Banish Vampires To Reduce Global Warming

There’s something with tiny little teeth sucking on your electrical wires. The blood it draws isn’t just electrical current. It’s your money, a few cents at a time. It’s also your future, because while it’s trying to drain your bank account, it’s also heating the atmosphere and indirectly belching greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. What kind of a hideous creature could do this? One that’s a parasite on the equipment that you want and need for your business and home. It’s the dreaded electronic vampire!

Well, it should be dreaded. Sadly, it generally isn’t. If this was the type of vampire that lurched from behind a curtain and bit you in the neck, you’d quake in fear at its mere mention. But this vampire is more insidious. It hides inside perfectly acceptable electrical devices and does its biting behind your back. The damage isn’t a couple of bloody punctures from an attack that’s over in minutes. It’s a steady sip, sip, sipping of your precious resources. But the result is eventually the same as if you were attacked. You wake up and your whole world has changed.

So where do these electronic vampires live and how do you spot them?

That’s the tough part. These vampires are something like body snatchers, only for things that use electricity. They’re buried inside. You’ll know they’re around, though, because they leave indications. The first indication is a glowing light. Does anything you plug-in have a small red or green light that never goes off? Suspect a vampire inside. Is there any other visual indication of activity when you turn the equipment off? This might be an LCD display that still shows information, particularly a digital clock. It could be the sound of a fan running or the click-click-click of a hard drive being accessed. It could be a case that’s slightly warm to the touch. All of these are sure-fire indicators of a vampire inside.

One certain tip-off to vampire circuitry is a remote control. The remote runs on batteries and is likely not drawing any power until you push a button. But the device that it controls has to be awake to see the invisible beam of the remote. Even if the front panel is completely dark, there’s something hooked to an infrared detector or UHF receiver that continuously draws power on the odd chance that someone is going to push a remote button soon.

The new wireless network devices are power vampires. WiFi b/g/n is a power-intensive technology. That’s why smartphone and laptop computer manuals suggest you turn off WiFi access when you aren’t using it so your battery will last longer.

The truth is that the power switch is rarely a power switch anymore. It’s a stand-by switch. All you are doing when you turn off a computer, a television set, a printer, or even a coffee pot is switching the device from the high power to the low power consumption mode. A true power switch physically breaks the electrical circuit so that no electrons can flow.

The whole vampire power problem got started because people got antsy waiting for their vacuum tube television sets to warm up. They wanted instant-on. The only way to do that is to keep the picture tube filament on and up to temperature. It’s just like leaving a light bulb on all the time in a closet where you don’t see it. It’s still on, drawing power and producing heat.

Back in the vacuum tube days, there was no concern over continuous power draw in TVs nor any mention of global warming. But now we know better and more things than ever are drawing vampire power. Just how significant is it? Studies suggest that standby power draw can range from around 5% to over 25% of total energy consumption. Think about it. If we banished the vampires completely, homes and businesses would cut their monthly expenses by a significant amount and numerous coal-fueled power stations could be switched off with no adverse affect.

The effect of eliminating vampire standby power is even more significant. Every device that uses power generates heat. There may be no measurable effect on warming the entire atmosphere directly, but all that heat has to be dealt with indoors. That means extra air conditioning load in the summer that leads to more electrical draw and more demand on coal-fired electric generators.

If you are wondering just how much you are losing to the vampires, a good way to find out is to use a device like the Kill A Watt energy usage monitor. Plug it into the wall, plug your computer or other device into the monitor and read the meter when you have your device in both the ON and STANDBY modes. Add up the standby draw from all the devices you are powering and be prepared for a shocking total. Sometimes you can just look at the power specifications for the equipment in question. The manufacture will often unabashedly quote standby power even when it is 30 or 60 watts for a device that only draws a few hundred watts at full power.

How can you take action? Since the problem is distributed, you need to actually turn off anything that plugs into the wall that isn’t currently being used. That means a wall switch that controls the outlet or a power strip with a switch. You need surge protector power strips anyway to protect your valuable equipment. Keep the switch readily accessible and turn it off overnight or when you know you won’t need the equipment for awhile. It will come alive from a complete power shutdown soon enough when you return. Be sure to unplug those modular “wall wart” power supplies that are used to power smaller equipment and charge mobile devices like cell phones and MP3 players. That little black transformer is a tiny vampire in itself.

Some manufacturers are becoming more sensitive to the standby power problem. My laser printer has a sleep mode, but it also has a mechanical power off rocker switch. I’ve taken to turning the power off when I’m done for the day and only back on when it is next needed. During the day it goes into sleep mode, which is at least some power savings. Other companies are offering ultra low power modes of 1 watt or less when on standby. It’s not perfect, but it is a good compromise when you have something that really needs to be instantly available or if you’re not good at remembering to flick the power switch.

Just remember that every vampire banished is one more that won’t be biting your wallet or infecting us all with more global warming. If you find the prospect of global warming disturbing, there are many more great posts to read as part of Today’s (October 15, 2009) Blog Action Day 2009 - Climate Change.

