One thing I run into time and time again as an energy efficiency adviser is lack of consideration of a house, or any other building, as a system. Buildings are a complex arrangement of systems not totally dissimilar to biological ones. And what one does to one system in a building can positively or negatively impact others.
Let me give you a few examples:
One of the things I have realized when my wife and I found out we were going to have a baby this winter is how much I am still polluting the earth, even being as earth conscious as I think I am. I still buy lots of plastic and styrofoam products, disposable products, over packaged products, etc… We justify it to ourselves as saying there are no alternatives or at least no convenient alternatives and buy some of our food bulk but that’s about the extent of it.
One of the things I hear a lot in my new position is that people want to build their new homes energy efficiently but think that they cannot afford to. Whenever I hear this I always say without hesitation “You can’t afford NOT to build you home energy efficiently!”. There are huge misconceptions out there about the costs, methods and effectiveness of building new homes efficiently. Most new home builders do not help the situation and will tell prospective customers that adding more insulation to their house, installing a geothermal or solar heating system or building to take advantage of passive solar gains will add an unreasonable amount of cost and time delay to the building process.
Fortunately there are free resources out there for anyone to dispel these myths. A free software package from Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) can be downloaded called HOT2000 and it allows anyone to do energy modeling on their home and actually forecast what various changes will do to the energy consumption of there homes! It has a fairly shallow learning curve, with a windows interface, drop down menus and check boxes, and comes with a good help file and example files to build on.
How much (useful) energy can you derive from rain falling from your roof? How can you best capture wind energy with many small wind turbines? Are there other options for using solar energy besides PV’s and solar hot water heaters? What are some other small options anyone could use that have cumulative benefits and are easy and cheap to install?
It’s a thought I had the other day when considering energy production for our house in the future. While on the road for my job I passed by an off-grid (even though the grid was 100 feet away) 3000+sf home with solar hot water, solar PV panels and a 100′ tall 3 or 5 KW wind turbine. It was massive and made the property seem very out of place next to smallish 1400-1800sf bungalows all around it. I decided that one large scale device to provide all or nearly all of my energy needs was not a route I wanted to take. I started doing mental calculations and plans to incorporate many small unobtrusive energy production devices into our house and land. We have a hectare so we have some room to play with and it is a former farm field so can plan around future trees, wind rows, etc…
The First Air Car to Hit the Market - Associated Content
While I am sure there will be questions about this technology, and the safety behind it, it sure does sound promising! If you can couple this car with green, clean, home energy generation (wind, solar, micro-hydro or perhaps even a small bio-diesel generator!) it would truly be emission free driving! And ranges of 500 miles and 68mph make it a true contender against internal combustion engined vehicles. Prices on average of $8000 don’t hurt either.
It also does away with the need for heavy, toxic and hard to dispose of batteries that are the weak spot on otherwise promising electric vehicles.
I am excited to see what the future brings for these affordable green cars!
About Blackle - Energy Saving Search
In a simple yet ingenious way, Blackle saves energy by using a black screen, requiring less monitor power! Little steps!
It shows real leadership and a key understanding of how the planet is to be saved in providing this service. It’s up to all of us to make informed choices in how we consume (or don’t consume) and how we choose to live. I think I’ll look into making both my websites darker…
How much land do you need to be self sufficient? Again inspired by Red State Green’s recents posts I decided to do some research on my own. Prior to this, in a comment on “A matter of national security”, I used some somewhat high output figures I found on another site that basically said about 0.11 of an acre would be all that is required for a family of four. I decided to find some better numbers and also instead of just going by 2000lbs of food per year per preson, use the recommended portions of the CanadaFood Guide.
Assuming everyone followed Canada’s food guide, and using chicken for meat and dairy alternatives and/or trading or somehow offsetting the cost of purchasing some of the food, this is how I see it breaking down (weights of food taken from http://www.stambaughfamily.com/equiv_1.html):
Food Guide per adult male:
10 servings (1/2cup) of vegatables and fruit. Lets say your servings are 1 cup of tomato, 1 cup of spinach, 1 cup of carrot, 1 cup of cabbage and 1 cup of potato. That corresponds 74kg of tomato, 50kg of spinach, 55kg of carrot, 110kg of cabbage, and 83kg of potato per year.
8 servings of grain products. Lets use 4 servings of oats and the equivalent in flour of four servings of bread. That corresponds to 21kg of oats and 20kg of wheat flour per year.
2 servings of dairy. Lets assume soy drink, 1 cup ea. or approx. 23kg of soya beans per year.
