Tag Archives: less energy
Power for the people
Mary Teresa Bitti, Financial Post
For John Crane, the path to energy conservation started in 1979, when he took an energy course at New York University.
“From then on, I was interested in energy management,” says the engineer and operations manager at Yorkdale Shopping Centre in Toronto. In fact, during the course of his career, he took it upon himself to determine the health of the buildings he was overseeing by poring over hydro bills, trending and analyzing. He hasn’t stopped.
What’s more, he brought that meticulous focus to Yorkdale when he joined the shopping centre in 2001 after having completed a building audit of the two-million-square-foot commercial retail space and its 200 stores. Since then he has retrofitted the building with a focus on energy efficiency. His goal: to use less.
“We looked at all redundant equipment including ventilation and air conditioning systems that were energy inefficient and we replaced it with new equipment,” Mr. Crane says. “We went crazy on the lighting retrofits – this leads to the biggest savings.”
In fact, Yorkdale spent $300,000 on the lighting retrofit in 2007, which led to saving 850,000 kilowatt hours per year.
“We used Toronto Hydro’s Business Incentive Program to make the business case for that change. Now we have new energy efficient lighting throughout the shopping centre.”
What’s more, under his direction Yorkdale has installed a brand new building automation system allowing the building to shift and even shed its electricity load usage during peak times. Load shifting is just that: the practice of shifting energy use away from peak demand times (weekday afternoons) to less energy intensive times, when electricity is cheaper.
It represents a win for electricity consumers in the form of cost savings and for the province, which can better manage peak demand and reduce the need to import electricity or build new generation facilities.
“If you control your energy use, three things will happen,” Mr. Crane says. “You will create a wonderful environment for everyone – tenants, staff, customers – who comes to the building. You are going to help the hydro grid by reducing energy consumption. And you will save money. This is what will happen if you have a good energy and environmental program.”
And that is, in fact, exactly what happened. In 2001, Yorkdale consumed 14 million kilowatt hours of energy a year. At the end of 2008, that dropped down to nine million kilowatt hours a year: a 40% reduction in energy consumption. And through Toronto Hydro’s Conservation and Demand management program, Yorkdale uses its back-up generators when called upon by the utility during peak demand periods, taking the mall off the grid and thereby alleviating demand in Toronto by 1,300 kW. In return, the shopping centre receives an annual incentive payment.
Mr. Crane’s efforts are exactly what Bill 100, the Electricity Restructuring Act introduced in 2004, and Bill 150, the Green Energy and Green Economy Act, 2009, hope to encourage. Bill 100 calls on all electricity users to make a behavioural shift – one geared to conservation. The Green Energy and Green Economy Act (Bill 150) puts energy conservation, demand management and environmental responsibility front and centre.
“The legislation is really about awareness and being sensitive to what the environment is facing,” says Kah Fae Chan, director of demand management, Toronto Hydro-Electric System.
“The legislation itself has three components: renewable energy, conservation and putting some intelligence into the distribution system in order for the various components in the system to communicate with each other, making the overall system more efficient in order to meet demand and energy reduction targets determined by the government.”
The goal is to reduce Ontario’s peak demand by 20% or 6,300 megawatts by 2025. This is the equivalent of taking the city of Toronto off the power grid during peak load in a hot summer.
To that end, Toronto Hydro-Electric System and the Ontario Power Authority introduced the Business Incentive Program in 2007 to encourage commercial and industrial customers, which account for 70% of Ontario’s electricity use, to conserve.
“Essentially, we are trying to reduce the load during peak time,” Mr. Chan says. “The program is geared to three segments: industrial customers, commercial customers with buildings up to 25,000 sq. ft. and multi-residential buildings.”
The incentives range from $150/kW to $350/kW. The proposed project should result in a minimum of three kW of peak load reduction or have a minimum total incentive value of $450. As well, the project has to be permanent, reduce peak demand and involve certain savings. A good example is changing out inefficient lighting to more efficient lighting.
“Once that is done, we can be certain that the electricity demand will be reduced, as long as the lights are on,” Mr. Chan says.
“Replacing an old and inefficient rooftop air-conditioner unit with a high-efficiency unit is another good example, since on a hot day the air-conditioner would be running and demand reduction is certain due to the efficiency improvement.
“Ultimately there has to be significant effort from customers. In turn, that effort results in cost savings and a renewed commitment to the environment.”
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Water Efficiency a Priority for Green Buildings
Epoch Times Staff
Buildings consume 20% of the world’s available water, according to the United Nations Environmental Program.
Water efficiency and conservation are jumping to the forefront of green building measures, a report by McGraw-Hill Construction states.
Architecture and engineering firms, contractors, and owners report that water efficiency is rapidly becoming a higher priority than other aspects of green building, such as energy efficiency and waste reduction, says McGraw-Hill.
“Efficient practices and products, such as grey water treatment and low-flow plumbing fixtures, provide significant opportunities for the architect and engineering industry to respond to this trend and build high-tech, low-water-demand projects that will turn the tide on the water crisis and create the conscientious buildings of tomorrow,” says McGraw-Hill.
Respondents reported that on average, applying water-efficient designs and products leads to 15% less water use, 10-11% less energy use, and an 11-12% reduction in operating costs.
Current brand awareness is strongest for high-efficiency toilets, water-saving sinks, and waterless urinals, the report said.
Owners are especially committed to water-efficient practices, according to the report, with many respondents saying that more than three-quarters of current projects incorporate water-efficient designs.
