster model comes along. “Every four years we get a system that’s about 10 times larger than one we put in three or four years earlier” says Yelick.

According to Moore’s Law, those next generation supercomputers should be faster and more compact. But John Shalf says computer chips have hit a wall.

The End of Moore's Law?

“The problem is now we can’t make them go any faster. So we can cram more things on the chip, but if you make them go fast, it’s so hot they’ll melt.”

If chips themselves aren’t faster, supercomputers will simply have to add more and more of them to increase computing power. And that comes with a very big impact on the energy use.

Hopper uses around 3 megawatts of electricity – about as much as 2000 homes. But future supercomputers? “Projections say that at the end of the decade, we’d be at 100 megawatts if we continue,” says Shalf.

That’s enough power for a small city, about the size of Novato. The electricity bill alone would be roughly 100 million dollars a year.

“What that says is our current approach to doing supercomputing is dead end. And that we need to think of dramatically new ways to improve the efficiency of computing,” Shalf says.

That could be done with some very familiar technology. Cell phones have computer chips inside them, but not the same chips as desktop computers.

From Peter M. Kogge, "ExaScale Computing Study: Technology Challenges in Achieving Exascale Systems," Sept. 28, 2008

“For as long as they’ve existed, they’ve wanted a cell phone that would last longer, be less expensive,” says Shalf.

To do that, chips in cell phones have had to be smaller and more energy efficient. So Shalf says, why not build a supercomputer with chips that combine millions of these simple cell phone processors, specially designed for scientific jobs? In other words, use cell phone technology to make the world’s most powerful computers.

“We’re able to demonstrate an additional 80 times more energy efficiency than business as usual, and that gets us within striking distance of where we need to be to build a practical supercomputer,” he says.

Instead of a 100-megawatt supercomputer, it would be a three to ten megawatt computer. Whether or not it gets built depends on chipmakers like AMD and Intel, who would design the chips. But Shalf says a supercomputer with that power could make a big difference in climate change science.

“It enables policymakers to have the tools they need to make important decisions that have trillion dollar consequences. And that’s why you want to build a supercomputer that’s able to do this.”

Berkeley Lab hopes to use the supercomputer to better predict some of the trickier impacts of climate change – like changes in rainfall patterns, ice sheet melt and the effects of clouds.

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Making cool roofs in Philadelphia. Photo by Scott Wagner, Energy Coordinating Agency

There are cool roofs and not so cool roofs, and it has nothing to do with fashion. A cool roof reflects the non-visible part of the sun into space, reducing the atmospheric temperature, and reducing the temperature of whatever is beneath the roof. The same phenomenon is true on a global scale, if you consider the Arctic circle to be the roof of the world. As global average temperature increases, the Arctic becomes warmer, the snow melts, and seawater takes its place. Snow is a great reflector of invisible light; seawater isn’t.

In the cities of the United States, it has been common to roof buildings with tar and gravel. But the result of that practice is that the summer temperatures in many large cities is up to 5°F higher during the day and 20°F higher at night than in the surrounding suburban and rural areas, where there is more green space. Lately, in cities like Chicago and San Francisco, builders are using white roofs or colored roofs that reflect light in the invisible range.

A typical white roof is made using a highly reflective elastomeric covering. But there are colored roofing shingles that look a lot like the traditional composite shingles that you find everywhere on houses. Only the reflective shingles reduce roof temperatures by 50°F to 60°F in the summer, reducing cooling load and air conditioning bills. Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory helped produce the reflective coatings that allow shingles to be something other than pure white.

The Florida Solar Energy Center in Cocoa, Florida, does research on cool roofs at its Flexible Roof Facility, where they measure the effects on attic temperature and heat flux using various roofing materials. Experiments show that a white metal roof decreases heat flux by 44% compared to traditional black shingles. This translates into 15% less cooling energy use in the house below and a 15% drop in cooling bills. Not a huge amount, but imagine if even one home in ten had a cool roof; the total effect on U.S. energy use in the summer would be significant.

