The Sustainable Home Blog

“Every power plant generates electromagnetic waves. From there they follow countless miles of high-voltage wave guides (commonly called “wires” or “lines”) at near the speed of light to numerous customer loads: heaters, motors, telephones, lights, antennas, radios, televisions, fiber-optic systems, the Internet, etc. We constantly “swim” through this sea of electromagnetic energy just as fishes swim through water. And, like water to fishes, this ethereal energy is vital to modern civilization.”
Richard C. Duncan, The Social Contract, 2006

“Whatever the statistics may finally show, it is probably the scenes on TV….thousands of New Yorkers walking home across bridges….five-star restaurants throwing out food….families in Cleveland and Detroit lining up for bottled water….that best convey the blackout’s impact.”
Commentary on August 2003 Northeast Blackout

How Electricity Gets to You Home

Today we take for granted the easy power available at the touch of light switch, but it was only as recent as 1882 that the first coal fired electric power plant opened in New York city delivering only enough power to light a mere 11,000 incandescent bulbs.   125 years later,  we have cobbled together a complex and fragile North American electrical infrastructure that delivers electricity to over 115 million American homes.

According to the Energy Information Agency, in 2001, 107 million homes consumed:

• 1,140 Billion Kilowatt Hours (kwh) of Electricity

• 4,704 Billion Cubic Feet of Natural Gas

• 5,105 Million Gallons of Fuel Oil

• 4,121 Million Gallons of Propane

• 18.7 Million Cords of Wood, and

• 348 Million Gallons of Kerosene

If you convert the numbers above to equivalent Btu’s, electricity is clearly the largest residential energy user at 11.7 Quadrillion Btu per year. That number includes the primary source energy (coal, natural gas, nuclear, etc.) consumed to generate that electricity for your home.  Due to conversion and transmission losses, only about a third of that source energy actually reaches our homes.  In other words, our national electrical system is about 33% efficient.

The Fragile State of the North American Electrical Power Grid

“The electric power networks are the largest, most complex machines ever constructed. They have been built, rebuilt, and interconnected over many decades with a baffling variety of hardware, software, standards, and regulations. The ravenous input nodes must be continuously fed with immense amounts of primary energy and then the output nodes deliver electromagnetic energy to myriad customer loads.”
Richard C. Duncan, The Social Contract, 2006

“…most of the equipment that makes up the North American grid is reaching the end of its design life after nearly three decades of under investment.”
Peter Asmus, energy issues journalist, 2006

The “handoff” from the power generating plants to the final electric distribution grid occurs at the local substation. Substations take power delivered via large transmission-level high voltage lines and distributes it to hundreds of thousands of miles of lower voltage distribution lines. The distribution system is generally considered to begin at the substation and end at the customer’s meter.

The U.S. electrical power grid consists of three interdependent but separate networks: the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection, and the Texas Interconnection. These networks are also integrated with international networks in both Canada and Mexico creating a N. American power grid. Overall reliability planning and coordination is provided by the North American Electric Reliability Council (NAERC) and its ten Regional Reliability Councils (RRCs). The NAERC is a voluntary organization formed in 1968 in response to the Northeast blackout of 1965.

The U.S. power grid uses about 157,000 miles of high voltage electric transmission lines. While electricity demand has increased by about 25% since 1990, the construction of transmission facilities decreased about 30% and annual investment in new transmission facilities has declined over the last 25 years. This lack of investment and deferred maintenance has resulted in congestion and increased failure.  U.S.-wide transmission and distribution losses grew from 5% in 1970 to 9.5% in 2001, due to heavier use of an overburdened and congested grid.  Bottlenecks now affect many parts of the grid and the resulting power outages (blackouts) and power quality disturbances (brownouts) are estimated to  cost the economy about $100-billion a year.

The Growing Risks of Losing Electrical Power to Our Homes

“With [urban] power out beyond a day or two, both food and water supplies would soon fail. Transportation systems would be at a standstill … natural gas pressure would decline and some would lose gas altogether - not good in the winter time … Communications would be spotty or non-existent. … All in all, our cities would not be very nice places to be… Martial law would likely follow.”
Paul Gilbert, National Research Council, 2003 Congressional Panel Testimony

“We’re trying to build a 21st-century electric marketplace on top of a 20th-century electric grid,…no significant additions have been made to the grid in 20 years of bulk electric transmission, yet we’ve had significant increases in the amount of generation.”
Ellen Vancko, North American Electric Reliability Council, 2003

‘‘If present trends continue, a blackout enveloping half the continent is not out of the question.’’
Roger Anderson, Columbia University

“For systems theorists the first message of their eerily smooth distribution curves is clear: big blackouts are a natural product of the power grid. The culprits that get blamed for each blackout – lax tree trimming, operators who make bad decisions – are actors in a bigger drama, their failings mere triggers for disasters that in some strange ways are predestined. In this systems-level view, massive blackouts are just as inevitable as the mega quake that will one day level much of Tokyo.”
Fairley, 2004

The August 2003 blackout in the Northeast, that left 50-million people without power for up to 3 days, was a preview of what’s to come. The lack of investment in our electrical grid has driven reliability to its lowest point in history. Blackouts that affect at least half a million 
homes now occur on average about once every four 
months.  The latest NREC 2007 Long Term Reliability Assessment reinforced the long standing and urgent need for investment in our national grid and identified additional critical weaknesses in the system.  The report stated that:

• Significant investment in transmission is still required in many areas of North America as projected transmission additions lag behind demand growth and new resource additions in most areas.

