Monthly Archives: March 2009

Analysing my Earth Hour energy graphs

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So last night I tracked my consumption during Earth Hour with The Energy Detective hooked up to this webite. Here’s the graph for the hour (click for larger image). It updates approximately every 1-2 seconds.

Earth Hour Analysis

Now I have all electric baseboard heating as well as cooking and other appliances. We don’t have any Natural Gas or oil appliances.

What I unplugged… not just turned off, but unplugged or shut off at power bar so there was no “standby” usage):

  • – All “power bricked” items, mostly tech stuff. Cell charger, laptop charger, external hard drives
  • – TV/Cable Box
  • – Electric baseboards with no wall thermostats
  • – “Dead Body” freezer

What I “turned down”:

  • – All The Electric baseboard heaters

What was still on/normal (drawing 440W):

  • – Our Living Room light (70W)
  • – My Internet, energy and weather (for alberniweather.ca) data collection equipment (150W)
  • – Stereo and Nintendo Wii were on Standby (couldn’t find the plugs in the rats nest!) (10W)
  • – Fridge (200W?)
  • – Other stuff(?)

That’s about it. As far as unplugging stuff. I couldn’t unplug all of my entertainment equipment because I wasn’t sure which was which and didn’t want to take the chance of unplugging my Mac Mini that was serving up the energy data. So those were on standby. Other than that, I left the living room light on… yes, many people went lights out… but personally, I see Earth Hour as a “use less” not, “go back to the dark ages”. This Hour was about realising how much power we waste. So leaving the only light on that we need is, IMHO, perfectly fine, and as you will see, if we want to make a difference on how much energy we waste, that difference won’t be from CFLs.

After we went around and turn off/down everything, I monitored the usage and noticed the spikes. We hadn’t turned down the heaters completely in the kids room.. but since they were sleeping already, we went ahead and turned those down too.

Then you’ll see the “Dead Body Freezer”… I wasn’t happy that we were still drawing 740W, so we thought for a bit and realized… THE FREEZER. We got one of those long chest type freezer for $20 when we bought the place. It’s perpetually half empty and is constantly running. It draws 300W… and probably costs us $100 a year to run.

That will be our first replacement as soon as we can afford it.

The last thing we learned was from our spare bedroom baseboard heater. I had turned all the stuff down 20 minutes before the “Hour” started. Turns out, the spare bedroom must cool down the quickest, because that heater was the first to come back on.

Here’s a comparison of Friday nights Hour and Earth Hour…

Comparison

On the left is Friday Night from 8:30 to 9:30PM… we were just watching TV, doing computer stuff, and we made popcorn for a movie.

On the right is Earth Hour on Saturday night.

And Finally, You can see our daily routine for Saturday, March 28 to this morning in the graph below.

24 Hour Analysis

My Earth Hour – in a Graph!

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I’ll have a deeper analysis and explanation tomorrow, but I wanted to post this picture of what my Earth Hour looked like… click on the image for a larger (very large) version.

Earth hour time slot

Earth Hour side-by-side comparison!

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It’s Earth Hour today at 8:30PM PDT! And just in time, Murkyview.com has been “TED enabled!” If you want to know how honest *I am* during Earth Hour tonight, you can monitor my Energy consumption right here. Check out the graph links for different times along the bottom too!

Tomorrow I will post a side-by-side comparison of Earth Hour vs. the regular 8:30PM to 9:30PM hour for me so we can see just how much difference I made!

BC Liberals: “We {heart} BC Hydro” Really!

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So because I’m a news dork, I subscribe to the PR RSS feed from the BC Government. I knew right away there was blogging material coming my way when I saw this headline:

FACTS ON INDEPENDENT POWER PRODUCTION

*rubs hands together*… lets begin:

Says El Gordo:

Claim: B.C. does not need to be electricity self-sufficient; we can easily import any new electricity we need from other jurisdictions.

Is anyone actually claiming that importing electricity into BC is a good thing?? Certainly is news to me.

They do get a little uppity in their response to…. themselves….

It takes time to build new electricity infrastructure responsibly, and government is not going to risk being ‘caught short’ by not continuing to plan for the economic future of this province.

Ya, so just lay off, Self! OK!! the nerve…

Ok, something a little more serious from Gordon:

Claim: The 2002 Energy Plan bans BC Hydro from building new electricity generation facilities.
…
Capital investments on several other sites are also proposed: Peace Canyon Stator replacement, GM Shrum Stator upgrade, Aberfeldie Dam Redevelopment and Coquitlam Dam Improvement Project.
In anticipation of increased demand, BC Hydro is adding capacity to the Revelstoke Dam and Generating Station. Revelstoke Dam is the most cost-effective energy source available to BC Hydro. This project will add about 500 megawatts of power, which will increase capacity at Revelstoke to 2,480 megawatts. As well, BC Hydro plans to add 1,000 megawatts of capacity with two new turbines at the Mica dam.

