If I Were the Energy King: Buildings

It is very hard to implement in parallel . Each item ia an initiative and needs centeral entity to creat awareness , assigne the viability ( technically , economically and financially)  and then propose implementation options .

It looks as " I have a dream " .

The main barriers will be the customers affordability .

Doug, all of your ideas seem reasonable to me, but I will make a general observation.

Among all of your suggestions there's somewhat of an "energy consumption is bad" undertone. It's a leftover of the 1974 OPEC oil embargo, when we were all convinced we must use less energy. But is energy consumption really bad, or the environmental impacts of generating it?

I grew up near Chicago, home of the Manhattan Project, FERMILAB, and Argonne National Laboratory. In primary school we were taught nuclear energy is the way of the future, that energy efficiency will be almost irrelevant, that we'd have so much we wouldn't know what to do with it. I learned all the waste from an individual's lifetime of nuclear energy consumption would fit inside an empty Coke can, that electricity would be "too cheap to meter". 

As time went on I realized that was the problem with nuclear energy. If energy was too cheap to meter, it wouldn't be profitable. And in an economy driven by consumption, that's bad. Nuclear energy is simply too efficient and economical. It takes so little fuel to make so much energy, that it shoots itself in the foot.

IMO, no matter what imrpovements you make to home or appliance efficiencies, or building codes, as long as humanity's primary driver is consumption we're doomed.

Ultimately, I don't believe we are - I believe if we take the environmental impacts out of energy we can use as much of it as we like, that consumption of energy isn't a problem, and that's why I'm a nuclear energy advocate. But I'll tell you: fighting against consumption of oil, and cars, and solar panels, and wind turbines, and of other unnecessary material things and their manufacture, and all of those environmental impacts, that's a fight and will always be. Every step of the way.

Doug, I love this post and am looking forward to the follow-up discussions that occur from it.  I hope the community will join it - I would love to hear what everyone thinks.  Here are my two cents on a few of them:

1) I would require two kilowatts of solar on every residential unit no matter how old. 

My Comment - what about the issue with what goes into making solar panels and their disposal when they retire.  I am all for solar panels if we can find a way to recycle and minimize the waste at the end of their life cycle.   I would be curious to hear from utilities how this would help them or not? 

2) Require an energy efficiency standard building code that would at least double the requirements for a high-performance building today and require retrofit of all buildings to that code before they could be sold. The code would cover residential, commercial, and industrial buildings with any form of heating or cooling, including protected historic buildings. 

My Comment -  who is going to regulate this? Some buildings can't even keep up with their structural issues - the Florida Condo building that just collapsed is a great example.  How are we going to make sure they keep up with EE programs too.  I do like the idea as commercial buildings are big consumers of energy, and the more efficient we make them, the less demand on the grid. 

3. I would require that manufacturers remove their appliance models in the lowest decile of energy efficiency from the market every 2 years.

My Comment - this seems like it would be tougher to enforce and could have an impact on their profits.  If they constantly have to put money into R&D, would this cause them to raise their rates on new products? 

4. I would create an appliance-replacement program to encourage consumers and businesses to periodically swap their low-efficiency appliances for high-efficiency appliances.

My Comment - The key here is the swap for sure.  I was just discussing this the other night with my family. Many people who have taken advantage of a new EE refrigerators, moved their old non-efficient ones in their garage - defeating the purpose. 

I don't think energy efficiency for buildings can be fully addressed by measures that focus just on individual buildings and their appliances. Thermal buffering and diurnal load shifting associated with heating and cooling are best addressed at a district level. I.e., district heating and cooling, or district thermal ballasting for heat pumping within individual buildings. That means taking advantage of day-night temperature swings for high and low thermal storage. In arid climates, summer daylight cooling needs can often be satisfied by nothing more than circulation of cool fluid accumulated overnight. Likewise, winter heating can be satisfied by circulation of warm fluid accumulated during the day. Depending on local climate and time of year, diurnal buffering may need to be augmented by heat pumping. But when augmentation by heat pumping is needed, at least the coefficient of performance (COP) will be high.

In humid climates, diurnal temperature cycling is weak; it will almost always be necessary to rely on heat pumping to at least some degree. But district thermal ballasting can still give all buildings with a district the COP benefits of geothermal heat pumps at much less cost than what building owners would otherwise have to spend on separate implementations for each building.

IOW, efficiency standards need to address utility districts, not just individual buildings.

"Show me the money." 

https://www.buildinggreen.com/feature/challenge-existing-homes-retrofitting-dramatic-energy-savings

"The cost of such retrofits is an impediment—running tens of thousands of dollars per house. As Bruce Harley, technical director for Conservation Services Group, told EBN, “I’d be hard-pressed to find a house where you could do [a major energy retrofit] for less than $50,000.” Other experts EBN spoke with, including builder John Abrams, agree. Using the estimate of $50,000 per retrofit, achieving the near-term 2030 Challenge of retrofitting 1.5 million homes per year in the U.S. would cost $75 billion per year.

There are a number of good and interesting thoughts buried among Doug's mandates, however each comes with both positive and negative impacts.  Start with the 2kW residential solar mandate.  

1.  Who pays for the solar - the customer, utility or society?  There are means to address all three candidates, however every mandated implementation always, always comes at higher cost and with more inefficiency than a market-based implementation.

2.  What about the environmental impacts?  Mining, manufacturing, installing and maintaining solar cells have real environmental costs.  Expanding solar panel implementation well beyond today's saturation will almost certainly come with rapidly escalating environmental costs.

3.  What about operational impacts?  If you assume compliance with the 2kW suggested standard, what you wind up with is very low demand during the 10am-4pm time frame, followed by rapid escalation of demand from late afternoon until early evening.  There will also be severe demand spikes due to intermittent cloud cover and those days when the sun doesn't shine.  Who will provide the rapid response generating resources to respond accordingly?

I believe the solution to each of these issues is found in a transition strategy that systematically targets each of the market segments and each of the alternative generation/conservation technologies over a 10-20+ year time frame.  Transition accomodates new technology development, the use of market-based incentives, and changing environmental (not just climate) situations.