energy efficiency
sastyk | March 28, 2012I've always liked Tom Murphy's "Do the Math" work, and I really like his latest piece on phantom loads and electricity cutting. That's one of the very first steps for most of us whe we seriously try and cut our electrical usage, but one that a lot of people don't know to do about. We've been able to radically reduce our electric usage by a lot of the same strategies, and they really work:
One of the most important reductions one can make is reduction of baseload power: devices that consume energy 24/7. Every 1 W eliminated removes 9 kWh from the yearly tally and about $1 of yearly cost at…
sastyk | April 17, 2011Lucy Worsley has a Guardian piece about the merits of medieval architecture as a model for a lower-resource use future:
Domestic life in the past was smelly, cold, dirty and uncomfortable, but we have much to learn from it. I spend much of my time working as a curator in Britain's historic royal palaces. But recently, for a television series, I've visited a lot of normal homes dating from the Norman period to the present day, and I've concluded that the houses of the past have a huge amount to teach us about the future. When the oil runs out, I think our houses will become much more like…
gregladen | September 15, 2010There are two quick and fairly easy approaches to reducing US emissions of CO2 by several percent. These reduction would be at the household level, possibly decreasing the household cost of energy by between 20 and 30 percent (or more, depending on the household) and decreasing national total CO2 emissions by around 10% or so.
But these approaches are nearly impossible to implement. Why? Because people are ignorant and selfish.
The two methods are: 1) Replace existing technologies with more efficient ones and 2) Use energy less. I'm not talking about replacing technologies at a…
purepedantry | February 18, 2009An article by Evan Mills, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, points out that scientific buildings use a lot more energy than average:
Improving energy productivity is a doubly worthy challenge, given that those making the biggest contributions to the science of sustainability often do so in highly energy intensive facilities such as laboratories, computing centers, and hyper-clean environments. There is a long way to go to meet the sustainable practices. According to a U.K. Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs survey, virtually all interviewed…