The Sustainable Home Blog

“I believe strongly that this country has to get off oil … The electrification of the
automobile is inevitable.”
Bob Lutz, GM Vice-Chairman, in Newsweek magazine, 2007

“Our view is that oil production will peak in the near future. We need to develop power train(s) for alternative energy sources,” to “move beyond petroleum.”
Katsuaki Watanabe, President of Toyota, June 2008

Our pattern of dwelling in America would not be possible without the everywhere, anytime mobility of the automobile.  The initial catalysts for our grand experiment with suburbia were abundant and cheap gasoline, the GI bill of 1944, and the vision of William Levitt who brought land outside of cites like New York and Philadelphia and constructed “towns” made of thousands of low cost homes.  Levitt’s invention would be duplicated all across America and gradually devolve into the  suburban sprawl, traffic jambs, and one hour commutes of the 21st century.

I spent my early childhood in a Southern California version of one of these post WWII developments.  We lived amid thousands of homes laid out in military grid formation with wide asphalt streets, concrete sidewalks, and the occasional park and school.  We ate 25¢ hamburgers at America’s first drive-in restaurants and fell asleep eating popcorn in the back of our family station wagon at the local drive-in theatre.  Cars where central to our lives and Detroit was still king of the automotive world.  Like a Paris fashion event, the annual introduction of new car models was exciting news and we all looked forward to how our nation’s car designers would drape and color the latest in sheet metal fashion for America’s showrooms.  Everyone in the neighborhood could play “name the make, model, and year of that car” and when a new model arrived in someone’s driveway, we all gathered around to admire and compare.

However, today the shine is off the Studebaker.  Levitt & Sons has gone bankrupt.  A victim of overreach and the sub-prime mortgage crisis.  What’s left of the Detroit auto industry is hemorrhaging cash as they scramble to survive in a $130 per barrel, SUV killing world.  In an effort to save our vast investment in suburbia and our automotive lifestyle major auto companies and a few entrepreneurial startups are designing and beginning to promote plug-in hybrid, all electric, compressed air, and hydrogen fuel cell cars as the answer to rising gas and diesel prices.

I have to question whether we will just transition painlessly to the next generation “power train” or will this new autopia be a game of fossil fuel whack-a-mole before we have to face up to to the unsustainable reality of suburbia?  In the short term the answer is a tentative maybe as we navigate the two decades between today’s emerging crisis of peak oil and tomorrow’s crisis of peak coal.

Understanding and Comparing A New Generation of Automotive Power Trains
Nothing is free when it comes to energy and transportation, and all of these new automotive power trains will merely transfer the current demand for gasoline into a new demand for electricity.   In America, that means we’ll be trading off oil against coal and natural gas which together comprise the base fuels for about 80% of our electrical capacity.

Electric, compressed air, and hydrogen cars often get promoted as super clean, zero emission, technologies and I still get the occasional email from friends who seem to think that the laws of thermodynamics have been suspended for these new technologies and that we’ll be driving around burning water for fuel.

The truth is that all of these new power trains will require fossil fuel inputs to get us to work and back. Electric and plug-in hybrid cars will depend on lithium ion batteries that will need to be plugged into the national electric grid every evening for a recharge.  Air cars will depend on high pressure storage tanks of compressed air that will have to be re-pressurized every evening using electrical power.  The one question that usually goes unasked and answered for hydrogen cars, is “where does the hydrogen come from?”.   The unfortunate answer is that hydrogen will come from the electrolysis of water and that will require an energy input of either electric power or the burning of natural gas.  In addition, after creating the hydrogen, much like air, it must be compressed to store enough usable energy for the fuel cells to convert hydrogen into DC electricity for the power train.

Although there are cost tradeoffs between the three options, based on the efficiency of converting electrical power into miles driven, lithium ion electric cars have a clear advantage.  A study by the Institute for Lifecycle Environmental Assessment based on incorporating each of the three drive trains into the equivalent of a Ford Taurus gives the lithium ion technology a three to one advantage in miles per kwh of electrical input.

Based on electrical rates in Denver, and 18 miles/gallon for a Taurus, the “equivalent gallon” costs of all three technologies easily beats our current national average of over $4.  However, when you compare the CO2 emissions, based on 1.8 lbs/kwh in Colorado, only the electrical car emits less greenhouse gas than the equivalent gasoline powered Taurus.