You may also be interested in reading our other posts this week related to climate change and technology. They are:

Monday: Blog Action Day For A Less Toasty Tomorrow.

Tuesday: The Green Energy Fairy Tale Is Real.

Wednesday: Every Home And Business Is A Battery.

Every Home And Business Is A Battery

As part of Blog Action Day 2009, we’re dedicating this week’s posts to the topics of global warming, climate change and alternative energy. Yesterday’s installment presented the case that alternative energy is a fairy tale no more. It’s mature technology that only needs a little national fervor to make it the power of choice. It’s pretty hard to argue with the “shovel ready” nature of solar and wind when there is already so much installed base and even smaller scale units showing up for sale in hardware stores. But skeptics still cast a suspicious eye. Often that suspicion is voiced by the question, “So what do you do when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow?”

That’s a fair concern. After all, the sun still sets every evening and winds blow sporadically in most locations. If you don’t want your lights getting brighter and dimmer, you need something to smooth out the fluctuations. That something is energy storage.

Coal, nuclear and natural gas fired generating plants don’t need storage. The energy storage is built into the fuel. There is also a short-term energy reserve in the steam boilers that only heat up and cool down so fast. Not so with windmills and solar panels. They have no fuel. They extract energy that is directed at them and only while they have access to that energy source.

At first glance, this appears to be a show-stopper for alternative energy. But it’s really not that bad. The sun doesn’t shine at night, but most of us don’t either. When it gets dark, we go home and shut down offices, factories, schools and stores. The biggest energy demand is during the day. That’s also the biggest demand for air conditioning, because the same sun that makes it bright outside and lets solar panels tap it for electricity also heats everything up. The wind doesn’t blow all the time either, but it’s usually blowing somewhere. That’s the value of an energy grid. Sources that contribute energy feed the grid and users that need energy tap it.

Some of the difference between supply and demand can be handled by base load generators. These are things like nuclear power, geothermal, and natural gas generators that can produce at a steady rate regardless of what’s going on with the weather.

But really making good use of clean energy sources that may generate too much power some times and not enough at other times requires storage. Users that are so far “off the grid” that it’s too expensive to string wires to their cabins often use lead acid storage batteries. Wind and solar generators charge up the batteries when they can. The user draws power from the batteries as needed.

Batteries are a good idea, but the automobile style lead acid batteries have some limitations. You need a lot of them to store much energy, so they take up a lot of room. They emit nasty gasses that need to be vented. Battery life is also more limited than we would like.

Nickel-metal hydride batteries are more energy dense and are the battery of choice for today’s hybrid cars. Lithium ion batteries can store even more energy per cubic foot and are the batteries chosen for plug-in hybrids and electric cars. They’re a bit pricey when you get to the capacities needed to run a home or business, but that’s soon to change. As Li-ion batteries get into mass production in vehicle sizes, the prices will plummet. How soon before they’re reasonably priced for fixed location battery backup?

What I’m talking about is a unit about the size of a furnace that will have a battery, inverter and control circuitry suitable to run the entire electrical load of a residence or small business. Power outages will be a thing of the past. Feed one of these from solar panels on the roof or a wind generator out back and you can go off the grid any time you want and avoid paying the electric company for power. Or, better yet, let them pay you for power.

Rather than round up all the batteries and put them at the generating station, why not distribute both generation and storage of electrical power? The grid still makes sense for sharing power among users. Those who are power rich can sell their excess capacity. Those who have demanding needs, like steel mills, street lights, and buildings without generation or storage will just pay the electric bill like today. The difference is that most of the generating sources can be green. The system will be more robust because a million small resources aren’t as likely to go out of service at the same time as one or two large generators.

The availability of reasonably priced generation and storage may give rise to a new era of energy entrepreneurs. Savvy producers will want to sell as much as possible during the heavy-demand daylight hours to get the best price possible. At night, they could even draw off the grid at lower prices to run their own lights and recharge their batteries. How about the family energy farm? A field of windmills and solar roof panels augmented by fields of corn for ethanol between the wind generator towers may offer the kind of income that makes independent rural life really attractive again. Factories and warehouses with large flat roofs offer ready real estate to load up with angled solar panels to eliminate power bills and become a revenue source. Ever shrinking payback periods are making this type of investment more and more practical.

Alternative energy is a key piece in putting the brakes on climate change before our environment degenerates into something that we’ll really hate dealing with. If you share our interest in this important topic, you’ll be interested in the huge collection of articles being posted on blogs worldwide as part of Blog Action Day 2009: Climate Change. The official event is October 15, but we’re participating all week with articles on this subject. Come back tomorrow for our feature on banishing power vampires that suck your “juice.” Say, isn’t Halloween just around the corner?

The Green Energy Fairy Tale is Real

How many decades have we been treated to a magical fairy tale of the future, where fantastic power sources like solar, wind, tidal, wave motion and maybe fusion will create a second Eden for us? It would be a world where unlimited energy provides a picture-perfect environment. Oh, but that’s not for now. Today we need wallow in the dirty world of coal and oil because those technologies are all that are practical with the technology we have at hand.

