People turn off lights in vain, ignoring real efficiencies
A survey on perceptions of how to save energy was done. I found this statement int he conclusion of the paper (see link at end of article) to be a double edged sword:
It is therefore vital that public communications about climate change also address misconceptions about energy consumption and savings, so that people can make better decisions for their pocketbooks and the planet.
From a press release by: The Earth Institute at Columbia University
Many Americans believe they can save energy with small behavior changes that actually achieve very little, and severely underestimate the major effects of switching to efficient, currently available technologies, says a new survey of Americans in 34 states. The study, which quizzed people on what they perceived as the most effective way to save energy, appears in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The largest group, nearly 20 percent, cited turning off lights as the best approach—an action that affects energy budgets relatively little. Very few cited buying decisions that experts say would cut U.S. energy consumption dramatically, such as more efficient cars (cited by only 2.8 percent), more efficient appliances (cited by 3.2 percent) or weatherizing homes (cited by 2.1 percent). Previous researchers have concluded that households could reduce their energy consumption some 30 percent by making such choices—all without waiting for new technologies, making big economic sacrifices or losing their sense of well-being.
Lead author Shahzeen Attari, a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and the university’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, said multiple factors probably are driving the misperceptions. “When people think of themselves, they may tend to think of what they can do that is cheap and easy at the moment,” she said. On a broader scale, she said, even after years of research, scientists, government, industry and environmental groups may have “failed to communicate” what they know about the potential of investments in technology; instead, they have funded recycling drives and encouraged actions like turning off lights. In general, the people surveyed tend to believe in what Attari calls curtailment. “That is, keeping the same behavior, but doing less of it,” she said. “But switching to efficient technologies generally allows you to maintain your behavior, and save a great deal more energy,” she said. She cited high-efficiency light bulbs, which can be kept on all the time, and still save more than minimizing the use of low-efficiency ones.
Previous studies have indicated that if Americans switched to better household and vehicle technologies, U.S. energy consumption would decline substantially within a decade. Some of the highest-impact decisions, consistently underrated by people surveyed, include driving higher-mileage vehicles, and switching from central air conditioning to room air conditioners. In addition to turning off lights, overrated behaviors included driving more slowly on the highway or unplugging chargers and appliances when not in use. In one of the more egregious misperceptions, according to the survey, people commonly think that using and recycling glass bottles saves a lot of energy; in fact, making a glass container from virgin material uses 40 percent more energy than making an aluminum one—and 2,000 percent more when recycled material is used.
Many side factors may complicate people’s perceptions. For instance, those who identified themselves in the survey as pro-environment tended to have more accurate perceptions. But people who engaged in more energy-conserving behaviors were actually less accurate—possibly a reflection of unrealistic optimism about the actions they personally were choosing to take. On the communications end, one previous study from Duke University has shown that conventional vehicle miles-per-gallon ratings do not really convey how switching from one vehicle to another affects gas consumption (contrary to popular perception, if you do the math, modest mileage improvements to very low-mileage vehicles will save far more gas than inventing vehicles that get astronomically high mileage). Also, said Attari, people typically are willing to take one or two actions to address a perceived problem, but after that, they start to believe they have done all they can, and attention begins to fade. Behavior researchers call this the “single-action bias.” “Of course we should be doing everything we can. But if we’re going to do just one or two things, we should focus on the big energy-saving behaviors,” said Attari. “People are still not aware of what the big savers are.”
The other authors of the study are Michael DeKay of Ohio State University; and Cliff Davidson and Wändi Bruine de Bruin of Carnegie Mellon University.
The paper, “Public Perceptions of Energy Consumption and Savings,” is posted at: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/08/06/1001509107.full.pdf
Author contact: Shahzeen Attari shahzeen.attari@gmail.com 703-447-3748 http://www.columbia.edu/~sza2106/
More info: Kevin Krajick, science editor, The Earth Institute
kkrajick@ei.columbia.edu 212-854-9729
I still think THE answer for homes and buildings is in the shingle & siding industry. There otta be shingle & siding that we can nail on the roof (along with a thousand more) and side walls that generate electricity from solar light & heat energy. Just think of all the energy we’re wasting every day with these ancient tar things and aluminum slats we’re using now.