• Canadian natural gas imports into the U.S. are expected to level off and decline overall as early as 2010 due to increasing demand in Canada.  This will expose Florida, Texas, the Northeast, and Southern California to potential interruptions in fuel supply and delivery [of electricity].

• New England, Texas, California, the Rocky Mountain states, the Southwest and Midwest will [all] likely face capacity shortages in the next few years.

• An aging workforce will soon impact reliability.   With some 40 percent of senior electrical engineers and shift supervisors eligible to retire in 2009, the industry will be faced with a significant shortage of experienced, knowledgeable workers.

Based on the current state of our electrical grid, blackout’s are more than likely to become more frequent, widespread, and longer in duration until we make the necessary  and substantial investments required to modernize our aging grid.  In addition, an aging electric utility workforce and shortages of natural gas will just add to our reliability problem.  Going forward, blackout’s lasting days or even weeks are not out of the question.

I received an email this morning from Scot Horst , who chairs the LEED Steering Committee. He describes the behind the scenes narrative that has been going on since work began on LEED 2009.

Person A: “Global warming doesn’t give us much time.”
Person B: “But we can’t address much of anything, let alone global warming, if we’re only dealing with a small fraction of the entire built environment. We need to get everyone involved.”

Person A: “Yes, but why get them involved in a system that doesn’t take them far enough to save us from ourselves? We need our buildings to be restorative.”
Person B: “LEED can’t save us from ourselves. LEED, as a tool, can engage the market in transformation. That transformation is about people. It is not about LEED credits.”

Person A: “You’re missing the point. We have to be tougher. We have to go beyond.”
Person B: “No, you’re missing the point. We have to find ways to engage a market that has never thought about these issues before.”

Persons A and B: “Let’s find a way to do both.

”This is an engaging and very important narrative and perhaps the most important point for me is that LEED is a “tool” that helps to raise consciousness and “engage the market in transformation.” My personal view is that we must “go beyond” and that much of what we currently do in the green building movement, however well intentioned, is nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. The global warming mentioned in Horst’s narrative has provided the catalyst for both LEED and Architecture 2030, but focusing solely on warming misses the point. Warming is a symptom and not a cause. It has prompted us to take some action, but not to “go beyond”. As a premise for action it has been useful, but is easily attacked on it’s “scientific validity”. It is one of the canaries in the coal mine, but there has been is very little discussion of the coal mine. We need to expand the narrative and take a broader view.

Taking a page out of ecological economics, once you picture the built environment as a mere subset of our closed ecosystem, then your conceptual framework regarding sustainable building is forever changed. It means you have to accept that there are limits, and that we are not going to be able to grow forever. It implies the built environment must have some optimal size and level of consumption relative to the larger ecosystem. It means you cannot grow beyond that optimum without threatening man’s survival within that ecosystem. Out of this stream of thought flows a list of very troubling questions?

• How do we stop growing?

• What are the limits? What is optimal?

• Does climate change tell us they have already been exceeded?

• Do we face a kind of built environment armageddon when fossil fuel production peaks and begins to decline?

• Is a zero energy standard imperative now?

• What do we do? How do we do it?

Our very survival depends on how and when these questions are answered. LEED does not provide the answers, but it does help us to prepare.

There are two ways to store heat and even out the diurnal or daily temperature swings in buildings. One is with massive material’s like stone, brick, and concrete the other is with phase change materials or PCM’s.

A material is said to “change phase” when energy is either added or removed to cause it to change from a liquid state to a solid state or from liquid state to a gaseous state. For example, it takes a considerable amount of energy to transform ice into water and in the process the temperature remains at 32° F. This energy storage capacity within the phase change is called “latent heat” and when harnessed allows for the storage of heat energy in a fraction of the volume required by materials like stone or concrete.

For building applications, you want this phase change to occur at or near the desired room temperature, so custom wax formulations are usually the material of chose. As the cost of energy has increased, interest in PCM technology has also increased.

In 2005, Oak Ridge National Laboratory teamed with Advanced Fiber Technology and BASF, demonstrated that a 2×6 wall insulated with cellulose insulation seeded with 22% PCM reduced the surface heat flow rate by 40%.

PCM seeded insulation is not yet commercially available, however BASF has developed a drywall product called SmartBoard™ that is available in the EU that incorporates microscopic polymer spheres filled with wax. Applying this 15-mm (0.59 inch) thick drywall product is the equivalent of adding a 9-cm (3.54 inches) thick layer of concrete. SmartBoard™ is supplied with a choice of two “switching” or PCM melt temperatures, 23°C(73.4°F) and 26°C(78.8°F) designed to accommodate both heating dominated and cooling dominated climates.