In the Central Valley of California, simulations done by the California Energy Commission predict annual savings of more than 400 kWh for every 1,000 square feet of highly reflective roof surface. Because of the energy and money savings, cool roofs have been a prescriptive requirement in California’s Title 24 building codes since 2005.

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Say goodbye to an old friend. Photo by WikiMedia.

You know which light bulb I mean. It’s the one you’ve burned your hands on when trying to unscrew it too soon after it’s been turned off. It’s the one you put in the lamp in your living room to read by in your comfortable chair; the one you use to light the stairways at night. It’s the 100-watt incandescent that uses practically the same technology put together by Thomas Edison in 1879. It’s a metal filament inside a glass vacuum that gives off light and heat when exposed to an electric current. Say goodbye. It’s out of our hands. It’s a goner. I’m guessing it won’t go quietly.

It’s a little late to say goodbye in California, where 100-watt incandescents have been effectively banned since January 1. The rest of the country will catch up to us next year, when the popular light bulb will be banned everywhere in the United States. It is not really an outright ban that is clearing the shelves of 100-watt incandescents in 2012, followed by the 75-watt bulb in 2013, and the 60- and 40-watt bulbs beginning in 2014. What’s killing the familiar bulb is an act of Congress that mandated efficiency standards that incandescents cannot meet: the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) of 2007. As the standard for watts per lumen (a measure of light output) become higher and higher, the familiar bulbs will begin disappearing from store shelves. It will be illegal to manufacture the less efficient bulbs in the United States or import them from abroad. A few special use incandescents will still be allowed, for example 3-way bulbs and appliance bulbs.

The most popular incandescents will gradually give way to more efficient halogen, fluorescent and compact fluorescent lights, and solid state lighting (SSL) devices like light emitting diodes (LED). The reduction in total energy use and green house gas emissions in the United States will be dramatic. According to an analysis by the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE) the efficient light bulb provisions of the EISA will reduce national energy use by 60 terra-watt hours (terra equals trillion) of energy and reduce national emissions by 12 million metric tons of carbon by the year 2020.

Incandescents are already banned in Europe, but according to Ira Eisenstein, writing in the Home Energy Pros blog space, some stores there are selling 100-watt incandescents under the name “100-watt heat source.” Look for the creative American mind and the market to come up with similar workarounds in the United States. But gradually the incandescent bulb will be a thing of memory, while cleaner, more efficient, and longer lasting light sources become much less expensive.

Look for more on the phaseout of the incandescent on the QUEST radio segment airing on Monday, January 24.

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Picking up local produce at the farmers’ market—that’s my kind of New Year’s resolution. Photo: Mazarine.

1. Go on an energy diet
A few years ago, I read an article in the New York Times in which the author tries to cut his annual CO₂ emissions by half a ton—roughly five percent of his yearly carbon “weight.” He makes several easy changes, all of which he accomplishes in under 8 hours. For example, he turns down the thermostat, washes his clothes in cold water, asks retailers to stop sending him catalogs, and swaps out some incandescent bulbs for C.F.L.s. He overshoots his goal of half a ton of CO₂, with minimal effort. This article has really stuck in my mind, because these changes are so easy to make. I’m going to revisit this article, The Energy Diet, and cut some carbon from my waistline.

2. Track my energy usage—and respond accordingly
PG&E just installed a SmartMeter at my home. Once it’s connected to the network (it will take a few months), I’ll be able to track my hourly energy usage. I want to do little experiments to figure out which of my appliances are energetically expensive. I’ll be able to see how much energy I save by turning off my computer at night, rather than putting it to sleep. I can swap out light bulbs and see if the savings are significant. I’m looking forward to doing nerdy energy experiments and seeing my energy usage drop! All PG&E customers should have a SmartMeter by mid-2012. To learn more about SmartMeters, check PG&E’s website, and watch QUEST’s Climate Watch: Unlocking the Grid. And for some of the controversy about SmartMeters, take a look at this post on the Climate Watch blog.

