Low-Hanging Electrical Fruit

According to DOE, residences in Ohio consume abut 30 percent of all electricity in the state. Residential lights are about 11 percent of that 30 percent or about 3.3 percent of the total. Compact fluorescent lights (CFL) can cut light usage by about 3/4. If all incandescent bulbs in Ohio homes were replaced by CFLs, Ohio’s electricity usage would drop about 21/2 percent. Not much, but a good contribution since the state is looking to drop usage about half of a percent per year

Hybrid Economics

Yesterday (27 April ‘08) the New York Times had two stories about hybrid vehicles.

The first was about Chevy Tahoe SVUVs. The hybrid version cost about $10,000 more than the standard and got 4-5 mpg better mileage. At $3.50/gal this amounted to a gas saving of about $4,300 over 100,000 mi. For this vehicle, buying a hybrid has a net cost of about $5,700. Of course, if you buy an SUV, you’re not serious about saving the planet.

The second story was about New York City cabs, which will be required to get 30 mpg by 2012. Replacing the standard Ford Victoria with a Ford Escape hybrid saves the cabbie $175/week in gas but raises the rent that he has to pay for the cab by $135/week. So the annual savings are about $2,000. Since the Escape is ten percent lighter than the Victoria, the gas savings have two causes.

Fuel Cells

I’m less negative about fuel cells than I was a year ago. The major application seems to be cars, which is a good thing because transportation is one of the two major sources of greenhouse gasses in this country. But producing hydrogen requires large amounts of energy from the other major source - electric power plants. Of course, power plants rely on domestic coal, whereas we get some of our petroleum from countries that we should no be relying on.

We could get hydrogen from natural gas, as the Japanese are doing for fuel-cell-powered home electricity. In fact, powering homes seems to be a more promising application than cars because introducing a new mass-production mass consumption power source should be simpler in a stable vs a moving application.Fuel cells are attractive for homes because they don’t need the sun to shine or the wind to blow.

Overall, I see hydrogen production as a major barrier to wide application of fuel cells. Some research should be devoted to this aspect of the problem.

Electrical Ballast Definition

An electrical ballast (sometimes called control gear) is a device intended to limit the amount of current in an electric circuit. An electronic lamp ballast uses solid state electronic circuitry to provide the proper starting and operating electrical condition to power one or more fluorescent lamps . Electronic ballasts substantially eliminate flicker in fluorescent lights and the lamps operate at about 9% higher efficacy.

(from Wikipedia)