Steven Chu on energy efficiency | Hacker News Reader

Steven Chu on energy efficiency

huffingtonpost.com

16 pointsMikeCapone11 comments

Great article. I am especially happy to hear it talk about measuring utility bills before and after retrofits, since a lot of improvements in this industry have been measured more on promises of improvement, as opposed on actual data (i.e. you will save 20% on heating by buying this boiler, and therefore, once installed, it's considered to save 20%). Pretty crazy way to do things.

While there are a lot of new solutions for improving measurement of energy efficiency, a lot of them are focused on electricity, and unless you take the whole building into account, you aren't truly figuring out the costs. I can switch from electric heating to gas, but that doesn't make my house more efficient. The reality is that even with smart metering technologies, it will take many years to retrofit existing building stock (only 1% of the building stock gets replaces annually).

Another area of a lot of activity here is the financing side - you see a lot of creative solutions popping up, and even banks are looking at energy efficiency as something they want to fund.

The startup I am working on does sophisticated measurement of utility bills, and uses some cool analysis techniques to split it up into various components - heating, cooling, hot water, and nonseasonal fuel use. The goal is exactly what is described in the article - to allow people to compare before and after, to quickly figure out where the most potential savings are, etc. It's for agencies that run energy efficiency programs or owners of portfolios of buildings, as well as people interested in financing energy projects.

We are doing a closed launch this week to a couple of beta customers, so this is very timely. We don't allow demo accounts yet, but if you are interested, sign up at www.energyscorecards.com to be notified when we launch publically.

That sounds really interesting. Is the idea to split up the energy use into different base functions by how it correlates with time of day, temperature, and season? I've been loosely playing around with the idea of doing this for my own house.

Basically, your energy use roughly varies with seasons. So you can apply some analysis techniques to tease out how much of your energy is for heating, cooling, hot water, etc. Most of the data you can get reliably is monthly bill data, so we just do it in aggregate. I've seen some systems (for electric only) that do more granular data, i.e. hourly, or even real-time, and once you have those, you can tell much more - but that requires an installation of devices, and doesn't tell you about all of your energy use.

You can then normalize it for size of the house, and weather conditions, and now you can compare buildings in different parts of the country,

Once you have a model of the building, you can then make predictions about what the energy use should be if you make certain improvements, which leads to many possibilities.

We are more focused on multi-family buildings, which have larger energy use and more opportunity for savings (but also complexity - you won't see steam-heated single-family homes :-))

There are some guys that are doing this for single-family homes, i.e. Microsoft Hohm is one, though I am not sure their analysis is quite as good.

"you won't see steam-heated single-family homes :-)"

Actually, I have one! ;-)

(Technically, it's a 3-apartment house, but each apartment has their own steam boiler.)

Sorry, I wasn't clear enough - I meant municipal steam heat that comes to you in a pipe as a byproduct of electricity generation.

http://www.coned.com/steam/

Steam heating in homes is common, but the energy source is gas or heating oil that is used to generate steam.

I was impressed by the number of interesting concrete ideas he listed for improving efficiency and retrofits. Usually policy at that level is almost entirely focused on enticements to lower levels of government and other types of stick/carrot programs. To see the DoE developing actual technical solutions like software and hardware is very cool.

In the same vein, the FCC has their broadband speed testing tool to gather data and make useful maps of speed vs. price and other factors, all to guide future policy decisions. Maybe this idea of running the executive branch based on data is widespread in the administration? If so, kudos.

My impression is that DOE is pretty hands-on in many energy research issues. They run the NREL (and the nuclear weapons labs) for example...

"Some economists, however, don't believe....there aren't 20-dollar bills lying around waiting to be picked up....why didn't the free market vacuum them up?"

I've always thought that inefficiencies are built in so industries, like the coal companies, can stay in business.

You are hypothesizing a conspiracy between industries that are basically unconnected to each other. It seems a far more likely explanation that people want cheap homes now and don't buy based on energy efficiency (which costs money), and that builders want to save money by not installing things that won't make the home sell for more. No conspiracy seems necessary.

you are right about incentives being misaligned.

In Europe, when you buy / sell a home, you get an energy report of how much you'll pay for utilities, so people are starting to take energy costs into account.

This is becoming true in the US, with New York, Austin, DC, and Seattle passing building benchmarking laws in the past year. Many are focused on larger buildings, but it's a good beginning.

This is especially important for larger buildings, esp. low-income housing, where owners pay for much of the energy, and thus are incentivized to be more efficient.

I think a really simple and sort of bash-you-over-the-head means to get this across to homebuyers would be to tack on the monthly utilities to the mortgage+tax number that people see.

If you were comparing the price of two houses, you often look at the monthly cost of mortgage and taxes... so throwing utilities on there would make it more apparent which house will actually be cheaper over the long term.

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