Lhogue1’s Recent Comments

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  The McKinsey link provided in the post took me to some weird spot in Grist, so I went back and found two articles covering different McKinsey reports from David's earlier posts:

  One was to coverage by Joel Makower of a McKinsey report showing that global energy demand growth can be held under 1%. The other was to New York Times coverage of a second McKinsey report showing that energy use could be reduced by more than a third with energy efficiency measures.

  Now I'm going to see if I can get my avatar to have a forehead.

  On Myth: Using less energy = sacrifice posted 7 months, 4 weeks ago 8 Responses

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  Another excellent post, David. I liked the "40 percent of where we need to go part" -- I'll check that link out. It's nice to see something besides the "growthgrowthgrowth" mantra that seems to pop up in the comments section. Boy there are a lot of supply-siders around here aren't there?

  On Myth: Using less energy = sacrifice posted 7 months, 4 weeks ago 8 Responses

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  Maxi, maybe you live off the grid with your own solar panels and whatnot, and if so more power to you. But what we're talking about here is switching over such a massive amount of energy consumption to a different power source that it will require massive centralized power plants. Large-scale concentrating solar power plants require scraping vast swaths of desert (1000 acres per 100 megawatts). Scraping the desert to power more energy-wasting plasma TVs, to air-condition poorly insulated houses, or to run the dryer all day long just doesn't make sense.

  Or, to think about it the way solar consultants do when they meet with homeowners, first you insulate the house, install dual pane windows, and replace the pool pump with an efficient model, THEN you decide how many solar panels you need. Energy efficiency comes first, replacing the dirty power second.

  Also, grid-tied solar panel owners usually find they still have an incentive to conserve electricity in order to zero out their utility bills. If we ever get a good Feed-in Tariff going nationwide (like the recently enacted one in Gainesville, FL), then the incentive will be to conserve power to be able to sell more of it to the utility, thereby making a profit. Get that profit motive going for every day homeowners and businesses, and photovoltaic solar will take off in the U.S. the way it has in Germany.

  On Myth: Solving climate change is primarily about finding cleaner sources of energy posted 7 months, 4 weeks ago 20 Responses

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  Hear, hear to David! Energy efficiency is the first and biggest thing we need to do, in the electricity arena at least. Then the amount of energy needed from renewables will be much less, making the technical challenges easier to overcome and reducing the environmental impacts associated with large-scale power plants.

  While EE is always mentioned, it's usually as an afterthought. It's rarely at the forefront of policy, even in a state like California, which has very lofty energy efficiency requirements. Engineer Bill Powers has put together a graph showing that energy consumption would actually decline if these requirements were fully enforced. I've posted it on DesertBlog.

  Hey, and thanks for the WordPress interface. It makes me feel right at home!

  On Myth: Solving climate change is primarily about finding cleaner sources of energy posted 8 months ago 20 Responses