SeekerBlog

This is a useful fragment of Ted Rockwell’s new “Get the Nuclear Energy Facts Report” which summarizes the real deal on the Lovins’ fancy unlimited-budget house. This is the model that Lovins wants everyone to emulate, which would result in all but the wealthy living 4 families crammed together in a small single room sharing an outhouse. Because most families do have to worry about what their housing costs. Due to personal sloth I have not duplicated here the extensive footnotes provided by Ted in the original at Learning About Energy.

(…) Lovins, founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, has made a career of showing us how one can get along on a minimum amount of energy. Rather than trying to get more heat out of the sun, his approach is to minimize the heat losses from the house, and, like a greenhouse, it may get warm enough. At 7000 feet, the clear mountain air makes both sun and wind more effective than average (but the thinner air takes away much of the wind advantage). There he built a house and office with no conventional heating system, but with a variety of special features to reduce heat losses drastically. Many of these features are commonsense measures, used by progressive architects since the days of Frank Lloyd Wright—overhanging eaves, to keep the overhead sun out but permitting the slanting rays of the winter sun to enter; double- paned windows, more effective insulation, etc.

But Lovins carried this to the limit, with such niceties as multiple-pane windows combining two or three transparent heat-reflecting films with insulating krypton or xenon gas, so that they block heat as well as 8-14 panes of glass. And a heat-recovery system to warm up the outside ventilating air and recover 95% of that heat before returning it to the outside. And a state-of-the- art data acquisition and control system, with 140 sensor points throughout the house. The building’s photovoltaic system has been fitted with a “6-kilowatt array of the most efficient solar panels on the market, courtesy of SunPower… With new batteries sucking up the extra electricity, the house will have several days of energy stored. The building will also have two of the most efficient residential air-to-air heat exchangers ever constructed …a new, highly efficient electric stove integrated with specially designed pots to save around 60% of the energy normally needed for cooking.” The LED-dominated lighting system has just undergone its fifth retrofit. There is radiant solar floor heating. (He says he buys wind power at night from the grid, but one cannot buy wind-power from the grid. The grid sells power whether the wind is blowing or not, and the customer gets whatever mix of generators is on at the moment.) Lovins uses solar in the day, and uses the batteries only when the grid is down. The energy consumed by his institute’s office equipment is wired directly from the utility and not included in his “zero energy consumption” tabulation.

The North American Insulation Manufacturers Association estimates that Americans have spent more than a billion dollars on insulation since 1970 and that this has reduced their heating and air conditioning costs by 20%, but 65% of our homes are still under-insulated.13 As buildings became increasingly bundled up, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) started to worry about the “Sick Building Syndrome:” When buildings are too tightly sealed up (to prevent heat loss), then solvents, plasticizers, paint and other noxious fumes build up and become health hazards to the occupants. So more and more ventilation and air purification systems (running on electricity) have to be installed.

All these special features cost money, so despite the use for two years of more than 100 volunteers, a dozen professional builders, and equipment supplied free or at cost, the house cost considerably more than most owners could afford. Note also that the big shade trees many home-owners might want would interfere seriously with both solar and wind-turbines. (Lovins avoids the latter problem by buying wind-energy generated elsewhere. Presumably he could also buy solar-generated electricity. But in both cases, there would have to be a commercial source near-by, and he’d have to account for the electricity lost in transit.)

It’s good to have a demonstration of how far such energy-conserving efforts can go. And if you believe, as Lovins does, that there is no way to generate energy without significantly harming the earth, then you would applaud, and presumably emulate, his efforts. But this would also involve considerable behavior modification for the occupants, as Lovins is quick to point out. He does not have most of the electrical appliances found in the average modern home. He hangs his clothes on a clothesline to dry. He seldom uses his car. He keeps the house temperature lower than usual in winter and hotter in summer. He has demonstrated that a zero- energy house can be built. But I wonder how much energy was spent in creating this demonstration? And how many people would be willing to pay the price, both in cash and in life-style modification?

Projects whose only purpose is to minimize energy use at all cost, remind me of Ernest Vincent Wright, a 67-year old MIT grad, who spent 165 days writing a 50,110-word novel without the letter e. An interesting experiment, but I have no interest in reading the book, and don’t know anyone who has read it. There is little difficult in getting as many es as one wants, or buying the modest amount of electricity that would permit normal activities in any well-insulated house. With today’s variety of households, the EIA says the average American household uses 12,000 kWh per year. This value includes nights with no loads and days when no one is at home. When getting ready for work or for supper, the average values quadruple or more. We no longer have to speculate as to what energy choices people will make. Passive solar works well for heating swimming pools to about 80oF, and this niche now constitutes 94% of the solar thermal market. Despite large subsidies and continued pressure to “go green,” the passive solar option for residential water heating is down to 4% and space heating to 2%.