The Gulf Oil Spill vs. Home Energy Retrofits
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The Gulf Oil Spill vs. Home Energy Retrofits
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Re: The Gulf Oil Spill vs. Home Energy Retrofits
#2Don't forget, you're not off the hook if your home is heated with natural gas or electricity. This post makes the great point that energy is energy... No matter what it's made from (at least among the fossil fuels). The less coal and gas we use, the lower the demand for oil there will be.
Re: The Gulf Oil Spill vs. Home Energy Retrofits
#3What is really cool is that the $10k can often reduce a home's POWER demand by 30%.
Pricing varies, but this gets to around $0.12-$0.5/kW. BUT. That's kW not kWH (e.g power, not energy). So the power demand reduction translates to energy savings for the lifetime of the building or systems in it..
Re: The Gulf Oil Spill vs. Home Energy Retrofits
#4So essentially, my little corner of Seattle is wasting the equivalent of a gulf oil spill EVERY YEAR!. Ugh. At least there's no damage to the environment from our waste... oh wait... :(
Re: The Gulf Oil Spill vs. Home Energy Retrofits
#5According to your math, homes in the US waste the energy equivalent of over 1,300 gulf oil spills every year. Ouch...
Re: The Gulf Oil Spill vs. Home Energy Retrofits
#6According to your math, homes in the US waste the energy equivalent of over 1,300 gulf oil spills every year . Ouch...
And for bonus points, although I haven't verified, he's probably measuring total energy content of that oil, not the amount we can successfully harness using mechanical means.
Re: The Gulf Oil Spill vs. Home Energy Retrofits
#7According to your math, homes in the US waste the energy equivalent of over 1,300 gulf oil spills every year . Ouch...
And for bonus points, although I haven't verified, he's probably measuring total energy content of that oil, not the amount we can successfully harness using mechanical means.
Yep - fun with math! Gallons of oil to barrels of oil to MMBTU's per barrel to MMBTU's per house per year (source energy vs. site energy). We totally geeked out on this. Minus points though for skipping the energy content in the natural gas that's leaking out of the well (apparently it's half and half). But our algebra skills reached a limit at some point once we felt like the point was made...
Re: The Gulf Oil Spill vs. Home Energy Retrofits
#8Yes, that's one of the disturbing things about the oil industry. The oil companies have done their best to make sure usage of oil is as inefficient as possible, since that is in their medium-term economic interest... They go to tremendous lengths and expend (and destroy) significant resources to extract oil, and then they are actually hoping we'll waste a major portion of it.
Re: The Gulf Oil Spill vs. Home Energy Retrofits
#9Amazing how much energy and resources we can save just by living our lives more efficiently.
Re: The Gulf Oil Spill vs. Home Energy Retrofits
#10This is a bizarre comparison. The problem with the oil spill isn't the lost energy, it's the destruction and the cost of clean-up.
The implication of this article is that retrofitting 75k homes somehow cancels out or equals an oil spill. At best, this amount of retrofitting reduces the risk of an oil spill slightly because one fewer rig would be built.
When a carpenter drops a beam on his foot, we can't say that the architect should have used one fewer beam to prevent the accident. Energy efficiency is great, but by itself, the amount of oil lost in the oil spill isn't really relevant to any cost-benefit analysis.