Cambridge Clean Heating and Cooling Informational Workshop

The City of Cambridge is hosting a second public informational workshop for the newly launched Cambridge Clean Heating and Cooling Marketplace, an initiative to help residents make their homes more comfortable, save energy, and cut their carbon footprint. The program will support residents who are interested in learning about installing air-source heat pumps, such as ductless minisplits, and solar hot water.

The Community Development Department will host the workshop on Thursday, November 14th from 6:30-8:00pm at the Citywide Senior Center (806 Massachusetts Avenue), Arts & Crafts Room.

Residents are encouraged to attend to learn more about air-source heat pumps and the Cambridge Clean Heating and Cooling Marketplace. Click here to register for the event

The City is working with Boston-based EnergySage to develop this program, which helps residents request, receive, and compare air source heat pump and/or solar hot water quotes from local, reputable contractors. An EnergySage expert Energy Advisor will be available to provide independent support every step of the way to help residents review technology options and installation quotes.

Many Cambridge residents have already installed heat pumps and solar hot water, thanks to generous rebates from state and utility programs. The Cambridge Clean Heating and Cooling Marketplace will help residents ensure that they are taking full advantage of these incentives.

Heat pumps and solar hot water are a great way for residents to save on their utility bills and reduce their home’s carbon footprint, while making it more comfortable. Air-source heat pumps, often called minisplits, are powered by electricity and move heat into or out of a home, instead of burning gas or oil to create heat. As a result, heat pumps deliver energy-efficient heating and cooling, year-round, and can be zoned by an individual room. Though they require electricity to operate, heat pumps use up to 70% less electricity than traditional electric-resistance heating and can be powered by clean electricity.

At this workshop, you’ll have the chance to learn more about the technologies, meet an installer, and get your questions answered! Click the link to register: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cambridge-clean-heating-and-cooling-public-workshop-tickets-78221361197?aff=camb

First-Ever Energy Star Label for Clothes Dryers Now Available

The EPA has announced a brand new energy efficiency certification for clothes dryers under the Energy Star label. As known energy hogs, the potential savings are big: if all residential clothes dryers sold in the U.S. meet these new requirements, the utility cost savings will grow to more than $1.5 billion each year and more than 22 billion pounds of annual greenhouse gas emissions would be prevented.

Over 80% of U.S. homes have a clothes dryer, which on average account for approximately six percent of residential electricity consumption. In order to reduce dryers’ energy use by over 20% of the minimum 2015 standards, Energy Star dryers will incorporate technologies such as:

  • Auto termination sensors
  • Heat pumps to recapture lost hot air
  • Performance data and alerts
  • Smart grid readiness

Explains U.S. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy: “Working with industry on innovative approaches to address our changing climate, we are helping consumers select more energy efficient appliances, save money and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Read more about this news from the EPA newsroom.

 

NSTAR has approved an extension to the Early Boiler Replacement Rebate Pilot

Have you been thinking of replacing your 30+ year old boiler?

Now, only through the end of September 2012, the Mass Save® Home Energy Services Program is providing a temporary increased rebate for replacing 30+ year old boilers.  The rebate ranges from $1,750 to $4,000 for new efficient boilers using the same fuel and installed by October 31, 2012.  This is a large increase from the normal $400 to $1,500 in existing rebates.  A no-cost Mass Save home energy assessment is required by September 30, 2012 to determine if your boiler qualifies.

Not sure what a boiler is or if you have one?

Schedule your no-cost Mass Save home energy assessment and your home energy advisor will let you know if you have a boiler and he/she will also collect the information needed for the rebate.  Boilers heat your home with hot water or steam.

Want to make your boiler upgrade even more energy efficient and save more –  consider installing solar hot water?

Heating water accounts for 20% of household energy consumption, even more with a boiler fed hot water or steam heating system. Solar water heating displaces 50-80% of the energy used to make hot water in a household. While you’re upgrading your boiler think about adding solar hot water to help you save more and become even more energy efficient.  Right now, Cambridge Energy Alliance has a solar hot water grant that rebates 50% of your out-of-pocket costs, up to $2000. Essentially you can install a solar hot water system for almost 75% off when you apply our rebate with the other state and federal incentives. You can also use a 0% interest HEAT loan to install solar hot water systems with no up-front cash. The grant will only continue through November so act quickly!

Schedule your no-cost Mass Save home energy assessment by calling Next Step Living at 866-867-8729.

Energy Star Rating Standards to Tighten

Energy Star Logo

The Environmental Protection Agency recently announced updates to its Energy Star Rating requirements on televisions and cable boxes. The revisions are the first in a list of about 20 products that will receive updates to their Energy Star Rating requirements this year.