3 servings of meat and alternatives. Let’s use chicken for all three (75g ea.) That’s 82kg per year.
More after the fold.
Red State Green » Blog Archive » A matter of national security
Fellow The Sietch blogger Red State Green has posted an interesting article on self sufficiency and food supplies. She has garnered a lot of attention on the post with dozens of comments ranging from support to abject scorn.
Most of the scorn seems to be coming from folks who are saying things like:
Uh… don’t want to rain on your self-sufficiency parade or anything, but do you also intend to build a fortified castle around your Victory Garden? Because if you don’t and civilization collapses because we can’t get Big Macs anymore we’re heading straight for the homestead that has all the chickens, pigs, and home-made preserves.
Mmmm. Jellies and jams.
And:
Are you serious? This is the most ridiculous idea I have heard yet. Oil embargo equals starvation? Give me a break. For one, you aren’t right in saying most of the food is produced in other countries. Yes, most of what we eat is made in other countries, but we export far more food than we import. The breadbasket of the USA (you have heard of the entire midwest, right?) could easily support the entire country. Also, higher food costs aren’t really a big deal, given that we already have some of the lowest food costs in the world.
But let’s take a step back and assume that this absurd principle could work. No gas in the cars? Uh oh… I guess that means walking or biking are out of the question. I bet people would kill each other over gardens before thinking about, I don’t know, walking to the store.
Let’s take the other scenarios. Terrorists bombing all our pipelines is not only unreasonable (since the United States is in anti-terror mode), but given that this country runs on oil, it would probably take only a few days to fix, causing at most a small spike in prices. A flu pandemic is an unlikely but possible occurrence, though I think the flu might be slightly more concerning than plans for food. Come on. No quarantine causing starvation would be placed into effect — the starvation could kill far more than the flu.
Victory gardens were a wonderful way to make people feel involved in WWII, but they weren’t the difference between life and death for Americans. This situation isn’t any different.
And I have to wonder if these people really think it is better to not have any means of self sufficiency at all then learn how to garden and provide at least a portion of your own food?
Another common theme was “aconomies of scale” and the great myth that commercial agriculture is the only efficient way to raise crops and livestock. I don’t even know where to start with that notion, I suggest those that believe that do some serious research on traditional and third world farming practices and let me know what they conclude.
I came across this discussion in the comments section of Peak Oil Debunked’s post on the chest fridge idea from the famous mtbest article. The gist of the argument, and I have posted the relevant parts of the argument against the chest fridge, was that the orientation of the cooling device would make no difference and that the original author was sacrificing a large amount of food storage. Seeing as the original post and discussion took place two years ago I doubt I will get a response, but have decided to post my thoughts on it here.
My take on the subject is that you can buy two 15cf deep freeze’s for the same price as one side by side refrigerator freezer unit and have one set up to be a fridge and use the other as is. In my research, the standard 25cf fridge/freezer has a 15cf fridge side and 10 cf freezer side. My research also shows that similarly sized chest freezers use less energy than upright refrigerator only models. So you can in fact have more storage and pay less in utility bills for it!
More after the fold.
What came first? Cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels or ever increasing levels of consumption? And what relationship did they have on each other? I have heard many analysts, politicians, pundits and thinkers throw out the statement that cheap oil has artificially propped up the pace of developement and the rate of consumption in places like America. This may sound reasonable and valid, oil and coal are cheaper in terms of extraction and conversion to usable energy than almost any other source. But does this account for the explosion in technology and material wealth enjoyed by so many since the The Great Depression? Could there be other factors that helped out or were maybe even more of an influence?
John Maynard Keynes was a British economist that developed and advocated what is roughly the same theories used today in modern capitalist countries. In simplist terms, he advocated basing the economy on consumption levels and spending out of depressions. The wikipedia artical on Keynesian economics states:
In Keynes’s theory, macroeconomic trends can overwhelm the micro-level behavior of individuals. Instead of the economic process being based on continuous improvement in potential output, as most classical economists had believed from the late 1700s on, Keynes asserted the importance of aggregate demand for goods as the driving factor of the economy, especially in periods of downturn. From this he argued that government policies could be used to promote demand at a macro level, to fight high unemployment and deflation of the sort seen during the 1930s. This however is contrasted by Supply-side economics. Keynes believed that the government was responsible for helping to pull a country out of a depression. If the government increases its spending, then the citizens are encouraged to spend more because more money is in circulation. People will start to invest more, and the economy will climb back up to normal.
More after fold.
