energetic efficiency

I recently became acquainted with the work of Danny Harvey, Prof. of Geography and a climate scientist at U. Toronto. Over the last few years, Danny has been putting together a large-scale energy plan that might be called a Renewable Electron Economy, to which a portion of this website is devoted. I believe Danny’s work is invaluable because he presents a great deal of detail about a wide range of technological solutions and also links these to climate scenarios.

In this 3-part post, I will outline how cap and trade’s composite structure contains within it fault lines that help defeat its and the climate action community’s goals.  In this first part, I will sketch out the components of the cap and trade hybrid

Home energy management is hot and I’ve seen more than a dozen companies having a very similar approach. It is almost hopeless for small start-ups to play the same, as many deep pockets have been working on this for a long time. Whirlpool and energy retailer Direct Energy have joined forces to showcase what the energy efficient home of the future will look like at the CES. I’ve seen some cool stuff from them.

Here is one not commonly known fact, we know massive data center use up tons of energy just for cooling, in any typical data center only 40-45% of energy use is for the actual computing -- the rest is used mostly for cooling down the servers. Data centers' emissions of carbon dioxide have been running at around one third of those of airlines, but are growing 10% a year and now approach levels of entire countries such as Argentina or the Netherlands.

A quick “hats off” to David Brancaccio and NOW on PBS for their well-researched and informative documentary on what Denmark is doing to attain energy independence and get off oil by building a version of the Renewable Electron Economy that is suitable for their resource base.

by: Michael Hoexter

In Part 1 of this post I summarized US and worldwide efforts to create legal standards to limit GHG emissions and described the political opposition to these efforts as based on a narrow conception of liberty, negative liberty, popular among conservatives over the last three decades. I introduced two types of ethical system, deontology and utilitarianism as helpful in understanding the debates over climate legislation.

by: Michael Hoexter

by: Michael Hoexter

One of the limitations of carbon pricing is that, as a support for renewable energy or other clean generation technologies, it is a roundabout and scattered means of “leveling the playing field”. Energy markets that still enjoy the climate-altering bonanza of fossil fuels are generally less excited from a narrow utilitarian perspective about renewable energy without heavy policy support, excepting in some areas large onshore wind projects.

by: Roger Dooley

by: Michael Hoexter