Your independent hometown award-winning newspaper
Your independent hometown award-winning newspaper
Sorted by date Results 51 - 75 of 90
New solar and wind electric generators are being installed at increasing rates because their costs are declining and utilities are getting better at integrating intermittent generation into their grids. New renewable generation plants are more economical than new coal or natural gas plants. Renewable generators are, therefore, displacing fossil or nuclear fueled plants when the old plants are retired. However, generation from solar and wind sources doesn’t necessarily happen at the exact same t...
About a month ago, I had to take my gasoline car into the dealer for routine maintenance. That cost about $2,000, and it needs more work. My car has been driven about 100,000 miles. It probably has at least another 100,000 to go before the end of its life. However, maintenance will be increasingly expensive from now on. I think $2,500 a year is a realistic estimate. My car gets about 20 miles per gallon. Even though I have a short commute here in La Conner, Jenelle and I visit family in Seattle...
Given national and international news, you may be thinking that it would be great to build a self-sufficient cabin in remote northeastern Washington. My grandfather did that, about 120 years ago. However, my grandparents’ cabin wasn’t very comfortable by today’s standards. They had to collect firewood to cook. The outhouse was a few hundred feet away from the main house, so grandchildren were warned about bears prior to bedtime. One might think that was just grandparents having fun at their...
Just 20 years ago, a kilowatt of new photovoltaic solar panel electric generation capacity cost more than a hundred times as much as a new kilowatt of natural gas capacity (although the difference was less significant with ongoing fuel costs for the gas plant factored in). General Motors’ EV1 in 1996 completely failed to bring electric cars back. Technology doesn’t stand still. Today, solar and wind energy are usually the least expensive sources of new generation. Electric vehicles are clo...
First, a clarification: Last week’s headline said we can expect 100% solar and wind energy on the grid in the future. Although that’s likely to become feasible within the next 20-30 years, I don’t think it’ll happen in Washington. We are, however, likely to have 100% renewable energy by 2050. Solar and wind will be prominent, but hydroelectric generation will still be used and geothermal energy may even be developed. Iceland and New Zealand have 100% renewable electric systems already because...
When I talk with groups about solar and wind energy, people ask: “The sun isn’t up all the time and the wind doesn’t blow all the time. How can solar and wind energy power a reliable electric grid?” About 25 years ago, senior management at a major utility turned down an experimental 8 kilowatt solar project I had proposed because the transmission systems engineers told the CEO that unpredictable solar energy might destabilize the entire utility’s grid. In other words, serious industry professio...
An earlier column emphasized understanding the numbers on your electric bill. Understanding what the bill means, however, doesn’t help much in understanding why you’ve used that much energy, nor does it help you reduce your energy costs. For that, you need to understand how much each of your electric devices contributes to the meter reading. Electric devices have wattage ratings. Multiply the wattage by the amount of time the device is used to determine how much energy that device is using. For...
A few days ago, one of the people I was talking with at the coffee shop asked me whether a possible ban on gas stoves is real, or just another straw-man argument designed to rile up the public in search of television ratings. It’s a real issue. Several cities, starting with Berkeley, California in 2019, banned new natural gas connections to residential and commercial buildings. The primary purpose of these laws is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Eliminating natural gas as a fuel supply f...
The Skagit Valley Clean Energy Cooperative is a nonprofit cooperative. It was founded in La Conner about a year ago. Like any co-op (say, REI or the Skagit Valley Food Co-op), SVCEC helps people to find and take advantage of the best products in its area of expertise. SVCEC’s area of expertise is innovative energy technologies, e.g., renewable energy generation, energy conservation, energy monitoring and electric vehicles. Our (I am a member) mission is to speed up use of these technologies i...
One of the most common complaints electric utility customers have about utilities is that utility bills are hard to understand. I looked at PSE’s website page, “How to read your bill.” Having done that, I decided to write this. Think of electricity as being similar to water. Water delivered to your home is usually metered in cubic feet. (There are about seven and a half gallons in a cubic foot.) The rate at which water is delivered is measured in cubic feet per second. When you get your water...
Well-built houses last for centuries. Today’s decisions during construction of a new home can affect your grandchildren’s grandchildrens’ energy bills. If you were building a new house for maximum energy efficiency, what innovative technologies could you add during construction that wouldn’t add much to its cost today, but would keep energy costs down over its lifetime? Metering and monitoring: Design the electric circuits to monitor energy consumption. Incorporate the ability to monitor...
Ongoing work towards both energy independence and the transition to energy sources that don’t use fossil fuels are going to create choices for energy consumers that we haven’t had in decades, or ever. If technologies in the energy field continue on their current course, buying energy is going to involve decisions we haven’t had to make before. We’re already seeing some of these changes and can expect to see more. For instance, electric utilities won’t offer just one product (now with electricity...
