Lights Out – The clock is ticking

The second annual “Sylvania Socket Survey” is full of surprises.

Okay, it says 74 percent of participants have switched to energy-saving light bulbs in the past year. That may be true, but there are more than 74 percent of shoppers at stores I frequent buying standard bulbs or the stores are foolishly filling shelves with the outdated bulbs.

That was surprise one. But No. 2? Almost 75 percent of respondents didn’t know that incandescent bulbs are headed for a phase-out beginning Jan. 1, 2012.

Count me and everybody I know in that group. I’m not proud of that, but it’s true. A press release about the survey says the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 calls for the transition to start with traditional 100-watt bulbs and continue from there.

At the bottom of the release is the explanation that the survey involved only 300 adults. That makes some of the findings make a little more sense, but I wonder if some of the them are really true. How does compact fluorescent lights get into “71 percent of homes in America” but rank second to traditional bulbs in terms of use? Are the CFLs not turned on or do people only use them in a few lamps, using the usual bulbs in all the others?

I don’t get it.

Anyway, here’s the rest of the results.

66 percent of respondents said they are likely to purchase a compact fluorescent light (CFL), halogen or light-emitting diode (LED) bulb in the future.
Halogens are used in 40 percent of homes.
12 percent are using LED lighting.
52 percent said price is a key consideration in purchasing; the responses reflect a 12 percent spike compared to 2008.
Just 13 percent said they plan to buy extra 100-watt bulbs before the phase-out.
16 percent say they will shift to lower wattage incandescent light bulbs.
91 percent said they consider energy consumption per bulb to be an important factor.

I don’t get it.

But then there's the recycling. CFLs have mercury in them, so don't throw them in the Dumpster, experts say. And you might want to use a drop cloth when changing bulbs because you don't want to have to sweep up a toxic mess.

But wait, there's more!

The phase-out will happen over two years, and by 2014, maybe there will be more choices, but the main option now is CFLs. Just be careful you get the right kind. There is a special kind if you have a dimmer switch, and you have to get the right temperature bulb, for some reason measured on the Kelvin (not my idea) scale, to get the type of light you want from yellowish to blueish. The Energy Star folks have a good illustration, but this seems a little complicated.

Nevertheless, the idea is to save energy, and that's a good thing says Andrew deLaski, director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project in U.S. News & World Report.

"It's hugely important," he says. "A 60 to 70 percent reduction in light bulb energy use will save as much energy annually as that used by all the homes in Texas last year."

I guess disrupting my life is worth that.

Did somebody get the number of that bus?

Whew! When I say I feel like I got run over by a bus, I'm not joking.

Ever on the edge of sanity, the holidays on top of the crazed year of service I've had with the family took me down.

But no mas!

Here's a light start to build up momentum to do better in 2010. I know, heard it before, but here goes.

Want the easy road to green? Try out these actual books that came out this fall: The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Renewable Energy for Your Home
The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Greening Your Business
It's easy, really.

While I was contemplating these, I got sidetracked, kind of like reading three unrelated pages of the dictionary because of the cool stuff I see when I look up something like "jalap" (The dried root of a Mexican vine of the morning glory family, formerly used as a purgative, according to Webster's).

So on the sidetrack, I found these books (also actual) that came out this fall, just in time for Christmas cheer:

The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Creating a Graphic Novel
The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Connecting with Your Angels
The Complete Idiot’s Guide® Numerology Workbook
The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Getting Government Contracts
The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Making Money with Craigslist

So far, so good, but is this one really going to help if you need it?
The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Getting into Top Colleges

Can't imagine what this would be about without being gross.
The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Eating Clean

If you want to brush up on being authentic,
The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to the American Accent

And a few more just to round out the selections.
The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Natural Childbirth
The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Yorkshire Terriers, Second Edition
The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Buddhism, Third Edition
The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Werewolves

It's easy, really.

Not in your backyard

I know, I've been lax in posting, but here goes a new era.

There's buzz around the region about the Chinese coming to the Panhandle to build a wind farm. I've been asked a few times in the past week and couldn't find out anything specific because all the information floating around never says where the project will be except somewhere in Texas.

That narrows it down.

The New York Times environmental blog Green Inc. is equally vague, but here's the details it did contain, confirmed on the Web site of Cielo Wind Power, the Austin-based company partnering with the Chinese. It also is active in the Panhandle, most recently developing the Wildorado Wind Ranch and piling up leases for future development.

