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Pathway :: Home
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Put Energy Savings Programs in the Consumer's Control |
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Contributed by Jim Elliott
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Saturday, 12 January 2008 |
/business/article/29089(http://www.enn.com/image_for_articles/29089-1.jpg/medium ) Imagine that you are being given the controls over what energy is consumed in your home. The main tool would be your computer. It would be attached through controllers to your digital thermostats. It would be attached to your water heater and clothes dryer. By logging onto a website, you would be able to set your acceptable range of home temperature matching that with a demand side managemet system of electricity and natural gas prices to ultimately set your energy costs. You would be able to monitor your energy costs daily, weekly, monthly.
Today, there is a pilot project involving 112 homes in the Seattle
area. They are working with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
of the Energy Department to see how this might work and the potential
for savings. The Energy Department has said that "if households have
digital tools to set temperature and price preferences, the peak loads
on utility grids could be trimmed by up to 15 percent a year. Over a
20-year period, this could save $70 billion on spending for power
plants and infrastructure and avoid the need to build the equivalent of
30 large coal-fired plants." With the current avertion to nuclear power and the myriad of
problems associated with the technology, this experiment could also
eliminate the perception that we need to replace every coal-fired plant
with a new nuclear powered one. This experimcent is said to test consumer behavior as to possible
energy savings. It could demonstrate that given the right tools,
people were quite capable to participate in controlling the energy use
for their homes. If it can be done at the home, then why not the
entire country? The problem in the United States is most state utilities have returns that
are
based on the power plants and equipment they own and operate, not how
much energy they save. Unless that changes, the Seattle pilot will
remain just an experiment.
But on first blush, don't we have all of this already, maybe not electronically?
With those demand side management tools not currently available to
most Saskatchewan residents, all of the same tools are there for most
residents. We can set the ambient temperature in the room. Most can
set the water temperature of the water heater and whether we vent the
hot air of our clothes dryer into the outside or keep it inside. We
can reduce or increase the radiation energy coming into the house.
So why haven't we been able to curb our electricity demand or our
energy? Much has been the approach of our utilities. They haven't
seen that reducing energy demand is as important as avoiding the future
costs of expansions to the system or that there might be a savings
realized. They are out there to just sell more "energy widgets", not to
find the best way to do things with as few widgets as possible. If
they need more widgets, they just build another "widget building plant".
Maybe, we need an energy savings utility within our crown corporatons
that would be able to save energy through investing in our total energy
supply system saving energy and then being able to sell that same
avoided energy savings back to Sask Power and Sask Energy to balance its
accounts.
It should then become increasingly more clear that saving energy
at the front end or demand side management would be less expensive than
just selling more and building more energy plants. It is also seen as a more stable, diversified, decentralized job market response than the specialized labour needed for power plant production and operations. With the multitude of energy supply options out there and broader than just electricity and natural gas, we might then start to tackle other energy uses like automobiles and transportation.
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 12 January 2008 )
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