A Game of Fossil Fuel Whack-A-Mole?
We get about 60% of our electrical energy from coal and about 20% from natural gas.  The good news is that coal plants, which provide most of our base load power, have excess capacity after about 10 PM at night, and ased on a study by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory that assumes plug-in hybrids gain a 50% market share by 2030, we’ll only need an additional 8 large power plants to meet that new electric car demand. The bad news is that if we plug in at 5 PM instead of 10 PM, we’ll need an additional 160 large power plants to meet demand.

In either case, we’ll be burning millions of tons of additional coal to power the electric, hybrid plug-in, compressed air, and hydrogen cars of the near future.  In the process we’ll be driving up the cost of coal and electricity and hastening coal’s eventual depletion.

An October 2007 report by the Energy Watch Group estimates that we’ll be facing a world wide peak in the production of coal sometime around 2030.  This study does NOT factor in a new generation of automotive power trains that rely on electricity.  Since electrical power generation is the primary end use of coal, this peak in coal production will only move closer.

I agree with Bob Lutz that  “the electrification of the automobile is inevitable”, but if we think coal is the answer then we’re just playing a pathetic energy endgame of Fossil Fuel Whack-A-Mole.

McKinsey and & Company released a report in May titled Curbing Global Energy Demand Growth: The Energy Productivity Opportunity.   The report documented how we could reduce the world wide annual energy demand growth rate between now and 2020 from about 2% to around 1%, simply by improving energy productivity.

Not surprisingly, the report states that the “… most substantial productivity improvement opportunity is in the global residential sector, which is also the world’s largest consumer of energy with 25 percent of global end-use demand.  By implementing available technologies such as high-insulation building shells, compact fluorescent lighting, and high efficiency water heating, the sector’s energy demand growth would more than halve, from 2.4% a year to only 1.0% a year.”

The report also states that:

 “Consumers lack the information and capital they need to become more energy productive, and tend to make [decisions based on] comfort, safety, and convenience priorities.  In addition, a range of policies dampen price signals and reduce incentives for end users to adopt energy productivity improvements.”

The report argues that policy changes will be necessary before consumers will take significant action to improve the energy efficiency of their homes.  In other words, nothing will happen without leadership from our policy makers

In an example of enlightened leadership, Duke Energy filed a request (also in May) with the North Carolina Utility Commission proposing regulatory authorization to be rewarded for investments in energy efficiency much like they would for a new coal fired electrical plant.  I don’t often use enlightened and Duke Energy in the same sentence, but their Save-a-Watt program represents an exciting new business paradigm and addresses the some of the policy issues outlined in the McKinsey report.   This is a promising new development that could help pave the way to a more sustainable future.

The following bullets are a summary of benefits Duke sees is this new business model for consumers, themselves, and by extension other electric  utilities.

• Allows for the treatment of energy efficiency as a “Fifth Fuel”
• It would displace a portion of the electricity otherwise needed to meet it customers’ energy requirements with zero air emission conservation, and also reduce the amount of new generation that would otherwise be required
• It would lower costs for customers, when compared to the costs that result would from the addition of new electrical generation resources.
• It would offer the potential to substantially lower costs for customers who participate in energy efficiency programs (PV, solar hot water etc.).
• Would provide customers the opportunity to lower their environmental footprint through direct participation in energy efficiency.
• The program would provide more choices and options that help customers manage their energy costs in an environment of rising energy prices
• The program would create new energy efficiency service jobs in order to implement energy efficiency programs.
• The program would provide the Company with an incentive to make significant, sustainable investments in energy efficiency and rewards the Company for the results produced and the risks taken.

The filing by Duke explains this new “energy efficiency” business model as follows:

“The Save-a-Watt approach will encourage and compensate the ultility for investments in energy efficiency at 90% of the avoided supply-side costs.  Under traditional regulation, a utility is allowed to recover the depreciation and operation costs for a new plant and also earn a return on the un-depreciated plant.  Under the save-a-watt regulatory approach, the utility would be allowed to recover 90% of the depreciation and operating costs avoided by not building the new plant and also  earn a return.”

“The Company assumes some risk in the proposed save-a-watt approach.  Revenues collected through the proposed energy efficiency rider are intended to cover program costs and the financial impact of lost sales, but will be based on actual results achieved.  Lost sales occur when energy efficiency programs reduce energy consumption, thus reducing the revenues available to cover fixed costs between rate cases (e.g. investments in utility infrastructure).”

In perfect accord with the McKinsey report, Duke goes on to say that:

“…customers are unlikely to sacrifice comfort and convenience to participate in energy efficiency.  In addition, the initial capital outlay associated with some programs could be a significant barrier to customer participation.”