Currently, Energy Star rated televisions hold at least 70% of the Market Share. The stricter standards mean, according to the EPA, “substantial overall energy bill reduction, and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions reductions.”

The new standards are requiring a 40% reduction in watt usage. For example, a 60 inch television currently averages about 282 watts, but the come September the same 60 inch TV will be required to use less than 108 watts to receive an Energy Star Rating. Talk about saving a watt!

In its announcement, the EPA states that if all U.S. homes had Energy Star rated TVs and cable boxes under these new requirements, savings would reach $5 billion a year and reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions equal to that of taking over 700 million cars off the road.

Did Cash for Appliances Work?

Graph of the how long each state's rebate program ran before allotted funds were spentIt’s a huge success. It hasn’t gone anywhere. Actually, it’s a little of both.

Fifty states and six territories have launched “Cash for Appliances” programs since late last year. Each one had the same amount of money – about a dollar per resident – but the results have been wildly different. Some states ran through their entire rebate budgets in hours; others can’t seem to give away their money. What’s been going on?

Cash for Appliances, modeled on (or at least nicknamed after) last year’s “Cash for Clunkers” program, was funded as part of the $787 billion stimulus bill. Unlike “Cash for Clunkers”, the appliance rebate program wasn’t designed and administered by the federal government. Instead, the government directed $300 million to the 50 states (plus DC and several American territories), at a ratio of roughly $1 per person in each state. Each state then had the opportunity to design their own program within the general guidelines given by the government.

As you’d imagine with a lot of cooks in the kitchen, no two states designed their rebate program in the exact same way: rebate amounts, categories, eligibility, application processes and marketing plans have all differed. As have the results… Ten states had crushing consumer demand that caused them to run out of rebate funds within 4 days of the respective program start dates, with complaints of flooded call centers and crashing websites. Thirteen other states still have desperate operators standing by and literally can’t give away their money.

Comparing State by State Rebate Programs

It’s not just a matter of some states having better deals than others. Take, for example, refrigerator rebates in Massachusetts, Minnesota and California. The programs in all three states offered $200 rebates on efficient refrigerators. Massachusetts and Minnesota “sold out” in 1 day and 2 days respectively. California? Same rebate amount, but the program has been open since April and still has $19 million in rebates unredeemed.

Across the country, the rebate categories and amounts are all over the board:

CategorySmallest State RebateLargest State Rebate
Refrigerators$50$700
Clothes Washers$35$800
Freezers$25$600
Dishwashers$25$400
Air Conditioners$20$1,075
Furnaces$100$2,000
Heat Pumps$75$2,000
Water Heaters$100$1,400
Solar Water Heaters$150$1,200
Boilers$100$1,200

So what attributes matter the most when it comes to determining whether a state program sells out quickly or not at all? The answers aren’t as straightforward as you’d think. We did some analysis to compare each of the programs to see what predicted their likelihood to sell out.

What Doesn’t Matter

Average Electricity Rates: One of the biggest surprises in analyzing the state by state rebate data is that the average price of electricity in a state has almost no impact on how popular its Cash for Appliances program is. Consumers don’t seem to be thinking about this program in terms of its ability to save them money over the long-term – otherwise, we’d expect to see that the states with much more expensive electricity selling out their rebate programs much more quickly than those that have relatively cheap power.

Non-Appliance Rebates: There are the “shiny” appliances (refrigerators, washers, freezers and dishwashers), and then there are the “boring” systems (air conditioners, furnaces, heat pumps, water heaters, boilers and solar water heaters). There’s almost no correlation between the number of “boring” categories that a state has rebates for, or the maximum amount of any of those rebates, and the speed at which the state has gone or is going through their Cash for Appliances budget. While we haven’t seen break-downs for many states in terms of the numbers of each type of rebate that have been redeemed, this result indicates that most people aren’t being motivated by the number or dollar figures of non-appliance rebates.

What Matters a Little Bit

Number of “Shiny” Appliance Rebate Categories: There are four basic appliance categories where states can offer rebates (refrigerators, freezers, dishwashers and clothes washers). Generally speaking, the states that offer rebates in 3 or 4 of those categories are more likely to have run through their rebate dollars quickly than those that have offered rebates in fewer appliance categories.

The fact that states that offer smaller rebates on a broader set of appliances have handed out their money faster than states that offer larger rebates on fewer types of appliances may mean that rebates aren’t successfully channeling consumers into buying specific appliances, but rather “catching” buyers who were already planning purchases.

