Mr. Eco takes on energy efficiency at Cal Poly

We're always looking for new ways to present energy efficiency to the masses.

In this video, dubbed "Turn Em Out," Mr. Eco parodies rapper T.I.'s "Bring Em Out." That latter video has more than 4.1 million views, while our Mr. Eco at this writing had yet to break 1,000.

But energy efficiency is tough to get the crowd yellin(g). According to details on YouTube, it was filmed all over the campus of Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, Calif. "with Mr. Eco cruising through campus in an electric car reminding everyone to 'Turn Em Out.'"

Mr. Eco included a very Cal Poly cast of cameos that included President Jeffrey D. Armstrong, ASI President Kiyana Tabrizi, Sustainability Coordinator Dennis Elliot, Soccer Coach Paul Holocher, Officer Chad Reiley and Musty The Mustang. Wikipedia says in T.I.'s version, Jay-Z offers a vocal sample, while DJ Drama, Jazze Pha and Swizz Beatz made cameo appearances.

Mr. Eco calls himself an environmental rap superhero who incorporates sustainable living tips into parodies and represents the Alliance to Save Energy's Cal Poly Green Campus Program.

There's more at MrEcoMusic.com or his YouTube channel.

Energy Efficiency: A Financial Investment For Tough Times

Making money in this era of low interest rates is hard. Good returns are fleeting, and it seems there are few safe harbors.

But there is one investment that is rock solid. It's not a traditional savings vehicle, however. And it is not so much earning money as saving money. But, really, what's the difference? It all goes straight to the bottom line.

You won't find a mutual fund of energy-efficiency measures, but if one existed, it likely would be outpacing other investments. Cutting your energy bill - which in my house is the second largest monthly expense behind my mortgage - can reap substantial rewards.

Heck, just shutting off one computer when it wasn't being used and replacing a desktop with a laptop saved this scientist $100 per month. That equates to a $1,200 annual windfall, and the knowledge he gained will save him thousands of dollars over the life of 30-year mortgage. He recouped the price of the laptop in a relatively short period - and, because those savings continue, got a gift that keeps on giving.

Over three years, the scientist, David H. Bailey, also installed a new pump on the pool, switched out lights and replaced energy-guzzling appliances. His monthly bill shrank from $400 per month to $50.

That's a reduction of 87.5%. Unbelievable!

A recent energy audit of my 1,400-square-foot, 18-year-old house near Clovis High School uncovered some leaks, and recommended $1,700 (after rebates) of upgrades that would cut my bill about $50 per month. That's a three-year payback, and a savings of $9,000 if we live there 15 years beyond that. Is it worth spending $1,700 to save $9,000 over the long term?

Let's look at it another way. I would need a 9% yield from a traditional investment to get the same return over 18 years from my one-time contribution of $1,700. I don't know many (legal) investments with those kinds of gains.

Still, energy efficiency, which the federal government calls the "low-hanging fruit" of the clean -energy movement, doesn't garner the headlines of renewables such as solar and wind. But saving money is something that all political parties could support; a national efficiency campaign could save billions of dollars.

In Fresno, where I live, city officials crunched utility data and concluded that a communitywide energy reduction of 30% would equate to a $260 million economic boon. Read more here.

Repeat that nationwide, and you have economic stimulus anyone can support.

Photo of power station.

Testimonial: Energy efficiency can be tough (sometimes)

For the past two years, I've been helping cities and counties prepare to install energy efficiency retrofits.

It hasn't been simple. We're working with federal grants with very particular requirements. But the challenge caters to my make-the-world-a-better-place sensibilities.

And we've got a lot of company. Energy efficiency has caught fire in the past couple years. In the corporate world, companies are installing lighting and other electrical retrofits and establishing sustainability policies that revamp manufacturing and distribution practices. Their directive is to cut waste and promote savings of not only but energy but water and other materials.

Building information modeling, which enables designers to drop energy use like a rock, is sweeping the urban construction industry and is threatening to encompass more. Managers have learned to shave significant energy costs by monitoring and adjusting power consumption before construction and during occupancy. New products are coming on light rapidly that allow greater central control and monitoring.

And utilities are reworking their distribution networks by incorporating smart grid technology that offers game-changing savings through broad energy management protocols.

