Holiday LEDs consume just 0.043 watts, compared to 0.45 watts for incandescent mini lights (Photo: SDG&E)

One of the easiest ways to trim expenses this holiday season is to replace your inefficient incandescent holiday lights with light-emitting diode (LED) lights that use just one-tenth the energy. Widely available online, as well as at hardware stores, home improvement stores and major retailers, LED holiday lights are rated to last at least 50,000 hours. LED lights are also cool to the touch, which greatly reduces the fire hazard posed by incandescent bulbs, can be used indoors or outdoors and, made of shatterproof plastic, aren’t susceptible to breakage like traditional glass mini lights.

With incentives offered by cities and utilities throughout California, making the decision to switch to LEDs is even simpler. In some cases, such as exchanges where you can swap two or three strands of old, incandescent lights for strands of new LEDs, the switch may not cost you anything at all. Check with your city or utility for available holiday light exchanges or rebates. Residents of Anaheim who buy LED holiday lights and complete the online program application through December 24, for example, can receive their choice of up to a $20 gift card from Borders, Home Depot or Starbucks. For updates on available LED holiday lights exchanges and rebates throughout the holiday season, check the Power Plug blog.

• Read background
• Read more: Anaheim Public Utilities’ Holiday LEDs Rebate (PDF, 121 KB)
• Use the Energy Scrooge Calculator found at HolidayLEDs.com
• Read more: PG&E Holiday Lights Fact Sheet (PDF, 884 KB) and SDG&E Holiday Lights Fact Sheet (PDF, 864 KB)

Bill Clinton addresses U.S. mayors at the Climate Protection Summit in Seattle (Photo: U.S. Conference of Mayors)

The Clinton Climate Initiative (CCI) recently announced the creation of the world’s largest public-private sector green technology purchasing network with new partnerships to make energy-efficient products more affordable and accessible to city governments, consumers, GE Real Estate and schools and universities across the United States. The partnerships will improve the energy efficiency of hundreds of millions of square feet of public and private real estate. CCI will expand its purchasing consortium, which offers volume discounts on green products, to all 1,100 cities in the U.S. Conference of Mayors. These discounts were previously only available to the Large Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40), a group of 40 of the world’s largest cities that are working together to combat climate change.

CCI and Wal-Mart will use their combined purchasing resources to drive down the price of green technologies. Products with discounts will include energy-efficient indoor lighting, traffic and street lighting, building products, water system components, alternative energy technologies, clean vehicles and advanced waste management technologies. These and other products will be offered by 25 manufacturers to municipal governments at discounted prices ranging from 5% to 15% below current levels for commodity items and from 15% to 70% below current levels for non-commodity items.

These efforts come at a time when U.S. mayors are increasingly taking responsibility for addressing climate change. At the U. S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Summit, held in Seattle on November 2, hundreds of mayors discussed how they are ramping up climate protection measures. At the summit, the mayors launched a website, GreenPlaybook.org, to guide communities that want to reduce emissions.

• Read more about the Clinton Climate Initiative’s partnerships with U.S. mayors, Wal-Mart and major manufacturers and GE Real Estate, schools and universities
• Read more: “U.S. Mayors Announce Ramped Up Efforts to Combat Global Warming and Share Best Practices at Climate Protection Summit” (Power Plug, 11/09/07)
  
• Read more: “President Clinton, Cities Announce $5 Billion Buildings Energy Efficiency Plan” (e-Newswire, 5/30/07)

(Photo: U.K. Dept. for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)

“This is not just an environmental problem. It’s an economic, it’s a political, it’s a migration problem. What are we going to do as a world, I would say, when people start fighting not over politics, but water? What are we going to do when refugees turn up on the shores of your country fleeing not political persecution, but environmental catastrophe? Economically, what are you going to do when the markets that your constituents earn their living making goods to sell into are no longer there because they’re too busy swimming for their lives because sea levels have risen? In other words, whichever way you look at it — because, the evidence is clear, in the end it’s going to have impacts on all of us in lots of different ways. Now, that makes for a very strong moral and a practical case for doing something about it. And again, it’s going to affect all of us wherever we happen to live.”

