energy efficiency

A Roadmap for Sustainable Consumption

Individual consumption – including household heating and cooling as well as non-business transportation – creates roughly one-third of U.S. energy use and carbon emissions. It would feasible to reduce these emissions by twenty percent in a decade: there is a lot of low-hanging fruit yet to be picked. A range of individual actions, while seemingly …

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China and Carbon Markets

In a surprising development, China may be  planning to create an internal carbon market a/k/a cap & trade.  According to Climate Wire, When professor Chen Hongbo tried to promote carbon trading in China three years ago, he found himself under fire. As developing countries like China aren’t obliged to limit the byproduct of their economic …

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The “Rebound Effect” Falls Flat

Prompted in part by a recent article in the New Yorker, there’s been a lot of attention to the rebound effect lately.  The theory is that increased energy efficiency in effect makes energy cheaper (as measured in cost per unit of benefit), so people actually consumer more energy.  The empirical evidence is that this is …

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Green Housing, High-Tech Aspirations

For some holiday-time green inspiration, be sure to check out Lumenhaus, a dynamic new housing concept developed by Virginia Tech grad students, and currently on display in Chicago’s Millennium Park.

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Buidlings and Energy Efficiency — Just Being New Isn’t Enough

Newer buildings in California put more of a strain on the electric grid than do older buildings.  That is the apparent conclusion of a new paper written by Howard Chong through UC Berkeley’s Energy Institute at Haas.  The strain comes in the form of a greater “temperature response” – an increase in temperature on a …

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Dim Bulbs

It’s good to know that there’s still someone who isn’t afraid to stand up for the use of obsolete technologies and the right of every citizen to overpay for electricity.

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Chilly in Baltimore: Energy Efficiency and Wind Power

I heard an interesting story on NPR today about “district cooling” in which a company in Baltimore uses ice to produce chilled water, which is transported to a number of building in the city for supplemental cooling.  What really struck me as cool about this (sorry about the pun) is the fact that this system …

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One More Try This Year for a National Renewable Electricity Standard

Is something, in terms of a federal renewable standard, better than nothing? There is new talk of setting a national renewable electricity standard before this session of Congress ends, due to the introduction of S.3813, this week. This Bingaman-sponsored bill echoes an earlier proposal that can best be described as imposing a standard of modest …

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What a Waste of Energy

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has issued its annual snapshot of our national energy use, based on data collected by the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Agency.  The good news is that we used less energy in 2009 than we did in 2008 (almost all of the savings probably attributable to the still-weak economy).  The …

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The Nano Road to Energy Efficiency

Science Daily reports: Researchers at Oregon State University and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have discovered a new way to apply nanostructure coatings to make heat transfer far more efficient, with important potential applications to high tech devices as well as the conventional heating and cooling industry. These coatings can remove heat four times faster …

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