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Conserving Energy, Progress Report

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Last year we invested heav­ily to con­serve energy at home and on the road. We bought a Prius and replaced an aging fur­nace with a hybrid energy sys­tem (heat pump plus high-effi­ciency gas fur­nace).

Today we got a report card from Puget Sound Energy, our util­ity com­pany: “we’re doing great” based on a 12-month analy­sis that was per­son­al­ized to our home:

Puget-Sound-Energy-Report

Com­pared to 100 neigh­bors with sim­i­lar homes based on square footage and use of gas and elec­tric­ity, we con­sume much less energy on an annu­al­ized basis:

  • 36% less energy in total
  • 54% less nat­ural gas
  • 18% less elec­tric­ity

That’s the good news. The bad news is it will take more than a decade to get the finan­cial pay­back, based on annual sav­ings of $984. (We’d hoped for bet­ter sav­ings than that.)

In the mean­time we feel good: we did the right thing, even if it was a big hit to our pock­et­book last year.

We received this per­son­al­ized report because our city has part­nered with 6 other cities and the power com­pany to pur­sue a num­ber of con­ser­va­tion ini­tia­tives  — the C7 New Energy Part­ner­ship — with fund­ing from the Depart­ment of Energy. (A few weeks ago they announced plans to begin offer­ing plug-in charg­ing sta­tions for elec­tric vehi­cles.)

It’s great that the local East­side munic­i­pal­i­ties are pro­mot­ing pro­grams to encour­age con­ser­va­tion. Any­one who has looked seri­ously into this knows that effec­tive con­ser­va­tion will have a more imme­di­ate pos­i­tive impact on cli­mate change than shift­ing to renew­able energy sources.

A Good First Step, But Not Enough

From what I’ve seen so far, the per­son­al­ized reports offer very broad-brush tips on steps you can take to con­serve even more energy (most of which we’ve already done).

If we want, we can go online to check on our home’s energy use for the past week, month (or months), or past year.

But these reports pro­vide lag­ging indi­ca­tors, based on infor­ma­tion that’s days old: there’s no real-time mon­i­tor­ing that might guide us to make changes on a daily or hourly basis, or time-shift our use of spe­cific appli­ances. Given this, I won­der how much behav­ior change this pro­gram will actu­ally influ­ence?