A-Power Energy Generation Systems, a Nasdaq company based in China, will ship in 240 of its 2.5 megawatt turbines for the project slated to cover 36,000 acres. The total cost of the project is estimated at $1.5 billion.

But no wonder people are in a fluff, the company hopes to get $450 million of the financing from U.S. stimulus funds, and the project will create 2,000 Chinese manufacturing jobs, according to the blog. There will be American jobs, but not anywhere close to that.

The thing is, for any wind farm, construction jobs are temporary and the jobs to maintain the farms are few.

Cielo has created jobs in the Panhandle, like at the Wildorado Wind Ranch and White Deer's Llano Estacado Wind Ranch, and has plans to do more, but this deal isn't happening here.

I talked to Walt Hornaday, CEO of Cielo, yesterday, and he said the project will be somewhere downstate where there are transmission lines available now. The Panhandle's are still not absolutely guaranteed until the PUC decides wind developers have proven they will use them, and the process to make them happen puts the finish date in 2013.

Hornaday said the reason the news on where the farm will be is that the exact location is not yet concrete.

This isn't the first time Cielo has reached out to partner with an overseas company. Cielo and Samsung Heavy Industries of South Korea are planning to install three of Samsung's 2.5 megawatt prototype turbines near Lubbock for testing.

All over but the crying

The Solar Decathalon is history now.

There's a fine Web site to check out if you haven't been following this event closely.

There's a lot of sweat and fancy thinking spent on these projects, and the contestants take it very seriously.

I won't spoil the finish for you, but there's a lot of nice work on the part of 20 university teams from Europe and North America. It was all played out on the National Mall in Washington D.C.

LED lights strategically placed in the base of the house and deck help the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's solar-powered house illuminate at night during the Lighting Design contest at the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.,(Credit: Stefano Paltera/U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon)

A Big Hug From Mother Nature

Speakers at Texas Tech's energy forum in Amarillo today addressed many topics, but digging deep for heating and cooling were a focus.

In a case study, a middle school in Frisco adopted a geothermal heat pump system that will save it $1.7 million over 20 years compared to a central gas boiler and air-cooled chiller, said Don Penn, consulting engineer with Image Engineering Group in Grapevine.

It all comes from filling classrooms with air blown across pipes that go up to 400 feet into the earth. Water under low pressure in the pipes becomes the same temperature the soil is, around 60 to 70 degrees, makes a u-turn and goes back to the surface to units that heat or cool school rooms, depending on the season.

There is a temperature control unit for each room so giant heating or cooling units aren't cranked up because the band wants to practice after hours, forcing the heating or cooling of many rooms that are empty.

"Each room is its own atmosphere," Penn said.

The life of the well field should be quite long, given the low pressure inside heavy-duty pipes.

"You'll be tearing the building down, and the well field will still be there," Penn said.

So the deal is about saving money, and then there's the carbon that is never released into the atmosphere because there's no coal or natural gas involved.

I know he's a salesman, and there weren't any naysayers invited, so my jury is still out on the viability of the technique. However, representatives of Lubbock Christian University who are using it on their campus vigorously vouched for it.

The power of sludge

Interesting. Sewage into ethanol.

It's that dream come true - turning waste into something valuable. There has been a lot of talk about, and work toward, harnessing methane produced at landfills, manure pits and wastewater at slaughter houses, but now an e-mail has arrived touting the use of the solids in municipal wastewater to create energy.

Applied Cleantech and Qteros are announcing their “breakthrough Q Microbe technology” to turn a substance produced from municipal wastewater solids into cellulosic ethanol. That might disappoint researchers who have been focused on cellulosic feedstocks like waste wood chips, switch grass and stuff like sorghum that can grows like it's on steroids.

If you’ve ever wondered what to do with your city’s sewage sludge, this is apparently it.
The companies claim a yield of 120-135 gallons of ethanol for every ton of Recyllose, the feedstock they create from sludge.

There is, however, a problem of scale. The companies say a wastewater plant that handles the sewage of about 2 million people can supply a “smaller-scale” ethanol plant. So don’t be looking for any of this alchemy in the Panhandle, or a lot of places that don’t have a concentration of at least 2 million people.

Meanwhile, if people insist on ethanol as the best next-generation fuel to act as a bridge to some dreamed about solution to oil addiction, don’t stop growing that corn and grain sorghum.

Blinded by science

All the details are beyond me, but think about how cool it would be to be able to paint a solar panel onto almost anything.

