Natural gas and energy efficient gadgets

August 9, 2010 by Dan Gibson · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Natural Gas, energy

Energy efficiency is one of the key aspects people look at when they’re trying to look at ways to address our energy needs, which are only going to grow in my opinion. We talk about energy efficiency quite often around the office because of this.

Water Powered Calculator

I was thinking about this while I was reading an article on Mashable profiling 5 Energy Efficient Office Gadgets. I’m actually thinking about buying the water powered calculator. The calculator uses water-activated batteries that produce about the same amount of energy as alkaline batteries. The real advantage though is those batteries aren’t toxic because they’re made of carbon. Just refill your battery tubes with tap water every two or three months and your calculator should be solving problems for a good long while.

If you really want to talk about energy efficiency though, you have to talk about natural gas. Since 1970, the number of natural gas homes has increased by more than 70 percent. At the same time, today’s homes use 40 percent less natural gas per household than 40 years ago. That’s a tremendous energy savings. A good deal of that savings is due tighter homes, more efficient appliances, and investment by natural gas utilities (our members) and their customers in energy efficiency programs. According to our energy efficiency fact sheet, Natural gas utilities invested nearly $565 million in natural gas efficiency programs in 2008 and budgeted about $927 million in 2009.

Here’s some data from the fact sheet on how the use of Natural Gas in home appliances saves energy:

Gas efficiency has improved tremendously over the past three decades as evidenced in the declining consumption of natural gas per household during this time period, falling one percent annually from 1980 through 2000 and declining further to 2.2 percent annually from 2000 through 2006. As a result, the average American home uses 40 percent less natural gas now than in 1970.
On a national average basis, natural gas is three times more efficient than fossil fuel generated electricity in providing energy for end-use applications. While 92 percent of the energy content of natural gas is delivered to customers as useful energy, less than a third of the energy used in the production of electricity reaches homes and businesses.
Efforts to improve appliance technology have resulted in natural gas furnaces and boilers that are up to 96 percent efficient.

Be sure to take the time to read the entire fact sheet and let us know your thoughts on energy efficiency in the comments below. Anyone going to try the Solar Gadget Charger? I wonder if it will work with my iPod?

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Tags: efficiency

There are $20 bills outside your house!

December 23, 2009 by Mike Pomorski · Comments Off
Filed under: Natural Gas

President Obama, who has been promoting the weatherization of homes and businesses as both an energy-saving and money-saving practice, was recently quoted saying, “If you saw $20 bills just sort of floating through the window up into the atmosphere, you’d try to figure out how you were going to keep them.” It is hard to disagree.

But what if you were driving or walking near electricity infrastructure and you noticed that $20 bills were oozing out of the wires and floating onto the road? I imagine that you’d try to stop and pick those up too.

If site-based efficiency gains (caulking your home or installing higher efficiency appliances) are like collecting $20 bills for yourself, then source-based efficiency gains are like society finding $20 bills laying all over the place.

After accounting for extraction, generation, transmission, and distribution (or, after adopting a source-based efficiency measure), three times more energy reaches the customer with the direct use of natural gas as compared to electricity. Put another way, if you start with 100 units of source energy, 32 of them will reach the customer if they are converted to electricity first, but 92 of them will reach the customer if they are used directly in natural gas furnaces, water heaters, etc. (for more information see AGA’s new direct-use slides here). It is a story you have likely heard before, but it bears repeating.

This is not to say that people should allow $20 bills to float through their windows. But we should all be thinking more about the $20 bills lying on the road.

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Tags: efficiency

Natural gas is efficient, don’t let your energy melt away

December 1, 2009 by Bruce Kauffmann · Comments Off
Filed under: Natural Gas

Imagine that you bought an ice cream cone — say, two scoops of Rocky Road with sprinkles on a vanilla cone, costing you $2.70 — and you then decided to walk the mile to your home and eat your ice cream cone there. So you put the ice cream cone in your backpack, trek home and pull it out to eat, only to discover that two-thirds of it has melted. In essence, you paid $2.70 for about 90 cents worth of ice cream.

Not a smart decision, but it illustrates a point with respect to energy use. Using electric appliances in your home, be it an electric water heater, heat pump or stove, is a lot like that ice cream cone. From the point of origin, whether it’s a coal mine or a natural gas well, to the place where either of them is generated into electricity — usually a central station power plant — to the electric outlet in your home, electricity loses about two-thirds of its useable energy. Most of that energy loss occurs in the generation process.

By contrast, natural gas’ journey from the wellhead through transmission and distribution pipelines directly to the natural gas furnace, boiler, fireplace or stove in the home loses only about 10 percent of its usable energy. Thus natural gas is far more efficient than electricity.

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