The study was supported by The Chicago Faucet Company and Sloan Valve Company.
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The Jevons Paradox
How Efficiency Improvements May Be Undermining Sustainability
By Martin Holladay – greenbuildingadvisor.com
Let’s say you’ve sold your old, leaky house and moved into a new, well-insulated home with Energy Star appliances. With all of its efficiency improvements, your new home requires 30% less energy than your old home. That’s got to be good for the planet, right?
Well, maybe not — especially if you save so much on your energy bills that you decide to fly to Florida for your next vacation.
A new book, The Myth of Resource Efficiency, casts serious doubts on the idea that efficiency improvements will lead to lower levels of energy consumption. The book focuses on the “rebound effect” — the increase in energy use that often follows energy efficiency improvements.
The authors of The Myth of Resource Efficiency — John Polimeni, Kozo Mayumi, Mario Giampietro, and Blake Alcott — identify William Stanley Jevons as the first economist to describe the rebound effect. In his 1865 book, The Coal Question, Jevons explained the mechanism whereby energy efficiency improvements lead to increased energy consumption: “If the quantity of coal used in a blast-furnace, for instance, be diminished in comparison with the yield, the profits of the trade will increase, new capital will be attracted, the price of pig-iron will fall, but the demand for it increase; and eventually the greater number of furnaces will more than make up for the diminished consumption of each.”
“Let’s Use More!”
One hundred and forty-four years ago, Jevons wrote, “It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.” Economists now refer to this principle as the Jevons Paradox.
The Jevons Paradox takes many forms:
* Because of improvements in refrigerator efficiency, consumers can afford more and larger refrigerators.
* Because of improvements in vehicle efficiency, car owners can afford to drive more miles per year.
* Because of improvements in airtightness, window performance, and insulation techniques, homeowners can afford to build larger houses.
* Savings resulting from energy-efficiency improvements — or even savings resulting from giving up meat in one’s diet — allow consumers to take more vacations, resulting in greater energy use.
As Joseph Tainter explains in the forward to The Myth of Resource Efficiency, “An action taken to conserve resources reduces the cost of daily life to such an extent that entirely different kinds of environmental damage become affordable.”
In 1865, Jevons correctly predicted that the development of more efficient ways to harness the power of coal would lead to an increase in coal burning. Worried that Britain’s supplies of easily mined coal would be exhausted, Jevons suggested that Britain prepare for coming fuel shortages by (in Tainter’s words) “using the coal-given prosperity for posterity and for a sort of soft landing at coal’s limits.”
Is Efficiency Part of the Solution or Part of the Problem?
The Jevons Paradox represents a serious challenge to the energy efficiency community. “The Jevons Paradox questions the pervasive assumption — common in colloquial discourse and even in many academic discussions — that sustainability emerges as a passive consequence of consuming less,” Tainter writes. “This assumption comes in two versions. The pessimistic version suggests that it is necessary for people voluntarily to reduce their resource consumption in order to become more sustainable. Examples might include taking shorter or colder showers, using public transportation, drinking tap water rather than bottled, or eating less meat. … The optimistic version…is that a future of technological innovations and the shift to a service-and-information economy will reduce our consumption of resources to such an extent that we will become sustainable without requiring people to sacrifice the things that they enjoy. … This is exactly the assumption that Jevons showed to be false.”
Communities that have a low environmental impact and live in harmony with nature are not particularly efficient. Our planet’s future is being threatened not by traditional rural communities with old-fashioned methods of livelihood, but rather by industrial economies where efficiencies are highest.
The authors of The Myth of Resource Efficiency note, “The idea that ‘an increase in energy efficiency always promotes sustainability’ is very simplistic.”
In Praise of Higher Taxes
If efficiency won’t save us, what will? One possible response to the Jevons Paradox is to enact higher energy taxes. According to Tainter, however, such taxes will never fly in the U.S.: “The Jevons Paradox cannot be circumvented through voluntary restraint or any other laissez-faire approach. Giampietro and Mayumi suggest that taxes could make up for any savings introduced by efficiency improvements, thereby avoiding the paradox. In the United States, at least, this approach is politically infeasible, but the general principle is sound.”
I agree with the authors of The Myth of Resource Efficiency that we need higher energy taxes, but I disagree with their dismissal of voluntary restraint. Higher taxes will help, but a solution to our global climate crisis will also require a movement towards voluntary simplicity, as advocated by Henry David Thoreau and Mohandas Gandhi.
À la recherche des loisirs perdus
A move toward voluntary simplicity would not only benefit the planet — it might also provide us with more leisure time. (An excellent short video by Peter Smith explores the link between the Jevons Paradox and the disappearance of leisure.) As anthropologists point out, every improvement in economic efficiency — including the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, and the transition from agriculture to factory work — has been accompanied by a decrease in leisure. In The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light, William Irwin Thompson noted, “With a labor of a mere fifteen hours a week, hunters and gatherers can provide for all their needs.”
The “disappearing leisure” problem was memorably described in an essay, The Original Affluent Society, by American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. Sahlins wrote, “Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter’s — in which all the people’s material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognize that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times.”
Needless to say, I’m not calling for a return to hunting and gathering. I’m calling instead for the voluntary adoption of a simpler lifestyle: one with less work, fewer possessions, and more leisure time. A graceful transition to such a lifestyle would be the greatest possible gift to our children and grandchildren.
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