And roads and bridges too! We need new kinds of tar and concrete that generates electricity that is transferred via our tires into the car to make it go! But what are we doing, we’re listening to Fat Al & Co. tell us we gotta go back to walking 40 miles each way to and from work to save the planet, and not have kids, and save polar bears, and give billions to African dictators, and get kinky massages, and not go to the bathroom, and…
The motivating factor has to be cost. I didn’t switch to a thermostat with a weekly timer because I wanted to reduce energy consumption – I did it to save money. The same consideration applied to my pellet stove to heat a cold part of the house, and the used cars outside. Never even considered conservation – all pocketbook decisions. Make me a solar panel that saves me money and it will get installed.
Okay, Buffoon, um, yup.
I’ve got maybe a SEER8, probably less than that now AC unit in the house. And it ain’t getting replaced until it dies. I’ve done the math, it is not worth it. (I live in N. Texas, so AC is where it is at)
But what I have done, I replaced the 30′ long intake flexible pipe that was barely insulated with R6 with a direct 8′ long flexible pipe that is insulated with R18. Have replaced all of my South facing windows, and 1/2 of the rest properly, even inset them. I’ve done this gradually over the last few years by myself, and my wife keeps the house at 78 in the summer. Net effect, with that old clunker in that attic our worse electricity bill, in the state with the highest (or close to) rate is less than $400 for a 2500 sq-ft 2 story house.
Granted, with the new siding and such, a lot of my own time, but it can be done. But I would have been hard pressed to replace those windows if they did not otherwise need replacing!
And just as many people have said, my 8 year old PAID for Suburban ain’t going nowhere. Yeah it only gets 13-15 (top) MPG, for the 7-12k miles per year, I’m keeping it for at least another 5 years.
I know how to add, I do the best to maximize my paycheck. Living to someone elses formula is not going to work for my household.
Douglas DC says:
August 17, 2010 at 6:20 pm
Turobodiesel guy here. I cannot see how hybrids can even be sound just from the Batteries alone.
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Diesel is just a much more efficient cycle and the US should use them a lot more, but the real question is the efficiency of hybrids vs. a non-hybrid equivalent. Done properly hybrids should have a little less weight because the (presumably) gas engine can be sized smaller and peak demand handled with a boost from the electric motor in a parallel configuration, or the transmission could be done away with completely in a serial configuration. In practice I think most (all?) hybrids are slightly heavier than their non-hybrid equivalents because of the current state of battery technology. Assuming the same weight though, then a hybrid’s main advantage is really in a stop and go environment. Idling a non-hybrid is completely inefficient — don’t bring up warming up the car in the winter time before you get in it — and a hybrid eliminates most of that. Some efficiency is also gained through regenerative braking.
On a totally separate topic, using incandescent lights or any pure electric heat is horribly inefficient. Remember that you’re only interested in the amount of work required to produce or move an amount of heat. For electric heaters heat=work at your house which is 100% (Q/W=1) thermodynamically efficient, but you need to consider the whole cycle. The generation of the electricity itself, assuming a fossil fuel plant like natural gas, and its transmission to your house both have efficiencies and in the case of the former they are substantially less than 100% (think ~45% typical and up to 60% combined cycle). If what you want is heat, then a high efficiency gas furnace is much better than direct electric heat because you eliminate most of the loss incurred at the generating plant. If you want heat and efficiency, then a heat pump will beat both assuming you have a suitable source from which to pump such as air that isn’t too cold or a well or other ground source heat pump. This is because the heat pump can move many units of heat per unit of work. Using the same definition of efficiency as above for a heat pump that moves say 5 units of heat per unit of work would give an “efficiency” of 500% (Q/W=5, but we’re really talking COP and not true efficiency). Obviously that’s impossible and only works because you’re moving heat from one location to another — basically you’re subsidized by the resident heat in your heat source.