In addition to addressing capital outlay hurdle for consumers, some of the elements of proposed Save-a-Watt program include:

• discounted or free Compact Fluorescent Lamps
• discounted energy efficient air conditioning and heat pump units
• remote power management of  air conditioning and heat pump units
• PV and solar hot water systems free to the consumer (pilot program)
• energy efficiency capital cost financing through Duke (pilot program)
• monthly billing statements correlated with historical usage and weather data to facilitate ongoing improvement

“People cannot stand too much reality” - Carl Jung

I’ve been musing lately about exactly what it means to be sustainable in the context of residential building. Since words are the symbols we blogger’s use to communicate, I checked my American Heritage dictionary and found that “sustainable” in today’s lexicon means “capable of being continued with minimal long-term effect on the environment” as in “sustainable agriculture”. That didn’t quite do it for me. It’s the kind of feel good definition that allows people to build 10,000 SF homes with bamboo floors, dual flush toilets, and a HERS index of 85 and call themselves “green”. So I continued looking and found that one of the definitions for “sustain” is “to support from below; keep from falling or sinking; or to prop.” Since our built environment has been “propped” up and shaped by cheap oil for about a 100 years, I found that definition more on the mark.

Getting back to our friend Dr. Jung, our not so sustainable residential lives are about to be turned upside down by three major reality checks. At the risk of being labeled as a “crazed and raving doomsdayer”, let just say, it is going to be painful.

Reality Check #1 – Global Warming

“When applied to material things, the term “sustainable growth” is an oxymoron.” - A.A. Bartlett

Thanks in part to an “Inconvenient Truth” global warming has already penetrated our collective consciousness, and for the 20% of the population that’s in denial it is already “too much reality”. American is responsible for about 25% of the green house gases that contribute to global warming. Buildings in America account for about 42% of that total and our homes contribute about half of that total or 21% of this country’s GHG emissions. But that’s just part of the story, because of the sprawling suburban pattern of WHERE we build our homes, our automobile lifestyle compounds the problem. According to the Energy Information Agency, in 2001 107.4 million households logged 2.3 trillion miles commuting, shopping, and schlepping the kids to school, consuming 113.1 billion gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel in the process.

Fortunately for our Jungian psyche’s, global warming is a slow moving water torture kind of crisis that we can safely ignore until Disney World Orlando is an underwater attraction.

Reality Check #2 – Peak Oil

“The time when we could count on cheap oil… is clearly ending.” - David O’Reilly, Chairman, Chevron, 2005

Peak Oil has yet to enter our collective consciousness, in fact most people don’t even know what it means. Peak Oil is the date when the peak of the world’s (crude oil) production rate is reached. After this date the rate of production will enter a long, painful and terminal decline. Peak oil in the U.S. was reached in 1970 and in N. America sometime in the early 1980’s. There is a growing consensus that global Peak Oil either already occurred (as early as 2005) or will happen sometime between now and 2010. Does that mean that production will fall off a cliff and there won’t be any oil? No, but it does mean that demand will very shortly exceed supply and that there will be shortages, rationing, and major economic upheaval and other changes to our “cheap and plentiful oil” lifestyles.

Source: peakoil.ie

“It’s no secret anymore that for every nine barrels of oil we consume, we are only discovering one.”
- British Petroleum Statistical Review of World Energy

“…we don’t have to run out of oil to start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We only have to slip over the all-time production peak and begin a slide down the arc of steady depletion.” - Howard Kunster The Long Emergency (2005)

“Such a peak would require sharp reductions in oil consumption, and the competition for increasingly scarce energy would drive up prices, possibly to unprecedented levels, causing severe economic damage. While these consequences would be felt globally, the United States, as the largest consumer of oil and one of the nations most heavily dependent on oil for transportation, may be especially vulnerable .” - 2007 GAO (U.S. Government Accountability Office) Peak Oil Report

“The U.S. food system consumes ten times more energy than it produces in food energy. This disparity is made possible by nonrenewable fossil fuel stocks.” - Dale Allen Pfeiffer, Eating Fossil Fuels, 2003

Source: Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas

Since only 9% of our housing stock is heated directly by oil, the most painful impact of Peak Oil on our residential lifestyles will be on our one car, one person commutes.

Expect a major increase in walking, bicycling, carpooling, telecommuting, the use of public transportation and an end to suburban sprawl and strip malls.

Expect globalization to take a backseat to localization.

Expect some people and governments to behave badly.

