Last week the Energy Circle blog featured a fantastic guest post from Nancy Baron describing her and her husband's different strategies for improving the energy efficiency of their home in Vermont. We also reiterated a call made by ReCharge America for Americans to give back - to the community, to the country, to their progeny and to themselves - by spending a couple hours making energy efficiency improvements on Martin Luther King, Jr. Service Day (yes, that's today).
It was an exciting week in the home energy management field, with Apple and NASA both announcing that they'll be joining the monitoring/management fold alongside Google, Intel, Microsoft and the dozens of start-ups that have the potential to turn what was recently a fringe-geek-past-time into a household norm. While NASA's energy management system is geared toward offices and commercial buildings, Apple's energy management technology looks like it will manage electricity consumption of computers, iPods, phones and printers. The discovery of the Apple patent application, in our view, has been wildly misinterpreted by those who can't resist a showdown with Google. Our view--which is admittedly just as speculative as all the others, is that they're focused on managing their products and now on whole house monitoring. That said, user experience is something the energy efficiency space needs desperately, and we're sure Apple's presence in the category will prod the rest of the field to improve design and usability.
California adopted the country's first mandatory statewide green building code on Tuesday. The Calgreen program, which will require new buildings to reduce water consumption by 20% and send 50% of construction waste to the recycling center rather than the landfill, among other measures, will help the state cut its greenhouse gas emissions 33% by 2020, according to the New York Times. All well and good -- but what about existing buildings?
Energy efficiency said two good-byes this past week. The first was to Arthur Rosenfeld, who left his post as California's Energy Commissioner at 83. The nuclear physicist is credited with making California a world leader in energy efficiency, thanks to his efforts to improve building codes, promote utility de-coupling and encourage development of more energy efficient appliances. The LA Times last week featured a great overview of Rosenfeld's career. The second goodbye was to Keith Johnson's Environmental Capital blog in the Wall Street Journal. After two years and more than 2,000 posts, the blog closed its virtual doors with a short post called "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish," which Joe Romm at Climate Progress thinks holds a hidden message...
And for some dreary news from the New York Times, Todd Woody in the Green Inc. blog reported that American fossil fuel use in 2034 will be about the same as it is today, according to a report from engineering and energy consulting firm Black & Veatch. Ouch.