In Pennsylvania, for instance, there are no rebates on “basic appliances”. All the rebates being offered in that state are for the behind-the-scenes systems for heating water and air (furnaces, boilers and water heaters) –systems in the home that utilize far more energy than kitchen and laundry appliances. And yet, Pennsylvania is one of the “slowest” states utilizing their Cash for Appliances money: of their $11.9 million, they’ve only given out $2 million as of early July. Does that mean that Pennsylvania is failing in their “Cash for Appliances” program? As an economic stimulus, it has clearly not injected as much activity as other “fast” states. But in the longer term, its rebate program should save Pennsylvanians more money than states using their money on appliance rebates only – saving more kWh per rebate dollar spent – if homeowners would just use the program!

Highest “Shiny” Appliance Rebate Dollar Amount: If you exclude several outlying state programs, where very large appliance rebates are provided but only to low-income (Kansas, Oregon) and disabled (Alaska) residents, there’s some correlation between the dollar amount of the largest appliance rebate and how quickly the program dollars ran out, though not nearly as much as whether a program required reservations.

What Really Matters

“Do you have reservations, sir?”: The number one predictor of whether a state rebate program sold out quickly didn’t have anything to do with how generous the rebates were. It actually turned out to hinge on the program’s design. Virtually all the “fast” states required consumers to pre-reserve a rebate application before making a purchase. These states set up websites and call centers that “opened” at a certain date and time, creating an “event” that turned into a feeding frenzy of activity, before closing down within days, or even hours.

Think of the lines around the block at your local Apple store each time a new version of the iPhone comes out. With the iPhone 4, everyone was just standing in line for a reservation! Do you really think Apple’s product marketers could have been taken by surprise by consumer five times in a row (4 iPhone versions and the iPad)?

Ten of the 17 “fastest” states required consumers to reserve a rebate before purchasing a qualifying appliance. Six others had hybrid programs where consumers could either reserve ahead of time or get the discount at the point of sale (if available). Of the 15 “slowest” states, 11 have no reservation system, and three others have optional reservation systems. Basically, all the “slow” states use mail-in rebates after purchase.

Conclusions

For consumers, there’s not much more to say than to give the advice to make calculated, rational decisions about the upfront cost of energy efficiency measures, the available rebates and the 3-5 year payoff. Of course, it’s been pretty well documented in recent behavioral economics research that most consumers don’t behave rationally. So, how about this? At least make sure that you’re aware of all the state, utility and federal energy rebates and tax credits that you can “stack” together and pay for your projects. And, if you’re not sure which projects are the best investment, EnergySavvy has an online energy analysis tool to help you figure it out.

For rebate program designers in government, utilities or manufacturers, there are a few lessons that can be taken away from the Cash for Appliances results:

  1. Create demand through scarcity by requiring pre-reservation for new rebate programs. For rebate programs like Indiana and Pennsylvania (and like many utility rebate programs across the country), that only pay out non-appliance rebates, a potentially effective strategy to kick-start demand would be to re-launch the program with higher rebates for the same back-end measures, but require consumers to pre-reserve their rebate on a specific launch date.
  2. Bundle “shiny stuff” (basic appliances) and “boring stuff” (HVAC systems) together to increase the uptake of less exciting, but greater energy saving, systems.
  3. Catch the “already upgrading” crowd by offering rebates on a wide set of categories but only on the most efficient models in each category. The program may not be stimulating purchases that wouldn’t have happened already, but it can nudge consumers to the highest efficiency products in each category.

The data from the Cash for Appliances program results fit with academic research on consumer behavior.

“The variable rates of uptake based on seemingly trivial factors such as creating a sense of urgency are further evidence that, when the goal is to encourage consumers to act in their best interest, giving them some reason other than pure rationality can be surprisingly effective,” said Michael I. Norton, Associate Professor of Marketing at Harvard Business School, “Inserting some excitement into behaving well – in some sense, copying the way parents induce their children to eat their vegetables via airplane noises – should always be an important consideration for policymakers interested in encouraging behavior change.”

For more information on this report and analysis, contact Scott Case at EnergySavvy.com.

Replacing our Desktop Computer with a NAS

Home NAS device replaces a desktop computer for storage When we tested all our electronics with the Kill-a-Watt, we found out that the ten-year-old desktop was using a lot of energy, even when it wasn’t powered on. Since we were mostly just using the desktop for storing our music and pictures—we’re primarily laptop users now—we thought it would be a good idea to replace the poor old thing with network-attached storage (NAS for short).

