The cover story for this month’s March issue of National Geographic, 2009 shows an infrared image of an older house in Connecticut, reproduced below. The article follows three families who have created a friendly neighborhood pact to track and reduce their CO2 emissions by cutting back on electrical use, car driving, and performing home audits. The story is full of interesting images including the science barge, an organic floating farm on the Hudson River in New York that uses solar panels to generate electricity, a General Electric test site for the GEnx-2B development engine (meant to produce 15% less CO2 than previous airplane engines), and many more infrared shots.
The article is also full of factoids and charts that are sure to make any home owner reconsider their daily impact on the environment, facts like “69% of the electricity produced for homes is lost in transit and heat” that’s 2.2 kilowatt-hours for every 1 that is used. There are some interesting solutions posed in the article and anecdotal short stories from around the country. In one such story the building of a 730-megawatt power plant in Austin Texas was avoided through the use of rebates and energy saving appliance incentives in the community, the same amount of electricity was simply “saved” proactively.
Peter Miller, the senior editor at National Geographic who wrote the story, does a great job covering the different lifestyles that readers might have, from farmers to city dwellers, and delivers a story that is empowering and fun to read all at the same time. For example, did you know that 85% of the energy produced from gasoline or diesel in most cars is lost in the form of heat?.
Unfortunately, most of the experts I know who work in the field of energy have dismissed many of the statistics in the article. Specifically, there is one statistic commenting on the reduction in power generation of coal plants that are converted to cleaner technology. While there may be a small impact, it is not nearly as drastic as the National Geographic article suggests. It is estimated by one expert whom I work with, that the use of scrubbers and secondary power generation techniques would increase electricity cost by $0.25 which would move us from $0.04 per KWH to $0.05 which is not much, especially if there were a carbon tax. Furthermore, a carbon tax could provide an incentive to capture and store CO2 from coal fire plants which can be resold to oil developers – CO2 can be pumped into the ground to bring up Oil in what is called “Advanced Oil Recovery”. Similar techniques can be used to force out Ethane from deep coal mines, the CO2 will bind with the coal and push out Ethane at a rate of 1:3.
All things considered, the National Geographic article was stimulating and sure to draw attention to energy and environmental concerns nation wide.