Expect “victory gardens” in the front and back yards of suburbia.

Expect 10 to 20 years of unrest while we make the painful transition to a new world order

Unlike Global Warming, Peak Oil will be an “in your face” crisis, impossible to ignore or deny.

Reality Check #3 – Peak Natural Gas

“It seems obvious to most viewers the [U.S.] future production will decline in a cliff in the near future…” - Jean Laherrere, ASPO Berlin, 2004

As if Peak Oil were not enough “reality”, we also have to get our Jungian heads around Peak Natural Gas. According to Energyfiles Ltd., natural gas will peak in N. America about 2010 and globally between 2030 and 2035.

Unfortunately, natural gas is different animal from oil. Oil is a nice viscous, not very volatile liquid that can be easily shipped around the world and processed locally into to gas, diesel, fertilizer and other products. Natural gas however, must be refrigerated to minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit to convert it to Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) and shipped in very expensive container ships that amount to small nuclear bombs. Because the global LNG infrastructure (ships and docking facilities) is relatively undeveloped, the impact of Peak Natural Gas is basically confined and defined locally by a geographical network of pipelines. For us that network includes Mexico and Canada, and our “reality” is that we may be facing shortages by the end of this decade or sooner.

So how bad is this new energy reality? How does energy flow into our homes, and how will shortages affect our lives? Let’s first take a look at electrical generation in the U.S. Unfortunately, just about every power plant built after 1980 was designed to run on natural gas, so we’ve spent the past 25 years adding to the problem.

Source: U.S. Energy Information Agency 2005

The good news is that thanks to venerable coal, Peak Oil & Natural Gas only impact about 22% of our current electrical generating capacity. The bad news is that is more than enough to cause brownouts, blackouts, and rationing, especially during the summer when air conditioning loads peak.

As we painfully replace a 20% plus shortfall over the coming two decades, expect phenomenal growth in nuclear, coal, solar, wind, and geothermal power plants.

The next chart shows the relative residential energy consumption by energy source. Since over 55% of our homes and some 70% of new homes are heated by natural gas, shortages caused by Peak Natural Gas are going to be a major problem!

Source: U.S. Energy Information Agency 2005

Given this new energy reality, homes built to our current energy code or even to an Energy Star or LEED standard amount to nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The energy train wreck we face demands that we only build and retrofit homes to a Net Zero Energy Standard. Homes that can be completely served on-site by wind, solar, hydro or geothermal power sources. This will require a new energy standard based on a HERS index of better than 25%, well below the current Energy Star/LEED minimum standard of 85%.

“We’ve invented the system that has given us this rise in life; now we begin the descent. We’ll either have to invent our way out of it, or go back to the way it was before.” - Byron King, Agora Financial Symposium, 2007

”We don’t inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

“Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, 
committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Margaret Mead

On February 20th I attended the Architecture 2030 Global Imperative, web-cast teach-in with 250,000 other design professionals, government officials, and students from around the world. Architecture 2030 is perfect example of the “power of one”. Founded by New Mexico architect Edward Mazria, it lays down a challenge to building design professionals to incrementally reduce energy consumption in buildings and by the year 2030 to be designing only carbon-neutral buildings (i.e. using no fossil-fuel GHG-emitting energy to operate).

This is no arbitrary goal plucked from the air. Based on EPA data, Mazria has identified buildings in the U.S. as the largest source (~48%) of green house gas emissions, and the goals he has identified tie directly to averting a looming global warming disaster.

By any measure these are lofty goals, especially in the U.S., where the architectural profession is responsible for the design of only a small percentage of the buildings constructed or remodeled each year. Mazria’s challenge is made even more difficult by a culture of celebrity within his profession that often seems to have more in common with the fashion industry than the building industry. To an outsider, (although his work is beautiful) Mazria’s challenge to the AIA must look a bit like America Ferrara’s character challenging the petty and superficial world of fashion in Ugly Betty.

Personally, I applaud the audacity, vision, and courage of Mazria’s challenge and stand beside him in doing whatever I can to raise awareness of our housing stock’s impact on global warming. However, it will take much more to solve this problem than just energizing the design community. With over 120 million housing units in this country it will take the kind of Manhattan Project commitment, “Victory Garden” mentality, strong national leadership, and grass roots sense of urgency that mobilized the country during WWII. We need to act as if the ocean’s had already risen 20 feet, and large parts of our coastal cities had already been lost.