SmartBoard™ has been successfully tested in each major EU climate zone and was used by last year’s winner of the DOE’s Solar Decathlon.

2007 Solar Decathlon - 1st Place Entry by the University of Technology, Darmstad

In addition to SmartBoard, BASF PCM materials have been incorporated into several other building products in the EU:

• Aerated Concrete by H+H Celcon, Germany
• Gypsum Building Blocks by Saint Gobain Rigips, Switzerland
• Gypsum Plaster by Saint Gobain Maxit, Germany
• Radiant (active) Cooling Ceiling Tiles by MWH BARCOL Air, Switzerland and Ilkazel, Germany

Combine peak oil with 1,500 mile farm to table transportation costs and 10 calories of fossil fuel energy consumed for every 1 calorie of food energy produced, and you have the perfect formula for a looming food crisis. I’ve speculated in the past that we will have to return to the citizen farmer victory gardens of WWII to build a secure bridge to a more sustainable food delivery system, however a Colorado entrepreneur has demonstrated that there is money to be made in converting the front lawns of suburbia into the organic farms of the future.

Transforming Suburban Landscaping from Ornamental to Edible

Kipp Nash under the banner Community Roots has created a suburban front yard farm network in South Boulder Colorado’s Martin Acres neighborhood. Homeowners donate their yards and Nash replaces their front lawns with beautiful and edible organic vegetable plots. Nash manages all of the planning, planting, weeding, irrigating, and harvesting and the homeowners are paid in organic produce. Community Roots sustains its operation by selling excess produce at local farmers markets or through it’s own CSA.

This is a business model that is healthy, local, sustainable, profitable, ecological and destined to grow by duplication in communities around the nation.

With price tags ranging from $15,000 to $50,000 or more for residential PV [photovoltaic] systems, the residential market has been limited to homeowners with a strong green ethic that either had the cash or were willing to tap into their home equity to pay for the cost of a system.  Given a 15 year plus payback and an average home ownership turnover of 5 years that represented a pretty small population of potential customers.  As a result, it was only a matter of time before entrepreneur’s realized that the PV industry had reached a point where it needed more financial innovation than technical innovation.

Power Purchase Agreements [PPAs] are offered by companies that are basically independent, solar electric utilities.  They use your south facing, roof-top real estate to install PV [photovoltaic] panels at their expense and then sell that energy back to you at a pre-determined rate under a long term PPA agreement.  Solar PPA’s represent over 50% of large commercial and industrial PV installations, and if you’re a big box store like WalMart, the economics are such that you pay zero upfront cost, lock in favorable long term rates and never have to worry about how it works or the costs to maintain the system.

Until recently, the PPA business model has been non-existent for the residential market, however two California companies now offer forms of residential PPAs to qualified homeowners.  Sun Run of San Francisco offers an 18 year residential PPA that requires an relatively modest (~30% of the system cost) upfront payment by the homeowner and Solar City Inc. of Foster City offers as low as a no money down 15 year lease to highly qualified (≥720 credit score) homeowners.  Whether it’s called a lease or a PPA the end result is the same, the company owns, maintains, and profits from the system and the homeowner pays a monthly charge that is off-set by their savings in electrical costs.  It’s a win-win-win situation for the company, the homeowner, and the environment.

To answer the “what happens if I move” question, both Sun Run and Solar City offer their customers the option of buying the system at any time, transferring the PPA/lease to a new owner, or renewing the PPA/lease agreement at the end of its term.

You’ve got to love the potential for the PPA business model to expand the residential PV market to millions of additional homeowners, but what are the factors that make it technically and financially viable for a companies like Sun Run and Solar City, and why are these programs currently limited to California?   The answer lies in tax credits, rebates, and utility rates, and in the case of California all of these factors are aligned to make the numbers work.

Whether it’s a lease or a PPA, since the company owns the system they get the tax credits and any state or utility rebates.  In the case of the Federal Investment Tax Credit [ITC], because they are a business, they get the full 30% credit and are not capped a $2,000 like us lowly homeowners.  Because the Federal ITC is scheduled to expire at the end of 2008, the PPA/lease business model may fall apart if it is not renewed.  If not renewed, the economics would probably dictate that the homeowner cover an additional 30% of the purchase cost upfront making the deal considerably less attractive.

Other factors that make the model work are the relatively high California utility rates and favorable net metering laws.  Additional requirements include an unobstructed southern exposure for the panels, a roof surface that will last the lifetime of the PPA or lease, and a system that’s large enough to make economic sense for the company.

If the Federal ITC gets renewed for several more years, look for both of these companies to rapidly expand into states with relatively high utility rates and strong incentives for renewable energy.  As utility rates inevitably increase and PV panel costs decline, this business model will only get stronger.