Into the light

Lighting retrofits are possibly the most cost-effective of these measures. And they're much of what I'm in charge of at the San Joaquin Valley Clean Energy Organization. We've also got air conditioning, pumps and other retrofits.

Yet getting our projects installed has not been simple. From my Formica-covered table top in Fresno, I have been working to funnel federal stimulus money into the Valley economy via Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grants. It's been a long road. We're finally getting the projects bid, materials purchased and at least some problems resolved.

Some issues still pose difficulties. Because of the relatively low rate of reimbursement offered by the California Energy Commission for the energy efficiency retrofit measures, some of my cities and counties have struggled to find contractors. The small size of some projects haven't helped.

Get 'er done

The state has been working frantically to get jurisdictions finish their projects by the March 14, 2012 deadline. But California Energy Commission project officers can only offer advice and direction -- no extra funds.

I heard one county was able to figure out how to pay for the replacement of air conditioning units on the maximum reimbursement of $1,000 per ton. That's a pretty big deal, by the way. So I gave the woman in charge of the program a call.

She said her county had no magic bullet, just an employee who had spent years in the HVAC trade. The county purchased units from a manufacturer that certified its products as Buy American-ready and installed them itself rather than going to an outside contractor.

Energy savings American style

The SJVCEO wants to maximize the value of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act grants my team is administering. When complete, the retrofits would save 5.4 million kilowatt hours of electricity. We want to save all that energy.

However, about four months remain before our deadline to complete the work, and a number of our jurisdictions still need contractors. Many of our cities don't have the staff to do their own retrofits. All have had to make drastic budget cuts because of the economic slide of the past few years.

We discovered almost immediately that because of the reimbursement rates our jurisdictions were having trouble attracting interest even in this down economy. Requests for proposal issued by several cities turned up no interested bidders, while others came in with bids that far exceeded reimbursement costs.

Finding solutions

My boss charged my co-worker Sandy Nax and I to come up with a solution. We followed the formula of using a sole proprietor who has no employees and does all the work himself, thus avoiding Davis Bacon wage rates. But this work is difficult for one person.

Sandy tracked down names using an online contractor search engine and California's Contractors State License Board listings, and I started cold calling.

I eventually called 83 contractors all over the San Joaquin Valley. Three contractors expressed interest in air conditioning retrofits.

I'm hopeful we'll find lighting contractors interested as well. I'm not so sure about pump retrofits, but we all have our fingers crossed.

Nothing's simple with grants

I've been on the phone a lot explaining how the process works. Reimbursement is likely going to be slow, making it tough for contractors already strapped by an unforgiving economy.

I did reach a friendly contractor in Kingsburg who said, "I'm not interested in anything to do with the government." I get that. Seriously, I do. Working within the strict confines of federal grant requirements is enough to make anybody relate to rocker George Thorogood's request for "one bourbon, one scotch and one beer."

Maybe when the job's done. We're determined to make this work.

Photo: Corcoran pump 9A where we have retrofits planned.

New Initiatives Bring Even More Green To California

California's already green tint is spreading.

Today's release of draft regulations to protect consumers from toxic chemicals in products on store shelves is part of an overall Green Chemistry Initiative indicative of increasing environmental awareness in California.

Debbie Raphael, director of the state Department of Toxic Substances Control, which issued the draft regulations, summed up the program this way: “More and more, there’s an understanding that some of the health and environmental problems we see in the world today may, in fact, stem from toxic chemicals in consumer products," she said in a press release. "A number of other countries are already taking action, but our Green Chemistry Initiative puts California at the forefront.”

California is at the forefront of the sustainability movement in other ways too. Its 33 percent renewables mandate is one of the most ambitious in the nation. The state recently resumed a green tax credit, passed a cap-and-trade program and starting next year sellers of commercial property have to benchmark energy consumption.

Benchmarking is something my employer, the nonprofit San Joaquin Valley Clean Energy Organization in Fresno, understands. The SJVCEO, as implementing partner of the Valley Innovative Energy Watch (VIEW), is helping six cities and two counties benchmark all of their facilities into the EPA’s Energy Star Portfolio Manager so they can better track energy usage.

