FRANKLIN COUNTY –- Americans have reacted to rising fuel costs and have reduced their consumption in recent months. Based on the supply and demand curve, will the market itself fix the energy crisis?

Not likely; some say we are in a situation like no other in the history of the fossil fuel era. Oil thirsty, booming economies in countries like China and India, as examples, could gobble up what we conserve.

Others claim that drastic conservation must play a part in our future and is one of our only hopes, if we are to transition away from fossil fuel to alternative fuels.
As University of Maine, Orono computer science professor Dr. George Markowsky puts it, “You don’t want to pay $4 a gallon for gas and would prefer $2 --carpool with one other passenger. You want $1 a gallon –-take three.”

Markowsky stated for every one person who bikes to work, five walk to work, nine take public transit, 21 ride in carpools and 154 drive to work alone.

Markowsky asks if people were serious about sticking it to OPEC… “Apparently not,” he stated, “because if we got half of these people to carpool we’d make a big dent in our petroleum solution.”

“What would that take –-we could do that tomorrow or next week. We have to get serious. We have to hear the doom and gloom to get people out of this mode,” Markowsky said.

The professor stated the most compelling argument for conservation is that aside from switching to different fuels, nothing will bring short-term relief from high energy prices faster than immediate conservation. Any additional power plants or energy sources will take years to develop and will not help this year. Even if a huge new oil deposit were to be found it would take a while to bring it to the market. The only short-term answer is conservation or switching to an existing alternate energy supply.

“Of course, if enough people convert, that will temporarily reduce the cost of petroleum. Predicting the exact path of energy prices is difficult in the short-term,” Markowsky explained.

“We can be doing a lot of things here in Maine rather then just waiting for the world to end,” he added.


SIMPLE CONSERVATION STATS

Richard C. Hill, former UMO professor and renowned expert on energy, spoke about conservation measures that he promotes within his own home. He explained that many electrical devices in his house were on timers and speaks of a conversation piece of particular interest.
Hill attached one inch of insulation to the face of his refrigerator and on it reads: “This insulation on this refrigerator saved 0.22 kWh/day.”

“That’s nothing,” Hill explained, “a kWh cost about 18 cents and I can save one-fifth of that by putting this junk on my refrigerator. It’s trivial,” he said referring to a nominal savings.

On the front face of the insulation is a mathematical formula which reads: 0.22 (kWh saved) x 365 (days a year) x 100 (million households in the US) = 8 billion kWh/year. “That’s one nuke,” Hill said.

“That stuff stuck to the side of my refrigerator is equivalent to (the power production) of a nuclear power plant because of the magnitude of the number of refrigerators,” Hill explained in a recent seminar.

Hill spoke of Bill Clinton’s former proposal for the installation of “one million solar roofs” in the country. According to Hill the solar initiative would produce two billion KWh.

Hill spoke of some other conservation measures that we sometime just take for granted. For instance some electric devices that are running, serve very little return in terms of usage.

For example a digital clock in a room that very few people look at.

“I picked up an electric clock and on the bottom of it said four watts,” Hill said.

“If we assume that in every household every one has at least one electric clock that nobody bothers to look at. If we pull the plug on that clock we get a savings of 4 billion kWh/year. If every one just pulled one clock that nobody cares about you’d beat Clinton’s plan to put one million solar panels on rooftops by a factor of two,” Hill explained.

In this country, Hill explained, electric dryers represent 70 billion kWh a year.
You can compare that usage in magnitude to an abundance of nuclear plants.


SIMPLE CONSERVATION METHODS

Asking Americans to replace their inefficient refrigerator, wrap their hot water tank or replace them with instantaneous hot water systems, better insulate their homes, use compact fluorescent lights and/or just keep the lights off, may be a challenge at first.

“I think that high energy prices are the most convincing argument for conservation. I think that people are realizing that energy is no longer as cheap and easy to get as it was, and that they need to conserve. Actually, many people are being forced to conserve because they just can't afford what they were spending,” Markowsky said.

In this segment of this series here’s a rewarding and somewhat fun exercise that was conducted just recently at my home. It found about a dozen of what the Sun Journal called vampires in the “Exorcising Phantoms” story written in July.

First off you think you are leaving for work one day and have all the appliances and lights off in your home. You then see that your electric meter’s little wheel is still spinning at a good rate. You then go back inside to find that your refrigerator compressor is not running and have not called for hot water for a while. This is where the story says you need an exorcism of your house.

“Turn devices off –-if there’s a light glowing then they’re not really off. The clock on your microwave uses more energy then you use for cooking,” Markowsky explained.
You’re probably using more electricity from your TV, VCR, DVD and your children’s game system when you think they’re off than in use. The reality is, when they’re off they’re using energy. If you can turn anything on with a remote, it’s drawing power.

Hill spoke of the impact of one clock, but Americans can walk through their home and find dozens of electricity-consuming devises. The black box on the cord that feeds things like laptop computers, cordless phones and things like cell phone chargers that are plugged in makes your meter spin even when not charging. Then there are the stereo systems, coffee machines with built-in clocks, cordless toothbrushes and razors. According to reports the average house has 15 to 20 of these devils which cost the average household around $200 a year in electrical costs.

“I think that one thing I would recommend is that each person should start keeping track of how much energy they use,” Markowsky explained. A relatively easy place to start is to look at old electric bills and track usage by month and year. Devise a game focused on reducing the consumption, while still trying to get as much done. Look at heating bills, and even gasoline consumption, he said. “Try to reduce the quantities of energy that you use, but still try to accomplish the same tasks. Eventually, saving energy will become a habit,” said Markowsky.

In Maine 50 percent of our electrical power generation comes from natural gas with 25 percent made up of nuclear and the balance coal, hydro, biomass and a very small percentage coming from wind.

Reducing our reliance on foreign fossil fuel will come from reductions in usages in the transportation sector, home heating with oil and other non-fuel applications such as fertilizer and packaging.

“Another very important issue overlooked by many is the first law of thermodynamics which is basically the fact that anytime you convert one form of energy to another, you loose energy in the form of heat, said Jim LaBrecque of Flexware Control Technology. Converting electricity to light produces a lot of heat (3.413 Btus per watt) and anyone who has tried to unscrew a light knows how hot the bulb can be, you can easily burn your fingers.

“Absent the first law, advocates for compact florescent lights continue to overstate the savings and fail to mention that these new light bulbs result in a windfall for the oil companies. Think about it, all the heat from these lights in our commercial and residential buildings has to be made up in some way. In Maine the dominant source of heat is oil. Therefore all the millions of energy efficient bulbs not producing as much heat cause oil heaters to run more resulting in an increase of foreign oil, a consequence contrary to the intent of the best politicians and environmentalists.

LaBrecque and Carroll Lee, former president of Bangor Hydro, have a lot to say about conservation, Maine policies on energy and what Maine needs to do to become an energy sustainable state.

“I think we need a plan to address just Maine's energy problems. In my view, we have it within our power (no pun intended) to do a lot for ourselves,” Lee said.
Conservation, efficiency and quality will continue in upcoming issues. New technological advancements in heat pump technology and possibly the need to electrify the economy will soon follow in future issues of this series.