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Since the earliest days of sailing, boats and ships have been powered by renewable energy. At first, the motive energy came from muscles manipulating oars. I would have said human muscles, but boats predate modern humans. Almost a million years ago, Homo erectus settled several Indonesian islands that couldn’t have been reached without boats. Boats with sails aren’t known to be that ancient; the first evidence of their existence starts around 7,000 years ago. Recreational sailboats, and var...
Most electric vehicle (EV) charging takes place at home. But, what if you’re not home? Suppose that Jenelle and I decide to go to Portland, Ore., with a detour to Multnomah Falls, for a weekend of scenic hiking and sneaker shopping, capped off with a couple of Portland’s giant donuts. It’s a 260-mile trip from La Conner to Multnomah Falls, plus 30 more miles into Portland, plus some driving around to Big Sneaker stores and the donut shop, before heading to a hotel. Then, there’ll probabl...
From 1999 – 2001, I worked for Florida Power & Light. Part of my job was to figure out how that company should make use of energy technologies that were just emerging from the laboratory into commercial use. Twenty-five years later, to borrow a line from Raul Julia in “Street Fighter,” some of the technologies I was studying “are Tuesday.” In other words, they’re no longer exotic. They no longer attract attention. They’re just what exists, barely worthy of comment. Compact fluorescent l...
Electric cars were introduced in the 1890s. They only had about 50 miles of range between charges, but they wouldn’t break your arm starting them and they didn’t make loud noises and scare horses. Internal combustion engine cars weren’t reliable, gasoline wasn’t widely available, tires on all car types were unreliable and roads were bad. As late as 1905, electric, steam and ICE cars split the market with about a 33% market share each. Steam and ICE cars gradually got better tires, electri...
Back when there were only three channels on TV, and you had to change them by hand, some new cars arrived in America. To paraphrase a quote often misattributed to Mahatma Ghandi: First, Detroit ignored Japanese car manufacturers. Then, Detroit laughed at Japanese car manufacturers. Then, Detroit fought Japanese car manufacturers. Then, Japanese car manufacturers won. In 1972, according to Detroit, nobody would ever want small Japanese cars, and Japan didn’t understand the U.S. car market. T...
Lighting experts expect that light-emitting diode lights will soon completely eliminate fluorescent lighting and that LEDs will reduce the use of incandescent lighting to a few specialty items like high-powered outdoor halogen lamps. This shift is expected to be nearly complete by 2030. Further improvements in LEDs, including a shift to what should ultimately be lower-cost organic LEDs are likely to continue. By 2050, all new lights may be LEDs or OLEDs. This change means that we’ll use less e...
Before electric lights were available, we created artificial light with fires, and beeswax or tallow candles, and oil lamps and gas streetlamps. In the 1860s, kerosene largely replaced whale oil for lighting. Then, starting in the 1880s, incandescent electric lights were introduced on a large scale. Electric lights were more convenient, easier to maintain, and less of a fire hazard than gas or kerosene lamps. That seems like an uncontroversial statement. In 1880, it wasn’t. Electric lights were...
I recently bought a used plug-in hybrid car, a Chevy Volt. After the federal tax credit and Washington licensing fees (EVs are currently exempt from sales tax), it cost about $8,000. I already had a home charger for Jenelle’s Chevy Bolt. If I had needed to install a 240-volt EV charger at home, that would have cost about $2,000 to $3,000 more. Over almost three months, I’ve put a little over 1,800 miles on the Volt, using it as my primary car. It’s a plug-in hybrid, not a pure electric, so it...
“What about airplanes?” That’s one of the most common questions I get when people start talking with me about renewable energy. It’s like asking Henry Ford “Hey, Henry, when’s that Model A going to be able to run 200 miles an hour for about three hours at Talladega?” The answer: Not immediately, but a Ford that’s a direct descendant of the Model A will be able to do that. It’s not like asking when a Ford car will be able to land on the moon. Switching to renewable energy will be possible witho...
Reducing energy use through energy efficiency is easier than ever. As we say in the energy efficiency business, a megawatt is the energy you use, but a “negawatt” is the energy you don’t need to use. Efficiency, as I’ve mentioned before, doesn’t mean that you have to stop using energy-consuming devices, or even that you have to use them less. It means that you choose systems and controls that enable you to use less energy to get the effect you want. Often, new, energy efficient technologi...
On June 18, the State of Washington’s Department of Commerce announced that the La Conner School District has won a $1.96 million Community Decarbonization Grant. This new grant will pay for the development, at the La Conner Middle School, of a grid-interconnected solar electric generation system with a capacity of 138.2 kilowatts. Based on the U.S. Department of Energy’s solar generation model, the electricity produced by this system during an average year will be about 140,000 kilowatt-hours....
Some nominally recyclable organic materials, in some specific locations, may be better used as fuel for a waste-to-energy system, even if that system produces some carbon dioxide, for the purpose of replacing a fueled heating system that would produce even more carbon dioxide and reducing waste shipments. La Conner may be one such location. There are two major reasons to recycle. If you can reuse raw materials that have already been extracted and processed, you’ll reduce the need to extract n...
