This is the third and final post in our three part series that explores San Francisco’s Existing Commercial Building Energy Ordinance. In the first post, we went over why the legislation was passed, the second post talked about how to comply if you own a building and here we will discuss how owners can make [...]
This is the second in a three part series that explores San Francisco’s Existing Commercial Building Energy Ordinance. In the first post, we went over why the legislation was passed, and here we will talk about how to comply if you own a building. Next we will talk about how owners can make the most [...]
Unless you own a commercial building in San Francisco, you may have missed a relatively recent piece of legislation that requires all buildings over 10,000 square feet to benchmark and disclose their energy use annually plus get an energy audit every five years. This three part series goes over why the legislation was passed, how [...]
Bombarded by information about going green and unsure where to start? Here is a simple, no-nonsense guide to your options for reducing your personal carbon footprint profitably
Ever wonder what that blinking red light on the restaurant bathroom light switch is doing and how the lights know that you’re in there? Understand occupancy sensors here!
Though alternative means of energy storage might be less well known than batteries, they have great utility in our electricity grid. And they are critical to its transformation.
Supercapacitors already play an important role in devices that need bursts of power like an automobile, and they have the capacity to revolutionize energy storage.
Want to get a job in Cleantech? You’ve come to the right place. This post describes a system you can follow to find pretty much any green job you can think of.
Have you ever looked inside a battery? In this post, we will discuss how batteries, ubiqituous in modern life, actually work.
You’ve almost certainly seen turbines before, but probably never heard of microturbines. They are an interesting technology with environmental opportunities and pitfalls
Energy storage for cars, computers, and power plants involves many tradeoffs. Learn about the fundamental choices and the metrics used to analyze the opportunities in this first of four posts!
What makes your laptop or cell phone battery die? How can you make it last longer? Find out.
The word ‘sustainability’ triggers a range of buzzwords: responsibility, environmentally friendly, safe, organic, equitable, recyclable, long-lasting, renewable, profitable, or biodegradable. As consumers, we now have the option of purchasing ‘sustainable’ seafood[1] or “sustainable” clothing[2]. Most famously, in 1987 the Brundtland Commission defined sustainable development as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability [...]
This post examines several of the key challenges required to model the impact of solar arrays on demand charges.
Odds are, you have never paid an energy demand charge in your life, but they are important part of how utility electricity works, and they become a complex problem when solar projects are involved.
Though a relatively obscure energy modulating solution for now, it has recently begun being marketed as an energy efficiency panacea. But is it?
Unless you’re either uncomfortable, or a mechanical engineer, odds are you don’t think about the temperature of the building you’re in. When you walk into a pizza place for lunch on a hot summer day, you expect to be greeted by a rush of cold air as you pass through the doors and would be [...]
There is a lot of hype right now about the Bloom Box. Major companies like Google have been installing them, and many people see them as the Return of the Jedi. Er, hydrogen fuel cell. At any rate, here we explain exactly what they are, discuss their carbon impacts, and let you download a nifty spreadsheet to do your own economic analysis.
There is a lot of talk about wind farms killing birds. Our engineers did a thorough study of 20 peer reviewed papers that examined this issue across the entire globe, sometimes for more than a decade. Come read the fun conclusions! (Spoiler alert: if you use a cost-effective turbine, your house cat kills more birds each year. If you place the turbines correctly, your house kills more birds each year. If you are a fossil fuel power plant, you kill more than ten times as many birds as a similarly-sized wind farm.)
There is a lot of talk in the energy efficiency world stating that repairing or replacing steam traps saves oodles of money and energy, and it’s all true. Rarely, however, have I seen a good explanation of why. This post explains what steam traps are, what they do, why they’re so important, and how replacing steam traps saves oodles of money and energy.
Today, PG&E, the largest utility company in California, released a statement about incentives for natural gas efficiency projects. Here’s our favorite sentence, which we will then translate to simple English: “The recently approved State of California 2011-2012 Fiscal Year Budget (SB87) includes a provision that authorizes the transfer of funds from the Gas Public Purpose [...]
Here we finish our examination of which is more emits more carbon dioxide: a gas powered car, or an electric car charged from a grid that is 100% coal-fired?
Here we explore the amount of energy and carbon dioxide a gasoline car uses to go one mile, and begin to compare it to an how much energy and carbon dioxide an electric car uses to go one mile.
Why is everyone so excited about electric cars? Are they really better for the environment if half (or all) of a country’s electricity comes from coal? Read here to find out!
Odds are, you have been misdirected to this page. But if you came to learn about wasted energy usage and standby loads, then you are in luck. “Vampire loads,” “Phantom Loads,” or “Standby loads” are the power that devices use when you are not using them. Yes, frustratingly, every time you leave a computer, coffee [...]
Summer is upon us: what is it that those magical air conditioners are doing to the hot air? The basics start with sensible and latent heat.
How do we heat a room? If your answer is “by adding energy to the room,” then the good news is you are thinking like a physicist, but the bad news is you’re wrong.