Funny. None of the projects in the response sound like new generation facilities to me… do they to you? Yes, renovations are important and good, but what about addressing the question of who is building the NEW projects in the province? Yes, Site C is there for BC Hydro only, but then, that’s not the problem, is it.

OK, I’m going to do one more… quoteth King Campbell:

Claim: B.C. ratepayers are paying the capital costs of new power projects being built by private energy developers through Electricity Purchase Agreement contracts with BC Hydro, and are paying as much as double the current energy market rates.

The cost BC Hydro pays for new power supply from IPPs is similar to that being paid in other jurisdictions for new supply.

But isn’t that the point? We don’t *want* to pay the same as other jurisdictions. We are supposed to be using our monopoly and advantage given to us by our Publicly Owned Electricity to ensure that we pay *less* for new supply than other jurisdictions and retain that advantage for the lifetime of the project.

At least that’s how I thought it was supposed to work?

Building new power projects is more expensive today than it was several decades ago. It costs more, not because they are IPPs, but because they are new projects. Similarly, a new home or vehicle costs more to build today than it did in the 1960s or 1970s.

Again, what is being implied here is that it is cheaper for private companies to build new plants than it is for BC Hydro. And again, have economies of scale stopped working since 1968? Can BC Hydro and BC taxpayers not benefit more from having full access to the revenue stream (no pun intended) from run-of-river than if built by a private firm?

In 1968 BC Hydro started work on the W A C Bennet Dam… it ended up costing just under $1 Billion in 1974. That’s about $4.5 Billion in 2009 dollars.

Site C is a much smaller dam compared to the WAC Bennett which has been expanded with double the generators over the years.

However, at its initial build in 1974, WAC Bennet was producing around 1500MW.

Site C will likely cost around $6 Billion and produce 900MW.

This is all semantics of course, because the *point* of public ownership is that the public doles out the money in order to receive the maximum benefit and minimum payoff period.

Nothing has changed in that respect. So no matter how much Gordo wants to spin the beauty of IPPs, the fact remains, our resources are being sold to for-profit companies and their shareholders (like GE) who are right now feeling the hurt.

One wonders how many of the 30 projects currently under construction might get shelved or abandoned due to “credit tightness”. What’s the cost to take those over?

I don’t have a problem with Run-of-River or Site C, I think the environmental costs are minimal and manageable compared to our continued reliance on fossil fuels. However, public ownership, in my opinion, is not negotiable when it comes to water and power in BC.

UBC Researchers propose Metro Vancouver wide Transit system

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This is really incredible:

Want One Port Mann Bridge, or a Light Rail Metropolis?

The provincial government now intends to go it alone, spending $3.1 billion to erect a new 10-lane bridge and widen the road on either end.

…..

What other transportation infrastructure, they asked, could we instead have for $3.1 billion?

By the time Prof. Patrick Condon and researcher Kari Dow at the UBC Design Centre for Sustainability finished punching in the numbers and mapped their results, they produced a startling alternative vision. For the same money, concluded the team, the government could finance a 200-kilometre light rail network that would place a modern, European-style tram within a 10-minute walk for 80 per cent of all residents in Surrey, White Rock, Langley and the Scott Road district of Delta, while providing a rail connection from Surrey to the new Evergreen line and connecting Pitt Meadows and Maple Ridge into the regional rail system.

This is what our reliance on the Single Occupancy Vehicle has done to us. We (myself included) have been conditioned to think that our one-person cars are the ideal. So instead of investing in mass transit that would benefit all whether they owned a vehicle or not, we spend gigantic amounts of money to replace aging infrastructure that is under stress from the amount of traffic we demand of it.

Now that’s not to say that we shouldn’t replace bridges and things that are in need of renovation or replacement. But clearly rather than expanding these modes of transportation which only further encourage greater volume and gridlock and increased CO2 emissions, we could be building a vast metropolitan network that would actually bring Vancouver into the 21st Century.

Compared to the 200 km grid of light rail, the Port Mann Bridge, including approach spans, is a mere 2,093 metres long, though the entire project actually extends 37 km and includes widening Highway 1, adding two lanes each way on the east side of the bridge and an extra lane in both directions on the west side.

Dow and Condon factored in the cost of tearing down the original Port Mann Bridge and erecting a brand new one, as current plans dictate. They based their comparative figures on proven costs per kilometre for building a type of high-speed light rail tram widely used in places like Alicante, Spain; Budapest, Hungary; and Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Much the same can be said for projects like the $32 Million Langford Interchange in Victoria. For the same price as this one “cloverleaf” to Bear Mountain which, thanks to the economic crisis, has ground to a halt in terms of further house/condo building, we could have completely upgraded the nearly 40KM stretch of railway from Parksville to Port Alberni.(Investment Casebook-PDF) Or upgraded the Cowichan to Victoria portion and put in a commuter service to relieve the stress on the Malahat.

Especially in these times of economic hardship, why aren’t we looking for ways to get the most for our money?