Initial Report on Our Household Energy Project

Avoiding Defeatism on Climate Change

Kevin Drum sounds a little bit down in the mouth:

If you were teaching a graduate seminar in public policy and challenged your students to come up with the most difficult possible problem to solve, they'd come up with something very much like climate change. It's slow-acting. It's essentially invisible. It's expensive to address. It has a huge number of very rich special interests arrayed against doing anything about it. It requires international action that pits rich countries against poor ones. And it has a lot of momentum: you have to take action now, before its effects are serious, because today's greenhouse gases will cause climate change tomorrow no matter what we do in thirty years.

I have to confess that I find myself feeling the same way Andy does more and more often these days. It's really hard to envision any way that we're going to seriously cut back on greenhouse gas emissions until the effects of climate change become obvious, and by then it will be too late. I recognize how defeatist this is, and perhaps the proliferation of extreme weather events like Sandy will help turn the tide. But it hasn't so far, and given the unlikelihood of large-scale global action on climate change, adaptation seems more appealing all the time. For the same reason, so does continued research into geoengineering as a last-resort backup plan.

I don't think this is really quite the right way of thinking about the problem with it's all-or-nothing, either-or quality.  I'd like to suggest some other ways of framing the issue that are helpful to me in staying motivated to take action.  As a starting point, let's look at a few emissions scenarios and temperature projections:

Bleg on Minisplit Ductless Airsource Heat Pumps

Sources have told me that in the last few years it has become possible to heat buildings in cold climates (eg the US northeast) with the latest generation of ductless minisplit air-source heat pumps.  I am seeking detailed technical information on the performance of these kinds of systems that would allow me to evaluate the low temperature limits, thermodynamic efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of doing this in a retrofit context.  I haven't easily come up with sufficiently detailed information in Googling around - can any readers point me in the right direction?

Average Household Energy Use

Energy Evolution of A House

Sanity Checking an Energy Improvement Proposal (II)

Sanity Checking an Energy Improvement Proposal (I)

Makanda Inn Visit

Experiencing an Energy Audit

Last week, I had an audit of our house's energy use done and I wanted to share a few impressions of the process.  Partly I hope to inspire a few readers to do the same, and partly I figure some of my readers know a lot more about this than me and can answer some of my questions.  The audit was performed by Jon Harrod of Snug Planet, a local energy efficiency firm here in the Ithaca area of upstate New York.

For background, our house is a Victorian farmhouse from either 1850 or 1870 (we heard both in the sales process) and has about 2100 sq ft of floor area.  It's stud construction and sits on a vented stone basement with a part dirt/part concrete floor which is always damp at best, and often with standing water after rain.  A first round of energy efficiency improvements in the 1980s had seen the walls insulated (probably with blown in cellulose), about six inches of cellulose blown into the attic, and fiberglass installed between the ground floor joists.  Most of the windows are the original single pane Victorian casements (and are obviously drafty) but some have been replaced with double-paned windows probably in the 1960s.

Personal Note

Yesterday, we entered into a sales contract on a pretty old farmhouse with a barn, a pond, and ten acres or so of mostly pasture.  It's a gorgeous piece of land right next to a lovely unspoiled creek that the beavers have turned into a wetland, and with state forest and land-trust land on either side.  We weren't really planning to buy until the spring, but I biked past the For Sale sign on my Sunday bike ride a couple of weeks ago, we fell in love with the land, and the FHA is willing to make the thing happen (at least so our bank tells us).  Yes we can.

The five year plan is to build our straw-bale super-insulated home next to the existing buildings, retrofit the farmhouse to a higher building performance standard, heat both with geothermal sourced out of the pond, install PVs on the barn roof (or wind if we have enough, but I doubt it), replace our cars with electrics, and get to overall fossil-fuel-free carbon negativity for our extended family.

The long term plan is to have our kids grow up with dogs, goats, mountain bikes and cross country skis, and fishing in the pond, and to help shepherd this particular very beautiful piece of a very beautiful planet through all the changes that are coming.  So far, my telecommuting arrangement is working great and I am convinced I can make it work long term.  So I propose to stay on this land until I can't ride my bike any more and they wheel me off to the nursing home.

The short term will involve a few compromises including an existing coal stove, a riding mower for the extensive lawn, longer drives to school, etc.  But you have to have a short term to get to the long term.

As a weak agnostic, I request those of my readers who are religious to pray that nothing comes unglued during the sales process, just in case it helps!

Durisol Foundation House

SIP Home Embodied Emissions

Straw Bale Model House

Embodied vs Sequestered Carbon in a Model Conventional House

Deep Energy Retrofits

Agriboard

I'm pretty interested in this general question of agricultural residue management for carbon capture.  As far as I'm able to determine there are three possibilities of varying degrees of "greenness":

• Turn the residues into cellulosic ethanol
• Biochar (briefly mentioned the other day)
• Turn the residues into building materials

The most famous possibility amongst the last is straw bale construction, but I wanted to briefly mention another version of this which strikes me as having more potential to scale industrially - there's a company called Agriboard in Texas that turns straw into a kind of Structural Insulated Panel used for green buildings.  There's a company in England, Stramit, that's been around a lot longer and does something similar.

At the moment, there's an interesting series on the first house in California being built with Agriboard by the architect, Michael Cobb (from which the picture at right is drawn).