About half to two-thirds of the average Western Washington home’s energy use is for space heating and cooling, and water heating. Normally, temperature management is either accomplished by burning gas or propane, or by using an electric resistance heater or air-source heat pump. There’s another, more energy-efficient option: Water-source heat pumps. These systems operate on the same basic principles as other heat pumps. They transfer heat from one side of the system to the other. In an air...
Wind energy – both on land and offshore – has been falling in cost almost as dramatically as solar power. It’s down well over 90% since 2000. The relevant technologies are still improving. Furthermore, wind has some advantages over other forms of electricity generation, including other renewable generation systems. For instance, wind generators can be installed in far more places than hydroelectric or geothermal generation plants, both of which require very specific geology. On average, a well-...
For most of the last 10 years, electric consumption in Washington has been relatively flat or even falling. Innovative technologies like LED lighting and heat pumps have been replacing less efficient incandescent lighting and the older generation of HVAC systems. Moderate weather, on average, in both winter and summer has also flattened electric loads. Some Washington utilities have been concerned that falling demand would affect their ability maintain their systems without substantial rate...
As longtime readers know, Jenelle bought an all-electric Chevy Bolt a couple of years ago. We’ve driven it about 18,000 miles. It replaced a Buick SUV that had about 85,000 miles on it. The total cost of the Bolt out of pocket, after the trade-in and the electric-vehicle rebate, plus the cost of adding a 240-volt (Level 2) charger to our garage, was about $25,000. The Buick got about 20 mpg, so we’ve saved 900 gallons of gas. Gas has been around $4 a gallon here for most of that time, so tha...
The energy infrastructure we have today is the result of thousands of years of technological development, during which the systems evolved based on what had and hadn’t been invented, and where. The Romans had everything they needed to develop a steam engine, but they didn’t. Where would humanity be today if we had almost 2,000 more years of industrialization? The existence of legacy systems significantly affects the speed with which we design and install energy systems based on the latest tec...
A few years ago I was managing an experiment aimed at determining whether it was practical to power cars with hydrogen, instead of gasoline. Most of the cars were small gasoline-engine SUVs which had been modified to burn hydrogen. Hydrogen, at automotive operating temperatures, is a gas that must be compressed and stored in high-pressure tanks. The tanks are made of carbon fiber. They look a lot like very large scuba tanks. A hydrogen storage system small enough to store aboard a car can only...
The tide-based currents in the Swinomish Channel may offer a local source of reliable, predictable renewable energy. Several people have asked me whether this natural resource could be developed to power greater La Conner, including Shelter Bay and Swinomish Village. A tidal energy system must be durable, reliable and capable of being installed and maintained cost-effectively in salt water. Doing all this has been challenging, so the engineering needed to extract energy from tidal currents...
One probably wouldn’t think that El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, would be particularly influential as regards the future of electric generation in the Pacific Northwest. Surprisingly, he might. Before Bukele took office, a currency experiment called Bitcoin Beach was underway in the El Salvadoran town of El Zonte. That experiment, which is ongoing, is aimed at demonstrating that it’s possible to use Bitcoin, or a Bitcoin derivative, as a day-to-day currency. The Bitcoin Beach proje...
Reducing energy use during the design and construction phase of a new building is almost always easier than retrofitting the building afterwards. There are many techniques that can be used to reduce the amount of energy a building needs. Using efficient systems like LED lighting and heat pumps are obvious. However, the building architecture itself can be designed to save energy, both without management of control systems (passive technologies), and with controls (active technologies). Architectu...
Adding up electricity, gas and propane, most (probably half to two-thirds) of the energy you use in your house is for heating, ventilation and air conditioning. One of the most significant other uses is water heating. In most homes, the same hot-water source is used for bathing, dishwashing and laundry. To compare water heaters, I looked up the specifications for similar, popular water heaters at one of the big-box stores. The propane water heater requires about 0.267 gallons of propane per...
The Skagit Valley Clean Energy Alliance will be sponsoring a new Solarize program this year, to help facilitate and accelerate the installation of new rooftop solar generation systems throughout Skagit County. When final details are available, I’ll write a whole column about this year’s Solarize program, including details on how you can participate, starting with a no-obligation analysis of your home by one of the pre-selected participating contractors. In the meantime, though, we’ve gotte...
Viewing parts of the electric grid, such as transmission towers and substations as public art is actually a decades old concept. The colored glass used in high-rise buildings since the early 1960s isn’t just for aesthetics. That technology was initially developed to help control the heat in the buildings. The use of energy systems in art isn’t limited to very large structures like high-rises and transmission towers. Smaller pieces of energy infrastructure are visible to the public and offer sur...
One of the least publicized but nevertheless significant obstacles to the new infrastructure required to support development of new energy resources is that this infrastructure can be unsightly. A few years ago, I was working on a consulting assignment at a well-known university. Management had a strong interest in developing on-campus renewable resources. Funding was easy to acquire. The biggest obstacle to progress was that a politically powerful, well-funded neighborhood association nearby...