(Our organization has created ‘Benchmarking Made Easy’, a ten-page training manual on how to use the online energy management system and how to create a benchmarking policy using data from benchmarking. The nonprofit also helps lead webinars and training sessions on the benchmarking.)

Critics say that going green is cost-prohibitive and unwise in this economic climate, but there is strong evidence of just the opposite. Many businesses have found that implementing sustainability programs, especially energy-efficiency measures, saves them much money with relatively minimal investment. Often, they can recoup the cost within a few years.

AT&T, for example, saved $44 million through energy conservation in 2010. Math whizzes at IBM thought their company could shave energy use 3.5 percent through efficiency, but wound up slashing 5.7 percent, or $30 million. Read more here.

The city of Fresno crunched data from PG&E and forecast a $260 million economic boost if residential and commercial property owners reduced energy consumption 30 percent. Learn more here.

Raphael expects the green chemistry program to benefit businesses as well. "Companies are finding new revenue opportunities as shoppers look for products they don't have to worry about," she said. "Early adopters, such as Apple, Green Toys, California Baby, Method and others...are proving it is a profitable business strategy."

And growing. A trip to Orchard Supply Hardware last week led me to an aisle filled with cleaning products. Nearly one half of it was products described as eco friendly. If that is a niche category, it is a much larger niche.

We are in the early stages of a transformation. Who knows if it will reach the industrial revolution status that some experts project, but clearly momentum is building. The younger generation will likely push it, as evidenced by UC Davis' recent announcement that student interest is leading to a new major in sustainable agriculture.

Photo of San Francisco

Could "Occupy Clean Energy" Be Next?

I was a cop reporter in Palm Springs for a period in the mid-1980s. The community was a spring break mecca for college students and, as luck would have it, I decided one spring day to make a last run through town.

It was about 4 p.m. when I came upon a park in north Palm Springs filled with students. They were just milling around, but electricity filled the air. I just knew something was about to happen.

I called my boss at the newspaper and told him I was going to hang out for awhile. "Something is about to pop," I said.

Boy, did it. The riot started when a motorcyclist with a case of beer strapped on the back rode past the park. The beer was hijacked and the rumble was on. Hundreds of students trampled through downtown as cops in riot gear and firing tear gas tried to stop them. The crowd finally dispersed several hours later, and I had the lead story the next day.

I mention this because I'm feeling the same tingle that I did that April day so many years ago. I sense that something big is about to pop with clean energy and energy efficiency. (And I wouldn't be surprised if young people are involved; they are demanding progress on the energy front.)

Out-of-touch Legislators may not realize yet, but the undercurrent is strong. Big Business, the military, local governments, schools and average citizens are waking up and recognizing that creating cleaner and cheaper energy is good for the environment, and is smart economically.

We've written about Walmart and other businesses discovering green is good - especially when it comes to energy efficiency. A relatively minor investment can yield huge results when it comes to conserving energy at houses, businesses, government facilities and hotels.

Clean-energy followers are getting restless. We see with Occupy Wall Street what can happen when the restless are moved to action. Will Occupy Clean Energy be next?

Photo of Palm Springs Aerial Tramway

LED goes Halloween in Riverside (video)

This Riverside, Calif. house takes LED lighting to another level.

Already pushing 1.4 million hits, this 2011 Halloween Light Show, featuring "Party Rock Anthem" by LMFAO has four singing pumpkin faces, tombstones, hand carved pumpkins, strobes, floods and thousands of lights, according to the YouTube post.

The published information via KJ92508 says, "Most all lights have been changed from incandescent to RGB LED so power consumption is a lot less than previous years. Also DMX added to show. All lights, faces and props are custom made (DIY) by me except for the roof line which are CCRs."

Controlling channels have gone up eight times from the previous year, with 1,144 channels, he says.

California pushed from top energy efficiency spot

It had to happen.

California, the land of energy efficiency pioneer Art Rosenfeld, has lost its title as the most miserly power consumer to East Coast upstart Massachusetts.

It's the first time in the five-year history of the annual Energy Efficiency Scorecard by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, or ACEEE, that Massachusetts has displaced the high-performing Golden State. The group says "a sour U.S. economy, tight state budgets and a failure by Congress to adopt a comprehensive energy strategy have not slowed the growing momentum among U.S. states toward increased energy efficiency."

