Converting to smart, variable speed motors could save 1,178,000 GWh of electricity per year or enough energy to shut down 286 nuclear reactors.
June 17, 2011
Efficient motors could eliminate 286 nuclear power plants
90% of the world's installed motors run at full speed 24 hours a day. Smart motors use variable speed drives, which use only as much energy as needed for a job, saving tremendous amounts of energy.
Converting to smart, variable speed motors could save 1,178,000 GWh of electricity per year or enough energy to shut down 286 nuclear reactors.
Converting to smart, variable speed motors could save 1,178,000 GWh of electricity per year or enough energy to shut down 286 nuclear reactors.
June 16, 2011
Wildfires and Climate Change
As fires like the voracious Wallow Fire spread throughout the Southwest, the U.S. Forest Service and the Department of Interior are being pressed to offer solutions.
Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell, one of the witnesses present at the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources hearing yesterday, cited research from within the service to link fires and climate change."Throughout the country, we're seeing longer fire seasons, and we're seeing snowpacks that, on average, are disappearing a little earlier every spring," he said, as well as devastating droughts. As a result, fire seasons have lengthened by more than 30 days, on average.
"Our scientists believe this is due to a change in climate," said Tidwell.
Committee Chairman Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) tied many of this year's natural disasters to climate change in his opening address, citing the recent "America's Climate Choices" report from the National Academy of Sciences.Pentagon announces plans to reduce energy use
In the most significant step the Defense Department has yet taken to address its substantial thirst for energy, the Pentagon yesterday released its first strategy (pdf) for changing the way it uses energy on the battlefield.
Problem is - while they do know how much energy they use, they don't know where they are using it. Specific energy data have proved a major hurdle for the Operational Energy office. Although Burke said that the military keeps good data on energy purchases -- where it is being sold and moved -- it does not have consistent data on how it is being used.
"You can't manage what you can't measure," Burke said yesterday.
Many of us may be in exactly the same situation as the Pentagon. We know how much we are paying for energy, but not where it is going.
Dracula in a set-top box
Imagine pulling into your parking space and just hopping out, leaving the car idling all day while you're at the office.
As ludicrous as this may sound, most Americans are guilty of a similar squandering of energy when it comes to their set-top TV boxes. A new study released on Tuesday by the Natural Resources Defense Council shows that set-top boxes in the United States consume nearly as much energy when not in use as when they are on, costing a cumulative $2 billion a year.
According to the report an HD-DVR set-top box combo consumes 446 kWh of electricity a year. I pay 17 cents a kWh. That works out to $75.82 a year - just for the electricity!That's 2.5 times the electricity consumed by a 42" LCD TV!
NRC says safety rules inadequate
Nuclear safety rules in the United States do not adequately weigh the risk that a single event would knock out electricity from both the grid and from emergency generators, as an earthquake and tsunami recently did at a nuclear plant in Japan, officials of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Wednesday.
A task force created after the accident at the nuclear plant, Fukushima Daiichi, delivered an oral progress report on Wednesday to the five-member commission. Charlie Miller, the chairman of the task force, said that studies by safety experts in the United States had analyzed the risk of losing electricity from the grid or from on-site emergency generators, but not both at the same time.
Steven P. Kraft, an executive of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's trade association, speaking after the meeting said that in the past it was "not considered credible" that a single event could knock out both supplies. In view of recent events, he said, it is time to prepare for the possibility of an extended blackout.
One of the commissioners, George E. Apostolakis, pointed out that existing safety analyses also assume that electricity will be restored within four or eight hours after a power cutoff, but that blackouts on the grid often last far longer. "Why do we still assume things that are now, in retrospect, unrealistic?" he asked.
Demand Management
Here's a short video from EnerNOC explaining how demand management can eliminate the need for peaking power plants.
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