Tag Archives: electricity

How Much Do You Know About Wind Power?

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The U.S. Department of Energy has a new quiz out that will challenge your knowledge of wind power and bring you up to date on some new and unexpected information, like how next-generation wind turbines will make a lot more wind power available, even in places that currently wouldn’t be considered good possibilities for wind.

electricity-generating "wind engine" from 1887

electricity-generating “wind engine” from 1887

My favorite factoid, and a surprising one to me:

Wind energy is now the cheapest form of power, with new power purchase agreements in 2014 averaging a record-low 2.35 cents per kilowatt-hour.

I got a 7 out of 13, and I felt like I was doing pretty well, considering! Hopefully you can beat that score. Check out the quiz at http://energy.gov/articles/quiz-test-your-wind-energy-iq.

Tips and Recommendations from the First Smaller Footprint Meeting

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Here are some notes of interest from the November 20th meeting of Smaller Footprint, a group whose purpose is to share information, ideas, and planning for shrinking individual and household carbon footprints.

Here are a fewbooks that were mentioned last night:

Mike Berners-Lee, How Bad Are Bananas – an expert carbon footprint calculator gives footprints of everything from paper towels to steak to car accidents to space shuttle launches.

Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior – The famed novelist’s story of a woman who finds a miracle that turns out to be the leading edge of climate change disaster. Much about the immediate experience of climate change creeping on us, leaving out discussion of what we can do about it.

Doug McKenzie-Mohr, Fostering Sustainable Behavior: An Introduction to Community-Based Social Marketing. The two types of social norms I mentioned that tend to cue people’s behavior, the names of which I can never remember off the top of my head, are injunctive norms (what people understand they’re supposed to do) and descriptive norms (what people perceive to be what others mostly do).

ice packDennis’s “Blue Ice Box” concept is a clever approach to reducing electricity use in refrigerators over the winter: purchase two sets of ice packs (he was thinking the blue ones, say, 12 ice packs total). Put half of them outside in freezing weather, then bring them in to the refrigerator as soon as they’re frozen solid. They’ll help cool your food as their temperature equalizes. When they’re entirely unfrozen, swap in the second set (which you’ll have had outside freezing in the mean time) and put the first set back out to freeze again.

Gotchas: leaving either the outside door or the refrigerator door open too long will cancel out some of the benefit of using this approach. Ideally, bring the ice backs in and out when you’re already going in and out of the house for other reasons.

Refrigerators use a thermostat, so adding the additional chill of ice packs will keep the fridge colder longer without requiring the compressor to start: voila, free cold and electricity savings! (Because cold is a renewal resource in Vermont.)

Alling Library Insulation and Weatherization Pay Off

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library insulation

In a note to community members this week, Marti Fiske of the Dorothy Alling Library in Williston said,

It has been a full year since the library’s insulation and roofing project has been completed. We have been collecting usage statistics for electricity and natural gas. Compared to the average usage over two previous years, the library saved an average of 27% in natural gas and 29% in electricity in this last year. When you convert that to dollars saved that is $884 on natural gas and $325 on electricity!

Vermont LED Bulb Promotion Saves Money, Energy, and the Climate

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ledbulbs

Efficiency Vermont has partnered with several electrical distributors to offer LED (Light Emitting Diode) light bulbs at a substantial discount. These lamps are the latest in lighting technology and offer efficiencies much better  than Compact Fluorescent and standard incandescent bulbs. Advantages of LED lamps include:

  • Efficiencies over conventional bulbs. For example, a 16 watt LED bulb will provide the same light as a 75 watt Halogen bulb.
  • These bulbs last and last – they are rated at 25000 hours of use. Conventional bulbs are usually rated to last around 1000 – 2000 hours, so these can nearly pay for themselves in bulb replacement costs alone!
  • Most of them can work with a dimmer and can be had in ‘warm white’ colors to match the light bulbs we now use.
  • There is no mercury pollution when disposing LED lamps as opposed to the compact fluorescent.

When buying LED bulbs you should keep the following in mind:

  • Replace bulbs with matched LED lamps so that they fit into the fixtures you have.  You may need to take in your existing bulbs for correct sizing.
  • Don’t try to save energy by using a ‘dim’ bulb.  A 5 watt LED bulb may look like the one you are replacing, but its light output won’t match the 60 watt bulb you now use.  Follow the guidelines that would tell you to use a 12 watt LED to match the light of your current 60 watt bulb.
  • The LED bulbs are rated at a color temperature, usually in degrees KELVIN .  A ‘warm white’ bulb is rated near 2700 degrees Kelvin.  4000 degree Kelvin and higher bulbs will have a ‘bluish’ light and are a bit harsh in my opinion.

The energy and cost savings are substantial. If you convert your light bulbs to LED, your electrical bill will go down. LED bulbs are most economical when replacing lights that are on most often. Closets aren’t the place to put these bulbs. I have converted 90% of the bulbs in my house to LED and my bill with Vermont Electric is usually less than $60 per month (I also have a propane stove, dryer, and water heater …)  The following is an example of the cost savings of these bulbs over their 25,000 hour life:

12 watt LED to replace a 60 watt conventional light bulb.

Savings:     1,200 KiloWatt Hours (kwhr)  at a cost of $0.17 per kwhr,  Savings =  $204

(and this doesn’t include the savings of replacing more than 10 regular bulbs!)

I have recently adopted Vermont Electric’s ‘Variable Rate Schedule’ which charges more for power at the peak times and substantially less for off peak times.  If most of my lighting happens in the evenings during the peak hours, the cost of electricity increases  to  $0.26 per kwhr and can increase to  nearly  $0.40 per kwhr…  This would result in savings of more than $300 to $480 per bulb over its life… Investing $100 in twenty LED bulbs will return from $4080 to nearly $9,600 over the bulbs’ lifetimes, and save 24,000 kilowatt hours of electricity.

So Efficiency Vermont and these local electrical supply houses are offering these bulbs from Phillips, Sylvania, etc at prices starting at $4.99 per bulb. This is a big savings – costs in the local hardware stores are more like $6 to $25 per bulb even for non name-brand bulbs.

Some of the stores where these bulbs are available are:

  • NorthEast Electrical, 340 Ave D, Williston
    open Mon – Fri, 6:45am – 5:00pm
  • Twin State Electric (behind Pet Food Warehouse on Williston road)
    open Mon – Fri, 6:00am – 4:00pm
  • Walsh Electric, Rt 7, Colchester.  (Just north of Costco)
    open Mon – Fri, 7:00am – 5:00pm

Most electrical supply houses aren’t open on weekends, but they do generally have early morning hours.