Chad Boutin recently reported for the National Institute of Standards and Technology that scientists are developing organic photovoltaics (see, I’m already getting a little confused). The short version is that they would replace rigid silicon cells. They would begin as a kind of ink that you could paint on various surfaces.

One rub is that the best organic photovoltaics currently can only convert less than 6 percent of light to power and don’t last very long.

Scientists at the institute are working on improving that performance and recently made discoveries that should help make progress.

“The 'ink' is a blend of a polymer that absorbs sunlight, enabling it to give up its electrons, and ball-shaped carbon molecules called fullerenes that collect electrons. When the ink is applied to a surface, the blend hardens into a film that contains a haphazard network of polymers intermixed with fullerene channels.”

See, clear as mud. But the important part is that, “By applying X-ray absorption measurements to the film interfaces, the team discovered that by changing the nature of the electrode surface, it will repulse fullerenes (like oil repulses water) while attracting the polymer.”

That means improvements in performance and lifespan because the materials aren't mixed haphazardly. That seems like a good thing to me.

And organic photovoltaics, try typing that fast six times, are a hot topic these days. A quick Google search brought up about 230,000 results. Go there for some light reading.

Slime sublime

The National Biodiesel Board is pushing research to turn slime respectable.


The NBB is supporting scientists in their work to make algae an efficient source of oil to make biodiesel. Research topics include developing a non-destructive oil extraction process. That means there would be a lot fewer algae bodies to dispose of or find a good use for after squishing them to get the oil out. Continuously removing oil from living algae is called, “milking the algae,” according to the NBB.

I get a real fuzzy picture of what that entails, but the potential result sounds good. Besides, you can grow algae in tanks of yucky water on land where crops like corn for ethanol or soybeans for biodiesel can’t grow.

The enthusiasm at a recent summit covering the topic almost sweeps you away.

“Ted Abernathy with the Southern Growth Policies Board captured the as yet unknown potential for algae in his welcome address.,” according to the NBB Web site. "When this started, it seemed interesting," he said. "Now it seems really interesting."

Really or really-really interesting?

Okay, he’s not a motivational speaker but the results could be helpful, especially if algae can be contained and not become an invasive species like kuzu or johnson grass.

The New York Times recently ran a cautionary story about some of the crops under consideration for farmers to grow to make cellulosic ethanol. The story cites giant reed, a scary grass that grows in dense clumps up to 20 feet tall, that researchers want to plant in Florida.

We probably don't have to worry about it here, since it grows in damp spots, but it crowds out native plants, forms a dense root mat that blogs water seeping into the ground, chokes water ways and, oh boy, is easily ignitable.

Giant reed photo courtesy of the National Park Service. Hmmmm.

It's a beautiful world - kind of

Ziploc's evolved, presumably you can evolve, and it's all bright under the orange-slice sun in a new ad for Ziploc Evolve plastic bags.

The Ziploc bag in the ad is covered with a field of peas, broccoli trees and some wierd hybrid wind turbine/palm tree things under the aforementioned orange slice. On the Web site's slide show, there's even animal cracker elephants and rabbits and the clouds look a little like califlower in the frame for Evolve.

But when you need two astericks in an ad to clarify your statements, well, not a good sign. The ad bills the new bags as "made with wind energy & 25% less plastic." Then comes the fine print, but note, it is made up of very small letters in green ink making it a little hard to read. "Made with wind energy and traditional energy sources" and less plastic "when compared to regular Ziploc Brand storage and sandwich bags."

Of course you can still buy those not-so-good Ziploc bags, but now you can feel better about yourself and the planet with Evolve. How many plastic trees do you think have lost their lives to make all the Ziploc bags in the world?

Mayhem on Main Street - The controller from outer space

The city of Amarillo is giving rebates up to $50 per water customer to people who buy controllers that turn their sprinkler system off when it's raining or near freezing, but Tom Ash thinks that's a "baby step."

Ash is the director of conservation for HydroPoint, a company that offers more than just a puny rain/freeze controller. They can input what plants you're growing, the slope of the yard, how much exposure to the sun there is, the soil type. Then the controller crunches the data to calculate the most efficient irrigation schedule for you.

But wait. There's more.

Just picture all the information flying through space from Earth to satellite to Earth to satellite to Earth as HydroPoint constantly collects information from the National Weather Service, other government weather observatories and private weather stations. They do some kind of way-too-complicated number work and figure out the evaporation and transpiration rates in the "micro zone" your yard is in. (That means how much water vapor is going back into the air and how much the plants are releasing in the surrounding half square mile.)