The bottom line is waste heat generated by lighting is still waste. Whether that waste is economical is left to the individual circumstance.
This subject is really irksome. The base line is that higher energy costs = higher prices on almost everything which basically reduces the standard of living for most of us, a whole lot for some and none for the one’s at the top running the show. For those having to closely watch outgo, higher costs of energy and other basics = less money left for fun or other luxury items. This is just so much crap & BS because control groups have a perverted philosophical view that the lesser people of western civilizations need to have their standard of living reduced to save xxx or xxx or xxx, meanwhile not affecting them at all as they live however they want to.
If someone saves energy voluntarily that is fine, but it should never have to be a requirement and energy, food and other necessities should always be priced fairly for those at the bottom of the rung (if not then the rest of us will pick up the difference ala the welfare tab anyway).
Governments and those influencing politicians continue to make wrong decisions in these areas and then want the rest of us to correct the situations with reduced lifestyles without any sacrifice on their part (this seems to apply also in the numerous financial scandals since dereg started in the ’80’s, as the taxpayer is always left to pick up the tab). I for one, will play their corrupt game only when forced to and then with much protest.
History tells us that greater efficiency does NOT reduce consumption. I’m referring to Jevon’s paradox. The only thing that will reduce consumption is higher energy costs and we know that’s what this present administration wants. So this researcher’s assertion that efficiency will save money is false.
JimBob @ur momisugly6:32
I agree with you 100%
Alan @ur momisugly 7:15
I read somewhere that a Japanese researcher wrote a paper on recycling and asserted that metal is the only substance that can be viably recycled. The little community that I live in only takes metal because the garbage service they use loses money hauling any other recycled materials.
Most of the solutions to our energy problems should involve governmental deregulation .
Lets get our nuclear industry back on its feet by allowing development of the new and safer technology to happen with a minimum of regulation.Lets get the huge oil field just south of the Canadian border on the prairies developed as quickly as possible.Lets shut down the EPA as soon possible.Lets start subsidizing only ideas that make economic sense both in the short and long term.Lets tell the government to get out of the way and let us rebuild this economy and country.
My response to this issue is: I don’t care if good old Edison bulbs are efficient or not. I like them, I HATE (yes very big letters) fluorescent lighting. How much I spend on power to light my house is between me and my pocket book. Nobody else’s beeswax. Period. I also collect and use Aladdin Kerosene Mantel Lamps as the power often goes out here in the mountains and because I LIKE to use them.
My house has electric resistance heating in it, but: I never have used it once. I don’t even know if it works or not I’m serious. I heat my home with two beautiful and efficient coal stoves which date from the early 20Th Century. These stoves provide 100% of my heating needs up here in northern Pennsylvania for about 45 cents a day and the house is warm, even in the sub zero weather that comes each Winter. My house is a Global Warming Whack Job’s worst nightmare. I heat with coal, the house is warm. I use Edison bulbs and you can see without getting a headache.
I guess I’m a menace to to society.
I agree with the article’s comment about miles-per-gallon being a poor choice for consumers to measure efficiency.
I much prefer the metric of gallons-per-1000-miles (gpKmi); it makes comparisons simpler. For example, if you’re trying to decide between buying a 24 mpg car and a 25 mpg car, how much is that higher mileage worth? Not obvious — it requires division which isn’t as accessible for most folks. But it’s easy to do the math if instead you compare 42 gpKmi to 40 gpKmi. For a typical suburban rate of 1000 miles per month, the difference is 42-40=2 gallons per month, or $5-$6 / month at current U.S. prices. If you have the car for 5 years, that’s a little more than $300. Alternatively, if you plan to keep the car for 100,000 miles, the difference would be 100*(42-40)=200 gallons, or $500-$600.
