Six Brilliant Megawatt Ideas
By Evan Ratliff from Earth Share of Washington organization Natural Resources Defense Council
A few very smart people came up with some very smart ways to curb our energy needs. You can even try them at home.
If you added up all the cell phones, laptops, DVD players, plasma TVs, cable boxes, and other assorted electronic gadgets typically found in American homes, the number would run (easily) into the billions. And make no mistake -- those machines are hungry for power. Combined with household appliances like air conditioners and desk lamps, they suck up a whopping 21 percent of the nation's total energy supply, more than a trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year. The power plants that supply all that juice typically burn oil, coal, or natural gas, which makes the average home responsible for producing twice as much carbon dioxide (CO2) as the average car. But while politicians and environmentalists continue to joust over how to satisfy our nation's energy cravings -- should we drill for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or improve the fuel economy of America's cars? -- a handful of innovators have quietly devised some ingenious ways to reduce the impact of our insatiable electronic desires. Sometimes it's as simple as building a better lightbulb (see Innovation #3). Sounds like a small thing, but save a kilowatt here and a kilowatt there and pretty soon you've eliminated the need for hundreds of CO2-belching power plants.
Innovation No. 1
THE SCIENCE OF COOL
The Problem: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory houses several thousand researchers, many of them cloistered in labs investigating scientific mysteries like the role of dark energy in the cosmos and the genetic code for human viruses. But one group became enthralled by, of all things, air-conditioning ducts. And oddly enough, they made an important discovery: In most households, about 20 percent of the heated or cooled air traveling through air ducts leaks through holes and cracks.
The Solution: The Lawrence Berkeley researchers, led by Mark Modera, devised a new aerosol sealant technique using a vinyl polymer, which reduces the leaks by 90 percent. A technician simply covers up a home's air vents and then blows a "fog" of the sealant through the ducts. The fog pushes into holes and cracks, plugging them with the polymer particles. Unlike traditional sealing methods -- think duct tape -- the aerosol method allows workers to catch leaks that would normally be inaccessible. Modera and his colleagues brought the invention to market through a company called Aeroseal.
California alone loses $1 billion to $2 billion a year in energy leaks from faulty heating and cooling ducts. Beginning in 2005, new state regulations will require most homeowners who replace their central air conditioner to seal these ducts. Other states, including New York and Texas, have also passed legislation or altered building codes to encourage the practice. "The biggest challenge is consumer awareness," says Modera. But he's working on solving that problem, too: Aeroseal now has 70 franchises nationwide.
Innovation No. 2
YOUR MOTHERBOARD
The Problem: In 1993, lighting specialist Greg Wiegand was working on the set of a Crest toothpaste commercial. That's where the trouble began. The dimmer used to control the lighting hummed so loudly that he had to run cables and move his kit off the set. Annoyed, Wiegand set out to find a fix and discovered that his problem was similar to one that afflicts every household in the United States: voltage control. When Wiegand turned up his dimmer, excess voltage flowing into the light kit generated a loud hum.
The same problem exists, less noticeably, in your home. Utilities are required to deliver power to households at somewhere between 114 and 126 volts (V), the standard operating range for home appliances. But because higher voltages are needed to push electricity over long distances, the actual voltage entering your house varies according to the distance between your home and the nearest substation. As a result, 90 percent of houses receive more voltage than they require. When anything more than 114V gets fed into an appliance, the excess is wasted as heat, increasing wear and tear on the device. Engineers have known for decades that they could save all this wasted energy by delivering electricity to homes at the minimum 114V, but there was no simple way for them to do so without the houses farthest from a utility's substation receiving too little voltage.
The Solution: Wiegand finally figured out how to silence his light kit with a clever metal device about the size of a phone book. And he eventually realized his little invention could be applied to the entire residential power grid. His Home Voltage Regulator, which attaches to the electric meter found on every house, is essentially a small transformer controlled by a computer motherboard. The motherboard measures the voltage coming into the meter, then directs the transformer to step it down to the minimum 114V. It then returns any excess power back to the grid to get passed along to the next house.
Wiegand quit showbiz and founded MicroPlanet, based in Edmonds, Washington, to promote his device and capture the large, lucrative home market. The company estimates that its devices could reduce household energy usage by as much as 20 percent by eliminating wasted voltage. Install them in a million homes nationwide and you could reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants by 640,000 tons a year. The nonprofit Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance plans to install 500 of the boxes in homes this spring, and MicroPlanet says a public utility commission in the Northeast is planning a 1,000-unit pilot program this summer. Eventually, Wiegand hopes his device will become the standard for all U.S. households.
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Six Brilliant Megawatt Ideas