Energy efficiency budgets increase

The report says that overall budgets for energy efficiency increased to $4.5 billion in 2010, up about a third over the previous year. Michigan, Illinois, Nebraska, Tennessee, Alabama and Maryland rated the most improved, and about half the nation's states have established energy efficiency standards and improved building codes.

"Energy efficiency is America's abundant, untapped energy resource and the states continue to press forward to reap its economic and environmental benefits," says ACEEE Executive Director Steven Nadel, in a statement.

Nadel calls energy efficiency "a pragmatic, bipartisan solution that political leaders from both sides of the aisle can support."

Rounding out the top 10 are New York, Oregon, Vermont, Washington State, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Connecticut and Maryland.

Poll says people want efficiency

The news comes on the heels of a poll released by the University of Texas at Austin, which found that less than 14 percent of Americans think the country is headed in the right direction on energy.

University officials say that of more than 3,400 consumers surveyed, 84 percent were worried about U.S. consumption of oil from foreign sources and 76 percent about a lack of progress in developing better ways to use energy efficiently and develop renewable sources.

Bill Powers, president of UT Austin, put it this way: "This survey shows that the public craves leadership on energy issues."

Embracing the submeter

The public isn't the only place where concern over energy sources and energy efficiency are fostering change. Corporations, building managers and others that pay big utility bills for operations of major square footage or spread over multiple buildings are looking to trim costs through efficiencies.

Paul Baier of GreenBiz.com reports that the next big expansion in energy efficiency will be "submetering," or installing sensors and meters in buildings to monitor and tweak energy usage. "As more and more companies find energy savings opportunities based on submetering their facilities, interest in the technology continues to grow," he writes.

Baier says much of the savings comes through behavior changes, such as turning off unneeded equipment. The University of Texas poll likewise finds that many U.S. consumers would be willing to employ similar strategies on their own turf with 68 percent concerned about the energy efficiency of their homes.

Could politics be far behind?

Judging by this widespread potential adoption of efficiency, politicians won't be far behind including it in their platforms and bragging about measures they've taken in their own homes. Although I just can't imagine Texas Gov. Rick Perry going Al Gore and saying his house is net zero.

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick says his state set aggressive goals and laid the foundation for greater investment in energy efficiency through its Green Communities Act, "and now we are proud to be a model for the nation and world."

Expect more of the same after this year's numbers are tallied. Maryland and Illinois, which showed big gains, are taking energy efficiency seriously.

Malcolm Woolf, director of the Maryland Energy Administration, says Illinois Gov. Martin O'Malley also set aggressive energy efficiency goals, saving residents more than 700,000 megawatt hours of electricity and more than $91 million since 2009.

Warren Ribley, Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity director, says the investment of more than $600 million in energy efficiency projects over the last four years has meant putting people to work. "We are creating jobs, building more sustainable communities and securing our place in the new energy economy," he says in a statement.

The bottom performing 10 states from last to No. 42 are: North Dakota, Wyoming, Mississippi, Kansas, Oklahoma, South Carolina, West Virginia, Missouri, Alabama and South Dakota.

Photo: Boston Harbor at night.

Tech companies move up list of green power purchasers

Tech companies Google and Ingram Micro have scurried onto a list of the nation's top green energy users.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released its list of top 50 green power purchasers, and Mountain View, Calif.-based Google and Santa Ana, Calif.-based Ingram, a maker of information technology products, edged their way onto the charts.

The companies join others like Walmart and Intel that have embraced sustainability and are setting an example to others of balancing saving money with environmental stewardship.

"By making the switch to renewable power, these forward thinking companies are reducing greenhouse gasses and other harmful air pollution so that Americans can breathe easier.” said Jared Blumenfeld, EPA’s regional administrator for the Pacific Southwest, in a statement.

No. 1 on the list is Intel Corp. with 2.5 billion kilowatt hours of green energy purchased amounting to 88 percent of its consumption. The rest of the top five include No. 2 Kohl's Department Stores with 1.4 billion kWh and 100 percent of its consumption, No. 3 Whole Foods Market with 752 million kWh and 100 percent, No. 4 City of Houston with 438 million kWh and 34 percent and No. 5 Starbucks with 422 million kWh and 52 percent.