Recycling three typical 12 ounce aluminum beverage cans, to create an aluminum sheet for making a new can, saves about a kilowatt-hour of electricity compared to the electricity it would take to make a sheet from aluminum ore. Glass, steel, plastics, car batteries and paper recycling can also create energy savings. Waste materials that are recycled are not sent to landfills, and thus do not contribute to the use of land for landfills. Recyclable materials are typically mixed at the initial...
One of the biggest expenses of new home construction in locations more than a few hundred yards away from existing energy infrastructure is the cost of connecting electricity and gas. Electric power distribution wires can cost up to a million dollars a mile for underground service and up to $100,000 a mile for above-ground. New gas lines use less expensive materials, but still require mobilization of construction equipment and installation labor. Upstream of the vicinity of the new building(s),...
Over half of the energy used in residential and commercial buildings goes to heating and cooling the air to keep occupants comfortable. Most of the time, cooling is achieved by using electricity to run a vapor-compression “air-source” heat pump that transfers heat into or from the outside air. Heating is achieved by running the heat pump in the opposite direction, or by using a resistance heater. Alternatively, burning fuel, whether in a fireplace, or via a propane or gas-fueled furnace, pro...
Power outages are rare and usually short here, but grid-provided electricity isn’t completely consistent and reliable under all circumstances. Here’s a quick guide to the world of power quality problems and actions individuals and businesses can take to minimize negative effects. Transient power quality issues that don’t result in outages include voltage variations (sags, swells and spikes), poor current frequency and problems with power factor. (Power factor is technically complex and is usual...
Could solar energy power the entire electric grid even though the sun is only up, in any given place, an average of 12 hours a day? Yes. It would be expensive to build solar power plants across every time zone, and interconnect them so that the sun would always be up somewhere over the electric grid, but it could, theoretically, be done. Projects that seem like that type of science fiction are being developed. Companies in the United Kingdom and Morocco are working on a system that will export...
A few weeks ago I mentioned that lights based on light-emitting diodes (LEDs) use less energy than tungsten filament lights or fluorescent lights. LEDs also longer lasting. And, the cost of LEDs has fallen dramatically over the last 15 years, and is continuing to fall. However, those are not the only differences between LEDs and the older technologies. LEDs offer a variety of new and improved capabilities, some of which were never practical, or indeed possible, with older lighting systems. For...
Just about everyone in the U.S. has heard the words: “Close the refrigerator door.” Stereotypically, this is associated with an indecisive teenager. How important is that closed door, really? Is it still important, given how much fridges have improved? If you are using a really old fridge as your primary fridge, replacing it will save money in the long run. The easiest way to save money on refrigeration is to replace any fridge built more than 20 years ago with a new EnergyStar-rated refrigerato...
Most residential energy consumers spend about 10-20% of their home electric budget on lighting. Significant changes in lighting technologies have made it possible to cut your lighting energy use by more than two-thirds while simultaneously improving your overall comfort and light quality. The tungsten filament incandescent lamp, which most people think of as a “standard light bulb,” was introduced on a large scale in the early 1900s. People have become so used to these lights that most Nor...
The most important thing most people can do to cut their electric and natural gas bills is reduce the amount of energy they use for heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC). This is because most – up to two-thirds – of money spent on energy in a home is for climate control. The rest is split between lighting, water heating, cooking, refrigeration, electronics like TV and computers and a variety of specialized devices. The HVAC system itself is probably the most important part of the HVA...
Suppose you were filling your car with gas, and the pump behind you suddenly changed the price from $4 a gallon to $400 a gallon. You’d get an unpleasant surprise when you put the nozzle back on the hook and saw how much you owed. Electric prices can go up 100-fold during an unexpected shortage, as they did in Texas in 2021. Price spikes of this magnitude are fairly common in the electric market (although usually much shorter-lived than they were in Texas), because heat waves, cold snaps and u...
What can Washington state do to avoid problems similar to those Texas experienced with its energy supply during February 2021? How should our grid and utility regulations be designed to maintain economic and reliable service, especially as the use of intermittent solar and wind generation, and electric vehicles, all increase? Let’s start with what our state can do to avoid the high electric prices Texas experienced. Two key lessons the public can learn from the Texas situation are: Electric p...
A letter responding to one of my columns recently suggested that this column is trying to force green energy down people’s throats. Typically, I wouldn’t reply, but I think it’s important to reassure readers that I’m very specifically trying to not do that. I’m trying to present rapidly changing facts about advanced energy technologies in as non-technical a manner as possible, and to explain energy economics in accessible terms. The column’s regular readers will have current information...
The Skagit Valley Clean Energy Cooperative is a member-owned, non-profit organization founded by Terry Nelson, Mary Wohleb, John Leaver, Marylee Chamberlain and Bob Raymond to speed up the energy transition in Skagit County. Anyone can join as a member, as I did last year. Like most co-ops, SVCEC helps members find and acquire interesting things. REI focuses on recreational equipment. The Skagit Valley Food Coop focuses on groceries. The SVCEC focuses on advanced energy technologies. SVCEC is pl...