Every time I hear that, I have to look around to see if we are all dressed like characters in a Dickens novel. Are you kidding, Scrooge? We could rid ourselves of dirty energy right now... if we wanted to.

The problem is that we are living in a fog of our own making. I’m not talking about the haze that settles over Los Angeles and other major cities around the world due to air pollution. I’m talking about a mental fog that we can’t see our way clear of. Like many myths, it’s so ingrained and potent that we believe it with all our hearts and souls. The problem is that it’s just plain wrong.

Remember the Apollo Moon program? I do. As a kid, I liked to watch the rockets blow up every time they tried to launch one in the late 50’s and early 60’s. Then President Kennedy said we were going to the Moon and come back safely within the decade. So, we did.

Clean energy is a far more mature technology today than rocketry was in my youth. Everything you need to power your home or business from solar or wind energy is an off-the-shelf item with a manufacturer’s warranty. Hybrid cars with double the MPG ratings of their non-hybird equivalents are sitting in show rooms, shined up and ready to drive off the lot.

Oh, but those are just toys for people who are willing to pay through the nose to be early adopters. Aren’t they? No, Scrooge, this stuff is mainstream now. In nearly all locations there is enough sunlight that you can make your electric meter run backwards with just the spread of solar panels that will cover the roof of your house. I just saw a wind generator on sale at one of the big box hardware stores. My Camry Hybrid routinely gets twice the milage of my previous Olds Cutlass Supreme and offers the same power and even more cabin room.

What’s wrong here is that there is no national fervor yet for energy independence nor slowing climate change. If there was, what would it look like? Let’s try to see an alternative dream.

This is a dream where every home has a roof made of solar panels and an inverter connected to the power grid. You don’t buy electricity any more, you sell it. Your electric bill is zero. Every flat roof of a commercial, government, school, or hospital building is also beset with solar panels. They’re often hard to see from the ground, but from the air it’s one great sea of power panels. Out in the country, every farm has at least one windmill that provides a secure income for the farm families regardless of what crop prices are doing. A barn roof full of solar panels adds to that residual income and powers the farm.

This mass adoption on on-site power generation means those dirty coal plants can just be shut down or converted to natural gas peaker plants that run only as needed to supplement the green energy sources. Nuclear plants provide a reliable base load capability with no realistic threat of poisoning the public. Our one domestic close call was the Three Mile Island accident 30 years ago where nobody was hurt. But it spooked us so badly that we’ve shunned nukes ever since. About 40,000 people are killed in traffic accidents per year or about 1,200,000 dead in the 30 years since Three Mile Island and yet there’s no outcry to shun cars. See how powerful these mental fogs are?

The President and other world leaders are seriously considering another round of nuclear weapons reductions. So do we just chop those warheads up and hide the radioactive parts inside a mountain in Nevada? No way. There’s our bridge fuel to make the switch from dirty to clean energy. When we’ve transitioned, we can reprocess the rods until they are nearly non-radioactive and stow what’s left for future generations to learn how to harness.

We use about 9 million barrels per day of oil for gasoline. If we simply doubled the mileage of our vehicles by switching to those hybrids that are ready to go, we could cut that to 4.5 million, which is less than the 5 million barrels per day that we produce in the U.S. That’s energy security, plus we’d cut the greenhouse gas contribution from cars in half. The next generation of plug-in hybrids and electric cars will use even less in the way of liquid hydrocarbon fuels and will create only a pittance of greenhouse gasses if we are smart enough to generate the electricity from sunlight, wind, and nuclear.

That’s not all of the oil we use, but by what insanity are we still burning oil other than for transportation? A crash program to convert all oil fueled generating stations to natural gas and switch the Northeastern U.S. from heating oil to natural gas and/or electric would get rid of the need to scratch around for new oil wells and dramatically cut greenhouse emissions. This conversion project would be a good use for current and future national infrastructure investments. We’re talking a jobs program at a time of record unemployment, an efficiency improvement that will save business and residential users money on their heating bills, and a major reduction in pollution and global warming emissions.

So, do we put on our Victorian attire and pretend we’re still living in the 19th century or do we cut through the fog that’s holding us back and demand to make alternative energy our next national passion? If we pursued green energy with the fervor that got us to the moon, we could simultaneously solve our job creation, global warming, economic security, and energy production problems. The whole new can-do 21st century attitude we’d acquire would be a bonus.

Do you think that as a nation we could be doing a much better job of converting to new energy resources to stem the accelerating rate of climate change that is upon us? If so, you’ll find many more inspiring posts to read on Blog Action Day 2009 - Climate Change on Thursday, October 15. Visit www.blogactionday.org for suggestions on how you, too, can participate.

At T1 Rex's Business Telecom Explainer, we’re blogging on the subject of climate change the entire week. You may also enjoy reading our kick-off post, “Blog Action Day For A Less Toasty Tomorrow.”