Energy Matters

  Grid and Bear It? Some people are born scientists: when they were lying on the backseat of the station wagon on family trips, gazing up at the rhythmic rise and dip of the overhead wires, they wanted to know how they worked, what they were for, where they were going.  Others are born to be English majors: they used such opportunities to recite a nursery rhyme or go to sleep, developing a bit of curiosity only somewhere in middle age. Conversations between the two types (English major and scientist) at the latter stages of life might ensue, and the English major might actually learn something useful. English Major : (petulantly) Why do I need to know about the grid again?  Scientist : Energy is everything, absolutely everything we do, buy, use, eat, wear, watch, drive, Everything.  And if we want to reduce our CO2 output to levels necessary to lessen the chances of climate catastrophe, we will have to change a number of ways we use energy.  This will involve el...

  With What Shall We Cook Then? Gas or electric cooking--which makes more sense, energy-wise?  What about those weirdly fast induction stoves--do the Europeans know something we don’t? These are questions that might haunt the obsessive cook who hasn’t found the time to research them. Cooking uses energy to generate the heat needed to induce chemical reactions that get the food cooked.  How you get that energy into the food is the question here. In the U.S., cooking uses less than 1% of our total energy footprint and maybe 3-5% of our household energy.  Still, if one is trying to reduce one’s overall energy usage and carbon footprint, every energy use makes a contribution, right?   Two types of electric stoves - standard coil burners and induction ranges - operate quite differently. Induction ranges heat up crazy-fast, and cool down almost instantly. An induction stove produces an oscillating magnetic field that directly heats the pan you are cooking with. W...

  Some Changes in the Solar Landscape  If you are puzzled by the solar infrastructure spreading across the landscape these days, you are certainly not alone. Former hay fields and other treeless areas are populated virtually overnight with legions of metal figures in battle formation - poised, perhaps, for the assault on climate change! -- but in the meantime, no one seems to be providing the drive-by observer much practical information about what’s going on. First of all, some of the larger installations popping up are simply industrial scale solar power to be fed into the regional power grid, being developed in response to demand for renewable energy.  The falling costs of solar are making it competitive, period.   But also significantly, in June of 2019 Governor Mills signed several bipartisan bills into law (LD1711, LD1430 and LD1494) making major changes to how Mainers can get their electricity from solar power (photovoltaics or PVs). These changes incentiv...

  Energy Decisions: Cash-Back Carbon Pricing? Finding ways to solve the climate crisis facing humanity is quite vexing, chiefly due to complexity.  The crisis involves physics, chemistry, ecology, biology, history, sociology,  economics, - pretty much everything, especially human behavior. The physics and chemistry and history are clear:  Since the industrial revolution, humanity has succeeded in stuffing the atmosphere with too many greenhouse gases, trapping more heat than it can contain to maintain the equilibrium necessary for life on earth.  There is no longer any credible refutation of this fact; this part is simple. The complexity enters the scene with the humans who need to decide what to do.  Some refuse to  believe it.  Others refuse to do anything until every detail of the climate’s ecological trajectory is described with certainty, which is not possible. Still others take it seriously but refuse to take action because they perceive any...

  Heat Pumps Revisited Although we have written about heat pumps before, back in the spring, Winter Is Coming, and we figure that heating systems are on many people’s minds as they consider their optimum strategies for staying warm over the next 6 months!  Also, as the climate crisis becomes more visible, many are trying to reduce their household carbon emissions in practical ways. With the rebates currently available in Maine for high efficiency air source heat pumps, these systems will pay for themselves in savings within 3 to 5 years, and can reduce your heating system’s greenhouse gas emissions by 75%. Heat pumps are a bit difficult to fathom if you are not an engineer or physicist.  People tend to think ground source heat pumps tap into geothermal energy (like hot springs), and they tend to think that air source heat pumps only work if it isn’t very cold out.   In fact, ground source heat pumps (confusingly often referred to as geothermal) take heat from wa...

  Energy and Slavery The relationship of modern humans to their energy needs can be fairly well described in terms of slavery, as appalling as that may sound; and just as human slavery has been abandoned as unacceptable in a sane society, so might we consider re-drafting the slave-master energy relationship in which we are so mired. Energy is required for work. Human survival has always involved a lot of “work,” which, in physics terms, means “energy transfer involved in moving an object over a distance.”  Every aspect of sustaining human life requires work, from obtaining nutrition to protection from the elements, predators and other hostile forces; for getting from here to there. Most animals perform their necessary work using their own energy, which is obtained originally from plant-based food, which is obtained from photosynthesis, which is achieved courtesy of the sun.  Ultimately all energy on the Earth comes from the sun. Somewhere in human history, people began to...

                                                                      How To Not Lie With Statistics Back in the 70’s there was a popular Statistics textbook called “How to Lie with Statistics.”  It took the angle of exploring how perfectly true numbers can be manipulated to tell a perfectly false story, so it was an engaging and light-hearted text. We feel like it is time to re-explore this concept, because these days there are a lot of statistics in the news - and a lot of them convey useless or misleading information.  We notice that this very often stems from a lack of considering phenomena on a “per capita” or “rate” basis.  For example, we hear a reporter state that in 2019 China used the energy equivalent of 24 million barrels of oil while the U.S. used “only...