PepsiCo left the top five this year, dropping off the list entirely.

EPA officials say the top 50 purchasers use more than 14 billion kWh of green power annually, "equivalent to avoiding the carbon dioxide emissions from the electricity use of more than 1.2 million average American homes." Green power is generated from renewable resources such as solar, wind, geothermal, biogas, and low-impact hydropower.

EPA says Google purchases green power from NextEra Energy Resources, Renewable Choice Energy and Puget Sound Energy and has helped create the largest residential solar fund in the country. It also has invested in the world's largest wind farm, the Alta Wind Energy Center near Tehachapi, Calif., and the Ivanpah Power Tower solar project in California’s Mojave Desert.

Ingram Micro's purchases of more than 3 million kWh of green power annually puts it low on the volume list, but it's enough green power to meet 107 percent of the company's electricity use.

Zero emissions? Hydrogen highway is possible but unrealistic, for now

In a 2008 video, Bob Lazar calmly explains how the fuel system he developed works.

What he doesn't say is that if proved to be commercially viable it would give oil companies a serious competitor and turn highways from pillars of pollution to clean, moisture-laden vapor trails.

Lazar proposes converting everyday internal-combustion automobiles to operate on hydrogen. The fuel, he says, can be produced from a solar-powered system that costs about $10,000. It uses electrolysis to separate hydrogen gas from water.

He's among a growing group of backyard mechanics, university research teams and even automotive manufacturers looking to shift into burning one of the cleanest and most plentiful elements in the universe. The trouble appears to be cost and infrastructure and, perhaps, getting a deep-pocketed or politically influential sponsor.

“If we had the budget of only one day in Iraq, this entire system would be available to everybody,” Lazar says.

Who's killing the hydrogen car

Lazar's system is the subject of the video short “Who’s Killing the Hydrogen Car?” by Jon Farhat, one of the film industry’s top visual effects guys. Farhat asks straightforward questions, sounding more like a guy who went over to Lazar's garage and stumbled upon a really awesome custom car.

Certainly, Lazar, whose company is United Nuclear Corp., has a cool car. It's a 1994 dark red Corvette that runs on hydrogen.

After separating out the hydrogen molecules, Lazar stores the gas in tanks similar to the oxygen bottles carried around by the old smoker down the street or the nitrous tanks in the dentist's office. And this appears to be Lazar's lock on the process.

As he explains to Farhat, transporting gaseous hydrogen by standard means would require huge tanks while liquid hydrogen requires keeping the gas extremely cold, about 423 degrees below zero or hanging around the surface of Jupiter. Instead, Lazar uses four tanks containing a hydride compound, which stores the hydrogen until heat is applied to release it.



Going the distance

“That’s the volume it takes to propel this car close to 400 miles, just about what it gets running on a full tank of gas," Lazar says. "And it’s a lot safer than gasoline. They can be shot at with incendiary bullets, cut in half with a chain saw. You can throw a match on them and they just smolder. … Only the hydrogen you need is released when you heat it so there’s never much gaseous hydrogen in the system.”

Kevin Kantola of www.hydrogencarsnow.com, who has been writing on the subject for about six years, says most, but not all, of the industry has settled on compressed hydrogen gas as the standard.

"There are some others working on developing cars that use a chemical carrier for hydrogen such as magnesium + hydrogen, different hydrides, ammonia, slurries, etc.," Kantola says via email.

Hydrogen production & distribution

Kantola says how to produce and distribute hydrogen is still up in the air, with manufacturing it from natural gas being the most popular method. He adds that there are some solar-electrolysis stations and even a wind-electrolysis station making hydrogen. "So, as an emerging technology there is a lot of flux right now."

One of the biggest problems is that of infrastructure. The transportation systems in our global economy are geared now to run our cars, buses and trucks on fossil fuels. The corner gas station from Deadhorse, Alaska to Hoboken, N.J. is part of the landscape.
"It's not so much an issue of cost, as the economics of producing and distributing hydrogen are understood," says James Warner, director of policy, Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association, via email. "The issue is, how to build sufficient stations for a vehicle rollout, and how to keep them in the black as the population of vehicles increase."

How important is clean air?