3. Eat local
As food is transported across the country (or across the globe), CO₂ is emitted. These food miles can really rack up. This year, I want to buy more food from local farms at my neighborhood farmers’ market. I might even add a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) box to the mix. This resolution has a few great by-products: supporting the local economy, spending fun mornings at the farmers’ market with friends, and eating many tasty meals.

4. Get more informed about the environment
I read the newspaper, and I peruse a handful of blogs; my favorites are Climate Watch, Dot Earth, Green, and treehugger. But I can always read more! What are your favorite sources for environmental news and commentary?

5. Get outside
This resolution has nothing to do with reducing my carbon footprint. I just want to breathe some fresh air and enjoy the outdoors. I’ll ride my bike, hike some new trails, and eat my lunch outside when it’s sunny. After all this work to preserve the environment—I might as well enjoy it.

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Ben Bustamante works on Leslie's house—for free! Photo Courtesy of Leslie Jackson.

When Home Energy’s part-time Associate Editor Leslie Jackson got home from a trip to New Orleans, where she did research on the rebuilding since Hurricane Karina, she got a message on her phone. It was PG&E calling to tell her that since she had been accepted into their CARE program, for households whose income falls below a maximum requirement, they wanted to come out and weatherize her home. CARE is a program of discounts on energy bills for qualifying households.

Once you qualify for CARE, you also qualify for PG&E’s Energy Partners Program, meaning you can have your home weatherized for free. Leslie is a renter, but that doesn’t matter, as long as her landlord agrees to have his property enhanced—well duh, who wouldn’t, for free! We’ve paid for these services already, through our energy bills. The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) collects the money and directs how it is spent by the utilities.

Leslie called PG&E back and within two days Elvis Tobar came out to do get things started and do a visual inspection. Ben Bustamante came a few days later to inspect the furnace and do a more thorough audit. “I was shocked when they called,” says Leslie. “And I was shocked when they said they would send someone out so soon. But they did! And I was impressed and pleased when someone showed up within the set time window.”

Ben found opportunities and had some concerns. Leslie will get a new refrigerator, CFLs, insulation in her attic, a faucet aerator in her kitchen, and a low-flow showerhead. She has knob-and-tube wiring in her attic, so the attic insulation won’t be installed until she has the wiring inspected. She could have gotten new lighting fixtures and had two new windows installed but she and the landlord wanted to keep the look and feel of the 1920s California bungalow.

And PG&E would have weatherstripped her doors and windows and air sealed her attic, but there was a problem. The vent from her gas furnace terminates in the home’s de-commissioned chimney. That and a well-sealed house are a bad combination. It is easy to depressurize a tight house—all it takes is turning on an exhaust fan. In a leaky house, makeup air can come into the house from all the seen and unseen holes in the building envelope. In a tight house, the makeup air may come from the chimney—taking dangerous combustion gases like CO with it into the home. “I’ll talk to my landlord about fixing the furnace vent. It has to terminate outside and above the house,” says Leslie.

At the time of this writing, Leslie found out that the refrigerator, which was supposed to take eight weeks to arrive, is coming next week!

“Everyone I’ve talked with from the Energy Partners program so far has given me the sense that lots of people who quality for this service turn it down because of privacy and other concerns,” says Leslie. “And that’s a shame.

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What's your home energy efficiency hot button? Photo by Leslie Jackson.

There is a hot and heavy dialogue taking place in an online group that I belong to, made up mostly of people who are in the business of auditing homes and then making homes more energy efficient, healthy, and comfortable. The main gist of the discussion is, Do we rely on the government to encourage people to make their homes more efficient, or is it up to the market? Does this sound familiar? Tune into any election debate in the country and you will hear some version of the same discussion/argument.