A NAS is a mini-server built specifically for storage. If you work in a corporate environment, there are probably more than a few hanging around on your network. Only in the past five years or so have they started to be sold into the home market. It’s basically a tiny computer built around a bay for hard drives. When I started looking, my basic criteria was: 1) something that chews up less electricity than the old Windows Vista desktop (not hard to do) and 2) something that we can access from the laptops and backup our data to.

After some comparison, I chose the Netgear ReadyNAS NV+. It’s a very sexy little silver box that slides right into my entertainment center. The old PC ran at 110W–121W (plus 18W for the monitor) and used 6W when it was off (plus 2W for the monitor). The NAS uses 29W–45W, and just 1W when it’s off. In comparison with other NASes on the market, it’s in the middle of the pack somewhere: not the lightest sipper of electricity but not a workhorse server either. One of the many reasons I chose it is that it has an array of possible energy-saving features, such as:

  • A variable-speed fan—it senses the temperature and adjusts how fast the fan spins automatically.
  • Automatic disk spin-down—most new computers spin down when they’re not in use, but NASes generally don’t.
  • Scheduled startup and shutdown—in case we forget to turn it off at night, although I try to turn it off when I’m not using it.

The electricity draw varies based on what sort of hard disks one puts into the box, so it’s important to look for low-power drives to go with your NAS. I picked the WD Caviar Green drives, but there’s a variety of equally good “green” hard drives on the market now. “Green” in this case indicates only that they spin at a slower speed and thus suck down less energy. This means that they’re a little slower, but you’ll probably never notice on a network-connected server.

Other reasons I chose the ReadyNAS:

  • It has a reputation as a reliable device.
  • It supports RAID (redundant array of independent disks), which allows me to stuff a bunch of hard disks into the box and, if one of them fails, still keep all of my data. Additionally, if I need more storage in the future, I can just stick another hard drive into the box or replace my old ones to expand my storage space.
  • The most silly: I can connect it to my Tivo right out of the box. Tivo’s a funny beast that doesn’t support DLNA like almost every other streaming device on the network (PS3, Xbox, etc). Most other NASes support DLNA, but not Tivo.

All in all, I really love it. I’ve moved my entire iTunes and picture libraries onto it, and they’ve barely dented the total storage capacity (1.8 terrabytes!). It’s hard to describe how freeing it is to finally be able to access all of our files without having to exile myself to the office.

Cross-posted on pragmaticenvironmentalism.com

Mass Save experiencing difficulties

Due to the overwhelming demand for the Great Mass Appliance Exchange, Mass Save’s web server and phone lines were down earlier today. If you experience any difficulties requesting a rebate authorization, please be patient as Mass Save adjusts its services to meet the load.

Similar demand is being seen across the country.

UPDATE: According to the Boston Globe, and the rebate-only website, the available funds have already been reserved.

Guess “who’s” turning 40?

FIASCOP 15 by Pierre Marcel Given our area’s notoriously schizophrenic weather you could forgive some for celebrating Earth Day a little early or late, but what if you want to observe this round-number anniversary the day of? Otherwise it can be a bit like trying to get excited about trick-or-treating on November 1st.

Here’s a special Earth Day view of our local events calendar to make it easier to find something to celebrate with. Some highlights include:

Also of interest, PBS’ American Experience will be airing a two-hour special on the history of Earth Day on Monday April 19 at 9. It should be in heavy rotation for the remainder of the week. On April 27 at 10 PM, Independent Lens is showing “Garbage Dreams” by Mai Iskander.

Welcome to the world’s largest garbage village located on the outskirts of Cairo, Egypt. The Zaballeen (Arabic for “garbage people”) recycle 80 percent of the trash they collect—far more than other recycling initiatives. But now multinational corporations threatens their livelihood. Follow three teenage boys born into the business who are forced to make choices that will impact the survival of their community.

Cash for your clunky appliance coming soon

New Refrigerator by dsleetor_2000Beginning on Earth Day, you can receive a rebate of up to $250 if you exchange your old refrigerator, dishwasher, clothes washer, or freezer for a new energy efficient model. However advanced registration required for these rebates will only be available for a two week period.  Start planning now if you want to take advantage of this offer and save you money on your utility bills for years to come.

Continue reading

Fun with a Kill-A-Watt

We finally got that Kill-A-Watt we’ve been thinking about, and we spent a good part of last weekend running around the house measuring the energy use of every single piece of electronic equipment we own. It was surprisingly fun. It was also a lot of numbers. (See below.) But we could draw a few conclusions from all of them: Continue reading

Cross-posted on pragmaticenvironmentalism.com