It's really a matter of values. How important is clean air? Can a price tag be applied to stopping the flow of carbon into the air, acidity into the oceans and pollutants into the food chain?

To me, that's rhetorical. To others, the whole climate debate is considered misguided. Our economy is based on coal and oil. Separating such a major component is like slicing out a conjoined twin. One will surely die.

But do we have a choice? More rhetoric. But I'd certainly like to keep driving, and this hydrogen option sounds like a good one.

This could take awhile

Scouting around the web, I found quite a bit on the subject. An older piece in Popular Mechanics describes the contentiousness surrounding the technology and details the pullback by the Obama Administration after President Bush's endorsement.

Erik Sofge of Popular Mechanics writes in his piece, "Why the Hydrogen Feud Needs to End: Analysis," that hydrogen fuel cell research, which appears to be the method of choice for automotive propulsion, is mired in "tumultuous debate."

Sofge says while proponents sink money into research and marketing, opponents refute their claims with their own numbers, "asking that researchers shift time and money to more promising technologies, like batteries."

The answer may be grassroots

Endless debate won't shift even a small percentage of automobiles or fleets onto a hydrogen highway.

I stumbled (seriously, on stumble.com) across a video from Juan Pablo Girardi, engineer and a founder of the Santa Monica, Calif.-based Brain Optimization Institute. He says while electric cars don't burn fossil fuel, they require creation of toxic materials via construction of their lithium-ion batteries. He also touts hydrogen.

Girardi says health-wise the evidence against gasoline is overwhelming. As for hydrogen, he says its development is not a technological issue but a political one. He urges a grassroots movement for getting U.S. government support of the production of hydrogen cars and the conversion of existing cars.

Maybe that will happen. But collateralized debt obligations, which in part led to the housing crisis masking toxic mortgages to investors, still exist despite heated opposition to the practice. So maybe not. This may need a big corporate supporter.

"You can move a 747 with hydrogen," Girardi says. "The technology is there. Let us stop procrastinating."

Hydrogen gets YouTube hits

There is interest. On YouTube, Girardi's video has just 3,660 hits. However, a test drive in a hydrogen BMW has 232,000 and an instructional piece with about the Formula Hydrogen racing car project, a collaborative exercise between RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia and the University of Applied Sciences, Ingolstadt, Germany has about 72,000.

Geoff Pearson from RMIT's School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering heads the team and explains very simply how it works. "A lot of the technologies are very similar to what you'd find in your standard vehicle," he says.

Using standard technology is exactly how Steve up in Davis, Calif. attracted a collective 356,700 hits on his YouTube channel. His most popular is a 1:31 minute video of a raggedy old Ford running off a standard welder's tank in which he says is hydrogen. "The truck runs better on hydrogen than gas," he writes.

Steve, who goes by powerzap69, also peddles several books he's written on converting anything to run on the gas.

The tiger in your tank will cost

Gene "Hydrogene" Johnson, an energy consultant and managing editor of H2 Nation who lives in Fresno area, puts it in perspective. He told me awhile ago, "Let's help get the OPEC monkey off our back."

Hydrogene sent me a picture of his H2 HHR SSR, an acronym for Hydrogen Hot Rod Super Sport Roadster, taken at Sunline Transit H2 Refueling Station in Palms Springs, Calif. back in 2007. He says hydrogen is possible. “The challenge with anything new is the cost. The tank alone (on the SSR) cost us $10,000. Total install cost around $20,000.”

Green jobs: Valley Legacy Project releases video on achievements

The Valley Legacy Project is meant to get the San Joaquin Valley's K-12 system, higher education and workforce investment boards working together to better prepare people for occupations with high-growth potential.

Those include agribusiness, biotech, water technology, renewable energy, manufacturing and supply-chain management.

Of course, at the San Joaquin Valley Clean Energy Organization, we care most about clean energy. We created a website, www.wiasjvceo.com, that is meant to be a one-stop shop for those looking for jobs or just to find out more about green energy.

The Valley Legacy video was presented at the annual California Partnership for the San Joaquin annual summit Oct. 7 in Bakersfield. It is short but has impact.

The project came about through a coalition of groups and great work from participating students, teachers, WIBs, the private sector and others.