As in just about everything else in life, the answer is not either/or, but both/and. That is the conclusion of a study recently completed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), “Driving Demand for Home Energy Improvements”. The government has already poured billions of dollars into improving building efficiency in this country. Since about 40% of the nation’s electricity is used in buildings, the down payment in energy efficiency will bring much more than it’s value in saved energy, lessened green house gas emissions, and energy security. But government money isn’t enough. The energy efficiency community is scratching its collective head trying to figure out how to motivate people to save energy at home. The conclusion of the LBNL report is that, while government tax incentives and rebates are important, it is up to local governments, retailers, and large and small home performance companies to sell energy efficiency. And every location and every homeowner is different, with different values and needs.

What works for you? 1) Increased comfort; 2) saved energy and money; 3) a saved planet; 4) less chance we’ll go to war again over oil resources; or 5) keeping up with the Jones? Yes, social scientists have discovered that one of the primary motivating factors in saving energy is peer pressure. Even a simple message on your utility bill comparing your energy use with the average energy use in your neighborhood has been effective in getting people to retrofit their homes or make simple adjustments in their lifestyles to save energy. You may or may not hear the word “audit” or “retrofit.” The social science data also suggests that audit makes us think about our taxes, and retrofit sounds like going backwards.

Does “increasing your home’s performance” motivate you to keep your thermostat at 780F on a hot day? Does “cut your energy bill by 30%” cause you to type “home performance contractor” into Google to find a local contractor? Does the possibility of seeing yourself as an energy hog get you moving to insulate your attic? Join the conversation by commenting on this blog entry.

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Summer Study participants were treated to two insiders’ take on energy efficiency in China.

Notes from Asilomar: The 15th Biannual Summer Study, Energy Use In Buildings, of the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (August 15–20, 2010).

Summer Study participants were treated to two insiders’ take on energy efficiency in China.

Mark Levine was recently the director of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and is now working full time with the China Energy Group at LBNL, a group Levine founded in 1988.

William Chandler is an expert in energy and climate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, as well as the president of Transition Energy and the co-founder of DEED China—private companies with energy efficiency investments in China. Chandler was a 1992 ACEEE Champion of Energy Efficiency.

Both Levine and Chandler provided lots of information about energy efficiency policy and reality in China—past, present, and future. But more important, they each shared a wealth of insight that only comes with a long history of lived experience interacting with people developing energy efficiency in China. Imagine the amount of time they’ve spent in airplanes during the past 25 years!

One insight from Tuesday night’s plenary is the extraordinary progress China has made since 1980 to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, and lower energy intensity in an economy that has grown by leaps and bounds. Between 1980 and 2002, China’s GDP increased by a factor of 8, while its energy use increased by a factor of only 3. Between 1980 and 2002 energy intensity, or energy per unit of GDP decreased about 5% per year. From 2002 to 2005, energy intensity increased about 5% per year, mainly due to a huge increase in the production of steel and cement. But energy intensity then began to decrease again, dropping 16% between 2005 and 2009.

Looking to the future, Levine outlined a likely scenario where China’s total energy use and greenhouse gas emissions will continue to grow, but then level off in 20 years or so, and then begin a slow steady decrease. But at its peak Chinese energy use per capita will stay well below that of the United States and below that of Europe. China’s emissions will not overwhelm us, according to Levine, because of several reasons, but mainly due to saturation in the appliance and transportation markets in China.

Chandler urged cooperation with China in regards to energy efficiency policy, and warned that a lack of cooperation, “I won’t do anything if you don’t”, will be a suicide pact. We need to better explain to the west China’s successes and commitment to reduce energy use and carbon emissions, encourage China to be more accurate and transparent with its energy and emissions data, remove barriers to business between the United States and China, and resolve diplomatically the rift in relations between China and other nations that are part of the Copenhagen climate agreements.

Can China do its part to mitigate climate change and obtain energy security for itself and other nations? Levine and Chandler both say, “Yes.” But only if the United States and other developed and developing nations do their part as well.

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