• Read “The Guys Who Matter When it Comes to Climate Change,” By Blake Hounshell, Foreign Policy magazine’s Passport blog, (9/25/07)
  

(Photo: City of Portland, OR)

Last week, at the Greenbuild International Conference and Expo in Chicago, City of Portland, Oregon, officials unveiled a proposal that would levy a tax on builders for merely meeting Oregon’s building code, award them cash bonuses for exceeding the code, and require energy audits to be performed on homes at the time of sale. Similar to the “feebate” incentives for efficient new cars long promoted by Amory Lovins, the Portland proposal would reward developers who build new homes that are at least 45% more efficient than Oregon code with cash bonuses funded by taxes of several hundred dollars on each new home that merely complies with code. New homes 30% more efficient than Oregon code would pay no fee. To get builders on board and to ease the transition before taxes come online in 2010, Portland officials say that the final plan will include a two-year, city-funded technical support and education program for builders. The plan will be presented to Portland residents in hearings beginning in January 2008.

• Read “City Unveils Carbon Tax Plan,” By Dylan Rivera, The Oregonian, (11/08/07) and the City of Portland press release
• Read Flex Your Power’s best practices guide for local governments
• Energy- and money-saving tips for your home
• Find rebates, incentives and services for your home

(Photo: City of Santa Barbara)

Earlier this month, the Santa Barbara City Council passed a new Energy Ordinance that aims to make the city’s buildings 40% more efficient than those in any other U.S. city. Under the ordinance, Santa Barbara’s energy standards become 10% more stringent every five years. The aim, City Council member Das Williams told the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Daily Nexus, is to make city’s buildings 20% more efficient than required under California Title 24 efficiency standards, themselves 20% more efficient than national standards. To pre-empt fights between the city and builders over the ordinance, the Santa Barbara-based Community Environmental Council and the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects worked to educate builders about the benefits of building efficiently. A coalition of 15 local groups, including environmentalists, contractors and architects, are actively supporting the energy ordinance and the Architecture 2030 Challenge, a measure that inspired the ordinance and calls for cities to be carbon neutral by 2030.

• Read “SB Plan Aims to Reduce Energy Use,” By Bianca Licata, UCSB Daily Nexus, (11/07/07) and the City of Santa Barbara press release
• Read Flex Your Power’s best practices guide for local governments
• Read more: “City of Corona Adopts Ordinance That Fast-Tracks Green Buildings” (e-Newswire, 10/31/07)

An energy-efficient HVAC chilling tower sits on top of the Kaiser building in Redwood City (Photo: Kaiser Permanente)

Kaiser Permanente has saved more than just kilowatt hours over the past year. After completing 15 energy efficiency projects across Central and Northern California in 2007, the hospital group earned $1.6 million in rebates from Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), including, most recently, $92,518 awarded to Kaiser Hospital in Redwood City. The hospital qualified for the PG&E rebate after replacing an aging cooling system with two large chiller towers that supply water to the 205,000-sq.-ft. hospital and 45,000-sq.-ft. of medical offices. In addition to the rebate, the upgrade will save the facility 734,354 kilowatt-hours every year, as well as prevent the emission of 403 tons of greenhouse gases.

• Read more about the Redwood City hospital retrofit
• Read more about the partnership between Kaiser Permanente and PG&E
• Find rebates, incentives and services for the commercial and institutional sector

San Francisco’s Cow Palace, which recently underwent a lighting retrofit that will save an estimated $240,000 annually (Photo: Progressive Lighting & Energy Solutions Inc.)

With the help of the environmental consultancy group Ecology Action, Progressive Lighting & Energy Solutions Inc. recently completed a massive retrofit of San Francisco’s Cow Palace arena through the RightLights program. The retrofit is projected to save 1,508,532 kilowatt-hours and an estimated $239,224 in energy costs annually, while reducing energy demand by 360 kilowatts. All fluorescent lighting was retrofitted with third-generation T8 lamps with ultra-efficient electronic ballasts, and high-intensity discharge (HID) lights were retrofitted with pulse-start electronically ballasted HID technology. Additionally, incandescent lights were replaced with ENERGY STAR qualified CFLs. The new energy-efficient lighting reduced the electrical load by 60%, provides better illumination and reduces maintenance. Funded by utility ratepayers, Ecology Action’s RightLights program provides free professional assistance to companies in San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Monterey and San Benito counties.