As the original article mentions, gains are magnified for inefficient vehicles. Improving a 15 mpg SUV to 20 mpg represents a huge reduction in fuel consumption, not readily apparent when stated in mpg terms. To achieve the same savings, to what mileage would one have to improve a 30 mpg sedan? Most people guess 35 or 40. But, assuming equal number of miles per vehicle, the answer is that you’d have to upgrade the 30 mpg car to 60 mpg. [ 66.7 gpKmi -> 50 gpKmi is a reduction of 16.7; the 30 mpg car is 33.3 gpKmi and has to be reduced to 16.6, to match.] Using fuel economy (i.e., gallons per 1000 miles or the like) for the gas guzzlers is a more telling expression of how inefficient they are.
It should be noted that the U.S.’s CAFE metric, although expressed in mpg, actually averages fuel economy rather than averaging the mpg values, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Average_Fuel_Economy#Calculation
1] What, no mention of Obama’s own “check your tire pressure” panacea? And,
2] “The largest group, nearly 20 percent, cited turning off lights as the best approach—an action that affects energy budgets relatively little.” Wait a minute, given that the Communist Revolution is moving right along here in the U.S. toward Utopia, I thought CFL’s were soon going to be mandatory and salvational – while, officially, it now appears that even having no light wouldn’t do much good! [I guess, as North Korea must already know?]
My primary weapon against energy consumption? A wood burning stove.
Coupled with insulation and double glazing I managed to knock more than £300 pounds off my winter natural gas bill last year. With the way the cost of energy is skyrocketing in the UK I reckon I can up that saving by another 50% at least. You can do that when you are not trying to get your many mansions noticed from outer space…
Karl: August 17, 2010 at 8:48 pm
History tells us that greater efficiency does NOT reduce consumption. I’m referring to Jevon’s paradox. The only thing that will reduce consumption is higher energy costs and we know that’s what this present administration wants. So this researcher’s assertion that efficiency will save money is false.
From the Department of Anecdotal Anecdotes Department: I had a friend who owned a 40-unit trailer park (before “mobile home community” was the PC term). During Energy Crunch I, aka, the Carter Presidency, my friend decided to be patriotic and bought timers for all his tenants and instituted a light-in-occupied-room-only policy for his tenants. After two months, his electric bill *increased* because he no longer qualified for a “conspicuous user” rate.
He collected all the timers, rescinded the policy, and kept the area security lights on 24 hours per day.
At the end of the month, he used so much electricity that he qualified for the “industrial user” rate, and his bill was *less* than what he had originally been paying.
coldfinger [August 17, 2010 at 1:01 pm] says:
I doubt that compact fluorescents achieve the savings vs. incandescents in the typical home that their efficiency suggests. When do you tend to have lights on? At night and in winter, times when it tends to be colder. All that energy that GLS incandescent lamps put out as heat reduces the space heating that is needed at night and in cold weather, i.e. a lot of the time it isn’t wasted energy.
Spector [August 17, 2010 at 5:24 pm] says:
… After replacing all my incandescent lights with the new fluorescent types, I now find that I must return from ‘AC’ to ‘Heat’ mode in the summer at night when before I could usually leave my thermal control system in ‘AC’ mode all summer.
Absolutely dead-on target comments! Indeed the subject of lighting itself constitutes a microcosm of all things green.
The heat thrown off by incandescent lights is a non-trivial point which of course means that it is completely lost upon retarded greenie do-gooders. In fact an argument can be made that the efficiency of an incandescent bulb approaches 100% under many conditions, for example in lights that are at lower height levels like lamps where the heat warms the air and rises. This efficiency is obviously less for lights up in the ceiling, and all the heat is wasted when the lights are outdoors (although small animals and insects may debate this).
As Spector mentioned, replace your bed/living rooms with non-incandescent bulbs and you will be nudging the thermostat up during 50-75% of the year. The area control granularity is usually coarse which means you will be bumping all the rooms up a few degrees and you may end up spending more money by using efficient lights. Expand this thought from lighting to every other field that the anti-logical Luddite tries to influence and the magnitude of their folly becomes dangerous.