What’s an economizer? If you’re asking that question, you are not yet an energy efficiency fanatic. That’s okay. This post is for you.
What does all the confusing energy jargon mean, and how does it relate to real life? What are BTUs, joules, therms, tons, and kilowatt-hours, and how do they compare to jelly beans, a can of soda, or a block of melting ice? This post aims to simplify the nomenclature by relating units of energy measurement to fun, every day items.
Ever wondered why we have three-phase power, why it’s worth it to go to so much trouble to string three sets of transmission lines across the country instead of just one? Click here to find out!
How do people actually know how much energy is coming out of a solar array? How do people measure energy efficiency savings? This article discusses some of the most common and useful energy engineering tools.
Enough people have asked us for a clear explanation of why the RMS of a sine wave is simply the peak divided by the square root of two, so here it is! This is a technical post on RMS; if you’re not interested in integrating but want to know about AC current and RMS, click here!
Ever wanted to know the difference between AC and DC power, and why we use AC for everything? Well, you’ve come to the right place. In this post we explore the differences between AC and DC power, how to measure them, why we use AC for transmission, and the implications of AC power for renewable energy.
What a boring title. Those pendulous words, however, describe one of today’s most exciting and far-encompassing opportunities to help the environment while saving individuals and companies money.
Much time is spent talking about solar project finance. Not least of all by us: here, here, and here. There are a number of reasons for this: solar projects involve large dollar amounts, they are more commonly financed than efficiency projects, and they are highly visible. They are, however, generally less profitable investments than energy efficiency projects. Which leads to a reasonable question: why don’t more people implement energy efficiency projects?
Reasonable, but mysterious.
Updated from earlier post – thank you Emma for your helpful feedback! If you have questions, you may always email us at info {at} carbonlighthouse.com. We’ll do our best to answer as soon as we can! Roof top cooling towers are a critical aspect of energy efficiency in buildings. They can provide a way to [...]
How much you pay for electricity is not as simple as you might think. Rate structures have changed drastically over time and vary substantially between customer classes and utility territories. While the rationale behind the rate that you pay for electricity may not be keeping you up at night, it has important implications for energy efficiency, distributed generation, and is actually pretty darn interesting!
Where it Doesn’t Work In previous entries ([1], [2]), we’ve looked at how solar project finance works from the perspective of homeowners and building owners as well as how project financiers earn their returns on investment. Given that solar project finance works and solar energy is much desired, why isn’t solar everywhere? Here we consider [...]
The Pieces of the Financing Puzzle In the last installment, we explored why solar project finance is necessary, and how homeowners and commercial real estate owners make payments through leases and PPAs. Where matters get messy is in examining how project financiers earn a return on their investment. Don’t they simply make money by lending [...]
Why it’s Needed The appeal of solar power is simple: a tireless source of clean energy, a compact solar module that allows any property owner to locally generate power, and durable equipment without moving parts that can operate for 40 years and then be recycled. The obvious question is why isn’t solar power everywhere. The [...]
Socially responsible investing (SRI) is a broad financial movement that incorporates a range of rationales and techniques. For those of you without a degree in economics, this post will start with a little background on what investing in a company really means. For a public company [i], the stock price should be equal to the [...]
“Financing” is the magical word bankers and CFOs use when they want to mystify how they are “helping” you pay for something. The reason to obscure the meaning of the word is because if you are providing financing – you are a bank – then the less people understand what you are doing, the more money you can take from them. So let us take away the mystery, shall we?
Want to finally learn the difference between a watt and a watt-hour, or a kilowatt and a kilowatt-hour (kW or kWh)? Well, this is your chance!
The term Smart Grid is thrown around a lot these days, but most people cannot define what the term actually means. In order to do so, it is important to understand how the current “pre-smart” grid works. Click here to learn how our current grid works, and how a Smart Grid would improve things.
Regulators have long required utilities to run energy efficiency programs, but utilities traditionally profited by selling energy. This put a serious damper on utility management’s desire to run effective energy efficiency programs since any good efficiency projects would make the utility becomes less profitable. State regulators tried all sorts of ways to urge utilities to run good efficiency programs, usually involving some method of buying conserved electricity from the utility at higher rates than what the utility was allowed to charge for consumed energy. The idea was to find a way to make it more profitable for utilities to conserve energy than to consume it, thereby encouraging utilities to run effective efficiency programs… Learn what finally worked!
…California decided to make this pretty good system even better. Regulators realized that although we only need one electric grid, we actually need hundreds of power plants. So why not let competitive markets build those power plants? Competition, it was believed, would lead to decreased costs in electric generation… Find out what went wrong and how other States learned from California’s mistakes.
With the release of the latest McKinsey report on Energy Efficiency, the Federal Government, the Non-Profit world, and the Private sector have come together in promoting energy efficiency as a viable means of fighting climate change and increasing corporate (and household) profits simultaneously. But unlike solar electricity, which can easily be metered and hence easily measured and verified, electricity saved through energy efficiency is more difficult to track. Here is how energy efficiency can be accurately measured and verified!
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