Clarification: About 60% of the green house gas emissions attributed to buildings come indirectly from purchased electricity from coal fired (and other fossil fuel) power plants. (So, in the interest of full disclosure, only about 19% of green house gas emissions come directly from buildings.) Looking at the big picture, this is both a supply and demand side problem and both coal plant emissions and building energy demands need to be addressed in the overall solution.

In 1661, activist John Evelyn wrote his anti-coal treatise FUMIFUNGIUM: or the Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoake of London Dissipated, in which he pleaded with the King and Parliament to do something about the burning of coal in London. “And what is all this, but that Hellish and dismall Cloud of SEACOALE?” he wrote, “so universally mixed with the otherwise wholesome and excellent Aer, that her Inhabitants breathe nothing but an impure and thick Mist accompanied with a fuliginous and filthy vapour…“

It would take nearly 300 more years before any real reform would be passed. In 1952, a four-day coal emissions fog killed roughly 4,000 Londoners. Four years later, the English Parliament would enact the 1956 Clean Air Act, putting an end to the burning of coal to heat London’s homes. It was the beginning of serious air-pollution reform in England, and beginning of the end of London’s famous “pea-soupers”.

At this point you’re probably wondering what any of this has to do with my home? Well here is the thing, we are not that far removed from seventeenth century London, we’ve just done a better job of making our coal pollution less visible and its impact more indirect.

Buildings in the U.S. are our largest source of green house gas emissions, accounting for over 43% of our country’s CO2 totals. Our homes make up 49% of the that total or 21% of total CO2 emissions. When you look a bit deeper at the data, about 60% of those emissions can be traced back to purchased electricity from coal fired power plants. So, every time you switch on a light you’re most likely drawing power in whole or part from one of this country’s coal plants. Largely due to our umbilical cord to coal, the average home emits more than twice as much CO2 than the average car!

Before I go any further, I’d like to go on the record that this is not an anti-coal rant. I believe that coal is an important part of our energy future, but we can no longer pretend that “business as usual” coal is not harming our environment and major factor of global warming.

Let me give you an example. Where I live in the Front Range of Colorado near Denver we are home to a total of eight coal fired power plants that collectively emit 1,669 tons of sulphur dioxide, 3,849 tons of nitrogen oxides, a whopping 24.6 million tons of carbon dioxide (the equivalent of about 5 million additional cars on the road!) and some 378 pounds of mercury.

In addition, EPA researchers estimate that fine particle pollution from power plants shortens the lives of about 115 Coloradoans each year. Fine particle pollution from power plants in Colorado also causes 21,425 lost work days, 91 hospitalizations and 3,611 asthma attacks every year, 52 of which are so severe they require emergency room visits. In addition, over 750,000 children in Colorado live within 30 miles of a coal-fired power plant and over 50,000 those children suffer from asthma.

Coal power plants are responsible for 41 percent of the total mercury emitted by all known U.S. Sources and approximately 30% of all lakes sampled in Colorado exceed the EPA fish tissue standard for mercury. A U.S. Geological Survey found that power plant pollution is directly linked to elevated mercury levels.

Mercury is a toxic heavy metal, which, when ingested, can cause serious neurological damage, particularly to developing fetuses, infants, and children. Children can be exposed to mercury in the womb or through breast milk if their mothers ingest mercury tainted fish or by consuming contaminated fish themselves. The neurotoxic effects of mercury exposure are similar to the effects of lead toxicity in children and include delayed development and cognitive deficits, language difficulties, and problems with motor function, attention, and memory.

It’s unreasonable to think that our huge infrastructure of coal fired electric utilities will change any time soon. That will take leadership, followed by enlightened legislation and even if fast tracked one or two decades of focused effort. So the problem will have to met on both the supply and demand side, and a good deal of the demand comes from our homes.

So today in the year 2007, nearly 350 years later, we find ourselves in much the same position characterized by the “fuliginous and filthy vapour(s)” of our friend John Evelyn in seventeenth century London. Aside from our utility bill , most of us never see the effects of our dependency on purchased electricity from coal. It’s most visible pollution is hidden away from our comfortable urban and sub-urban communities, and when we do read a headline or two about global warming or a mercury contaminated waterway it seems remote and unconnected to any action we might be taking. Only by raising awareness that leaving that light on is not only costing money, but it is also contributing to the loss of lives and to the potentially devastating effects of global warming, will we collectively begin to take action to reduce demand.

One simple low cost thing we can all do, is to replace the inefficient incandescent bulb in our favorite reading light with a compact fluorescent lamp. It will start paying for itself immediately, use 1/4th the energy, and last up to 10 times longer.

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