So the rational and logical mind should grasp the simple fact that efficiency arguments must be nuanced. Place incandescents where the people live and where heat is useful. Place those long-lasting durable LED lights (which I happen to like very much) outdoors or where heat is dangerous (near flammables) or in those hard-to-reach places. CFL’s probably can serve some purpose also.
But the insane cult of Luddite know-nothing do-gooders ignore all logic and what happens next? This: incandescent bulbs are placed on the fast-track to extinction at taxpayer expense. Their ability to jump to the wrong conclusion is limitless. This is exactly why anything related to Global Warming must not be debated but fought and defeated. There is no benefit of the doubt to be entertained, they can never be scientific because it is not in their genes. Perpetual Motion and Over-Unity and AGW are all indicators of the same mental illness: knee-jerk obsessive compulsive resistance to rationality, logic, common sense and indeed, Science itself.
Tsk Tsk says:
August 17, 2010 at 8:10 pm
On a totally separate topic, using incandescent lights or any pure electric heat is horribly inefficient. Remember that you’re only interested in the amount of work required to produce or move an amount of heat.
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The bottom line is waste heat generated by lighting is still waste. Whether that waste is economical is left to the individual circumstance.
Ummmmm. You were doing fine until swerved into that! Place an incandescent in a lamp for reading. The heat warms the air and offsets the use of whatever furnace or heat source is in the house. Take the bulb away and replace with CFL/LED and you will end up nudging the thermostat up to compensate (or you wear a sweater). In most cases the thermostat will raise the temperature of all the rooms not just the one where you are sitting. So the bulb becomes a spot heat source which is better than a global heat source. So I’m sorry, but that paragraph is most often patently false and is exactly the kind of shallow thinking that the greenie know-nothings take advantage of when pressing their socialist agenda.
I have a young adult child who is a new grad in construction. As an engineer, she is has had over a billion dollars in construction approved this year. She tells me that shopping malls do not have heaters and furnaces for tennants. Lighting and bodies create heat and they install a/c to remove heat.
As a kid, many nearby farms had detached summer kitchen buildings. We had a german name for them. Heat was generated outside the home and the home was closed for the day including shades drawn untill evening. Baking in the winter is a heat supplement as is ventilating a drier indoors in the winter.
idlex says:
August 17, 2010 at 12:28 pm
Is it really energy that must be saved?
If people think that it is, then it’s quite simple. Switch off all the lights. Switch off all appliances. Switch off the heating. Walk everywhere…
When you’ve done all this, you’ll probably find that lights and appliances and heating and cars all save time and work. They free people to some greater or lesser extent. And that’s what people gain from using these appliances. The energy cost of using them is what they lose. And that energy cost is paid in money earned at work.
All these devices cost something (energy or money or work or time), but they also gain something (time). If they gain more more their users than they cost, they’re worth using.
Simply ‘saving energy’ ignores the value of the various devices or appliances being used, and it’s a false economy.
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To get the “energy savings” the greens really want you will have to kick all the idle off welfare and put them back to work as domestic servants and farm labor, kids included. The only reason society has had the luxury of having a welfare class is because the work done by servants and slaves is now done by machines. Save energy by getting rid of machines and you will have to replace it with human labor. A wife and husband both working will be a thing of the past, women can not keep a house AND work if there is no convenience food, vacuum cleaners, washing machines…
Ric Werme says:
August 17, 2010 at 1:35 pm
….I’ve long thought if high schools taught spreadsheets by including a section on the cost of a kid, there’d be fewer teen pregnancies.
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As long as “Welfare Mother” is an attractive job category you will have teen pregnancies. Especially when welfare pays more than a entry level job. Small business people in the USA are often forced to pay under the table or not hire at all because they can not compete with the welfare pay rates.