All that figuring goes into tweaking the irrigation schedule that is transmitted by satellite to the controller.

There is a monthly fee for all this high-tech aid, but Ash says you save water, but also energy to pump the water. Then there's the carbon dioxide that would have been created by the Harrington Power Station while Xcel Energy to makes the electricity to power the pumps that move the water for the house that Jack built.

Let's see, that's a win, win, lose...well, good thing I'm not doing all this high-concept calculating.

I don't know if it works, but it is an interesting idea.

Oh yeah, and you can wire a "baby-step" rain sensor in for an extra charge.

All in the family

The Center for Public Integrity reports Podesta One and Podesta Two are going head on.

Seems John Podesta, formerly known as co-chair of the Obama transition and Clinton chief of staff, is head of the Center for American Progress, and they really don’t like the term “clean coal.” In fact, they accuse the coal industry of using it to mislead in the debate about energy production, greenhouse gases and air pollution.

Then there’s lesser-known but equally well-connected Tony Podesta. The Center for Public Integrity describes him as “one of Washington’s most successful lobbyists." He's also John's brother. One of his clients? The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. The coalition paid his Podesta Group lobbying firm $50,000 in the second quarter to make its case during the climate debate in the House.

One of the policy papers by the Center for American Progress lambasts ACCCE as a group of coal and utility companies just stalling on making clean coal mean something. The report says the companies made a combined profit of $57 billion in 2007 but invested only a "paltry" $3.5 billion in clean coal research over several years.

Now I could be wrong, but $3.5 billion isn't extremely paltry in my checkbook, but I get the center's point.

"Meanwhile, atmospheric greenhouse gas levels grow, ice sheets melt, hurricanes become more ferocious, and the day of reckoning for the Earth looms closer," according to the center's paper.

Even the Podestas' gotta make a buck, but there may be a "day of reckoning" in Podestaland if this climate debate thing keeps going.

This is going to hurt just a little

GE announced yesterday it is working on home plans for building or retrofitting homes to be net users of zero electricity. The company hopes to debut the plans by 2015.

The keys to making this work are more efficient energy-using products, management of how much energy the home uses, generation of electricity and storage of that energy. Makes sense – light bulbs and appliances that use stingy amounts of power, solar and wind generation on site and making decisions to not use power.

Wait. GE, and others promoting some smart-grid proposals, think an informed consumer will make a conscious decision to cut back on energy use if they just understand how much they are currently using. Are we talking about American consumers?

According to GE, residential housing uses 37 percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. Of that usage, appliances, lighting and heating and cooling account for 82 percent.

We already know turning off the blow dryer will cut energy consumption and so will keeping the thermostat set higher during the summer and lower in winter. Has that really changed a lot of lifestyles?

The nifty highly efficient water heaters GE is dreaming up and residential solar and wind sound good, except for the neighbors who will complain about the looks. But it will be really hard for a lot of people to quit being energy hogs.

A lot of bull

The Western Business Roundtable will be offering politicians and the media elite some “cojones” this week.

The business lobbying group will serve Rocky Mountain oysters at its annual Taste of the West event after a hard day of showing off "tomorrow's game-changing technology today." Some kind of clean tech/green tech show and tell.

In a news release, the group calls the bull testicles by prettified names like calf fries, cowboy caviar, and a new one on me, Montana tendergroin. I don't even want to think about that.

But apparently, Capitol Hill staffers love them.

"Although I'm not certain that everyone knows the dish's derivation. A number of Members of Congress from the West come by early just to make sure they can grab some before they are gone," said Jim Sims, President and CEO of the Roundtable. "I can't say that I have seen many news media folks try them, but hope springs eternal in the quest to better educate folks in the Beltway media crowd about life outside the Beltway."

Okay, so what’s the big deal about the media? If the congressional staffers don’t know what they’re eating, how would most members of the media? So if reporters are shying away from the calf fries, and they absolutely shouldn’t, what would be the reason? I think its just the politicians and their helpers hogging the good stuff before anyone else can get some. Would that be hard to imagine?

I really believe we should stay focused on the grand tradition of ridiculing politicians. They’re paid by the public, not Rupert Murdock. And believe me, they make way more than “the media.” And don’t forget, they write and pass the laws that apply to everyone but themselves. So maybe they have a cojones overload and should back away from the table and let somebody else get some.