• Read background
• Read more about Ecology Action’s RightLights program
• Read more: “Retrofit Reduces California Hardware’s Lighting Electricity Consumption by Over 60%” (e-Newswire, 9/19/07)
• Read more: “Lighting for Tomorrow Announces 2007 LED and Compact Fluorescent Lighting Winners” (Power Plug, 2/17/07)
• Read Flex Your Power’s best practices guide for commercial office buildings
  

Douglas Atkins of the Chartwell School receives a Best Overall Award from CEC Commissioner John Geesman at the 5th Annual Flex Your Power Awards (Photo: Flex Your Power)

When the Chartwell School designed their new campus building, in Seaside, they made sure that it was a model of energy efficiency. This high-performance learning environment features extensive use of daylighting, a wide array of efficient task lighting in classrooms, a 30-kilowatt PV system, high-performance window glazing, natural ventilation, a highly insulated envelope and state-of-the-art water conservation technology. Together, the features make the building a “net-zero” electricity user and the first LEED Platinum school in the U.S. The Chartwell School was one of five Best Overall Award winners in the 5th Annual Flex Your Power Awards.

• Read background
• View the winners of the 5th Annual Flex Your Power Awards
• Energy efficiency solutions for schools

GE’s new “eco-dashboard” (Photo: GE)

Next month, General Electric Company (GE) plans to release an “eco-dashboard” that enables homeowners to track their energy and water consumption and use real-time pricing information to help slash their utility bills. GE’s panel is designed to work in homes equipped with meters that provide real-time pricing information. (All of California’s investor-owned utilities are working to install these advanced or “smart” meters throughout their service territories.) GE’s eco-dashboard can, for example, show ratepayers how much they would save if they pre-cooled or pre-heated their homes before rates increase during peak demand hours. To avoid a peak rates price pinch, homeowners can also program the panel to run the clothes dryer or dishwasher, or turn on air conditioning, only when electricity prices fall before a pre-set threshold. Homeowners who’ve installed solar panels can use the dashboard to alert them to the best time of the day to run major appliances off the sun. If homeowners have coupled PV panels with batteries to store energy, the dashboard can be programmed to draw down the batteries when the price of power from the grid increases.

• Read background
• Read more: GE’s “ecomagination” product line
• Guides for energy-efficient products and equipment for the home
• Find rebates, incentives and services for the home

IBM plans to consolidate 3,900 computer servers onto about 30 System z mainframes, such as the one under inspection here by IBM Engineer Ed Horton. The 30 mainframes are expected to consume about 80% less energy than the current set up (Photo: IBM)

Energy efficiency makes business sense — save energy, save money, protect the environment and the bottom line. Now, if companies wish to offer proof of their energy-efficiency efforts to investors, the media or a concerned public, they can turn to IBM Corp. for earned energy credits (EECs), or “white tags.” IBM — in partnership with Neuwing Energy Ventures, a New York-based marketer of EECs — is launching a program offering consulting services and equipment to help customers reduce energy consumption in data centers. Customers who achieve energy savings will receive proof — a certificate for every 1 megawatt-hour saved. According to Rich Lechner, IBM’s vice president of IT optimization, “These certificates provide a verifiable, third-party mechanism to measure and validate energy savings.” These energy savings are, increasingly, an economic necessity for IBM customers. An industry research firm, IDC, recently found that data centers — which can consume 15 times the amount of power as a typical office building — spend approximately $0.50 on energy for every dollar spent on hardware, a cost rising about 50% annually.

• Read background
• Read more: “U.S. Needs An Energy Efficiency Trading System, Says Author” (e-Newswire, 2/21/07)
• Read more: “Tradable Energy Efficiency Credits Coming to U.S.” (e-Newswire, 5/17/06)
• Just how much electricity do data centers consume in the U.S. each year?