This is from a discussion with a group of small business people at an Arts and Crafts fair. Many of the more successful people wanted to hire help but ran into major snags. Being forced to pay a lot more than minimum wags for help was the biggie. Dealing with the red tape of course was the other problem but they had already evaluated that so the no help available for the price they could afford to pay blind sided a lot of them.
My biggest & easiest saving came from putting a timer-control on my electric water heater. Electric water heater isn’t shown on the graph, but it should be right up there w/the highest-usage items.
Lights/computers/TVs/etc are trivial by comparison.
I don’t see “high efficiency wood stove” or “5 full cords of dry renewable biofuel” anywhere on that energy saving chart! Or is that just my perception…..?
While making clear glass from recycled glass is wasteful, it is not true that recycling glass is inefficient, given that the waste stream is of mixed colors and the glass being manufactured is green or amber. The main cost of glass recycling is sorting the colors, and modern techniques permit this step to be skipped. As for energy, it is obvious that it takes less to make glass from glass than from raw material.
Something that was available yrs ago from science-surplus stores (I still have a few working) are the small rectifier-inserts that you insert on the end of incandescent bulbs. This eliminates one “side” of the AC waveform, so it reduces the bulb wattage by one-half. Why not just use a bulb rated at half the wattage instead? You can of course, but the little rectifier increases the lifetime of an incandescent bulb vastly — it can last for many yrs (one bulb I use daily has lasted 5+ yrs!) instead of a yr or less.
starzmom says:
August 17, 2010 at 6:12 pm
‘I fell truly blessed to live in a time when I have lots more opportunities than my grandmother.’
And you wonder why farmers had large families back in the 1800’s? A lot of chores had to get done.
The UK government has pushed not leaving TVs on standby as a means of saving money, also unplugging mobile phone chargers. TVs on standby use milliwatts, ditto phone chargers, no real savings in energy. Older TVs could have used less than they do but no-one of a normal disposition thought that people would be hyperventilating over a few hundred milliwatts.
As for glass, there is a glass available for double glazing now that has a low iron content which allows better transmission of visible light, which theoretically, when Low E coating is used makes for a more efficient unit.
The sand for this glass is shipped from Spain to Hull, then transported in lorries across country to St. Helens where it is processed into glass. The processing requires that the sand is heated a few hundred °C more than normal.
I wonder if there is any significant saving in energy here.
DaveE.
Ric Werme at August 17, 2010 at 1:35 pm says:
Ric, I’m fairly confident that with a lot of teen pregnancies, the economics of the situation was not a major consideration. Well at least for the ones not using it as a career move anyway.
It is a shame that the basics of ROI are not taught with this. As things fail from use and old age I replace them with cost effective replacements. I’m in the “use it till it drops” group. Upgrade? Sure just wait until this current one dies for good. Cars, TV, computers, and just about everything else. When repairs are not cost effective then upgrade.
You have to look at resource utilization, life cycle and efficiency NOT just energy. I have gone through a lot of CFL bulbs in the last 10 years (I’ve got one GE circle light that is 15 years old at 2 hours a day use). Keep the receipts and make the manufacturer go good on their 4 or 5 year claim. They all hate me. Most are pretty good about sending you a coupon to replace the dead one. The LED lights may promise 20-50 years but they are only guaranteed for 3. Go figure!
Look at your utility bills. The biggest cost for me isn’t the usage it is the connection fees, etc etc. The only way to really get a decent ROI is not being on the grid which is very difficult.
It is at purchase time that the best savings can be had. Especially in long lasting items like houses, cars & appliances. I see all these hybrids and compare the extra up front costs and give up. A 10 to 12 year payback at best for an item that may last 14 years? No thanks.
I have done some pre-death upgrades that worked out. A dual flush toilet for $100 paid itself back in 3-4 years so that was worth it. A fescue lawn instead of bluegrass payback in 6 years (plus only mow it once a month, nice slow growing stuff) was worth it.