Contact Us: 3225A Richards Lane Santa Fe, NM 87507 (505) 424 -1112 info@positiveenergysolar.com

Are Your Electric and Gas Bills Too High? We have been receiving many inquiries recently from homeowners seeking to reduce their energy bills with solar energy. Not surprisingly, there is an increased interest in energy issues. Power in some areas is not reliable. Electricity and fuel costs are unstable, and many are experiencing soaring utility bills. Are you looking to renewable energy sources because your electric and gas bills are too high? If you want to reduce your utility bills, the place to start is not to add solar! The best investment you can make is to tighten up your house to reduce its energy demand. As a rule of thumb, every dollar spent on energy efficiency saves three dollars on a solar electric or solar heating system. By making your residence and workplace energy efficient, you use fewer resources to operate your living space. Using less electricity, fuel, and water means lower utility bills. Once you have made your living space energy efficient, investing in renewable technologies, such as solar space heat, domestic hot water, or electricity becomes a reasonable and attractive option. We recommend you start with the book "Home Made Money: How to Save Energy and Dollars in Your Home", written by the staff of Rocky Mountain Institute. This book is available from Rocky Mountain Institute, 970 927-3851, www.rmi.org. We also have copies available for $18 postpaid. Another good resource is the U.S. Department of Energy's educational brochure "Energy Savers: Tips on Saving Energy & Money at Home", available at www.eren.doe.gov/consumerinfo/energy_savers/. Many energy-saving recommendations mentioned here are easy to do and cost little or no money. With rising propane and natural gas prices, solar hot water is one of the best and easiest investments you can make in your home. Heating water with the sun also provides long-term benefits, including a cushion from fuel price increases and possible fuel shortages, and tremendous environmental benefits. Many people have asked us about using photovoltaic (solar electric, or PV) power as a reliable option. A PV power system, however, that can provide abundant electric power for an "off-grid" home--that is, a home designed and built to use an independent electric power system, without connection to utility power--will not run a conventional home. Off-grid homes are designed and built with solar electricity in mind. Lighting, heating, appliances, electronics, and wiring are all selected and installed to make each watt-hour of electricity do as much work as possible. Tasks such as cooking, clothes drying, water heating, space (home) heating are shifted to natural gas, propane, wood, or solar heat. Done well, the result is a home that is bright, warm, and comfortable, while using a tiny fraction of the electricity of a typical "grid-tied" home. Most "off-grid" homeowners live comfortably using about 5% to 15% of the electricity of a conventional home - not by doing without, but by using energy, whether heat or electricity - wisely and efficiently. Conventional homes are seldom designed and built to this level of efficiency. Here's one way to look at the difference: A typical PV power system that can supply about three kilowatt-hours' worth of electricity on a winter's day might cost $15,000. With a small amount of backup generator power during cloudy periods, this is ample to meet the needs of a family. Supplied by the utility company, the bill would be less than ten dollars a month, plus base charge and taxes! Few utility customers have bills this small, because few have done the load shifting and high-efficiency improvements necessary to live comfortably on the amount of electricity supplied by an independent PV power system. While adding PV may not be an option, the good news is that you can do a lot to reduce your electric bills: Lighting - Compact fluorescent lighting uses one-quarter the electric power as incandescent lighting to generate amount the same amount of usable light. Modern compact fluorescent lights have completely eliminated the flicker and harsh colors reminiscent of fluorescent lighting of years past, and can fit in most lamps. Start with the lights that you use the most. Refrigeration - Refrigeration is one of the biggest electrical loads in an efficient home. Older conventional refrigerators consume four to seven times as much electricity as the most energy efficient new models. Efficient electric units have become quite affordable. If your existing refrigerator is more than five years old, replacing it with one of the latest and most efficient models is a smart investment . Clothes washing - Front-loading clothes washers use far less electricity, water, and fuel (to heat the water) than conventional top loaders. In New Mexico, a solar clothes dryer (also known as a clothesline) or a drying rack can be used almost year-round. Phantom loads - These are any devices that consume small amounts of power around the clock, even when supposedly turned off. Nationally, phantom loads make up about six per cent of our entire residential electricity consumption. If all phantom loads were eliminated, California would not have faced rolling blackouts! Any components that include a remote control or have an internal power supply are probably phantom loads: stereos, TVs, VCRs, most computers, AC adapters ("wall cubes") used with many small appliances. What do you do with phantom loads? The only way to eliminate a phantom load is to physically or electrically unplug the device from its outlet. They can be plugged into a switched outlet or a power strip, which is turned off when not in use. Several thousand dollars spent on making these energy saving provisions will save more energy and cut more off your electric and heating bills than the same amount spent on producing your own energy. These steps must be taken before solar energy can power your home anyway, so this is your place to start. Revealing Facts About U.S. Electricity Consumption Per capita annual electricity consumption (kW-hrs) in the U.S. in 1997: 12,1331 Per capita annual electricity consumption (kW-hrs) in the rest of the world in 1997: 1,3812 Percent increase in U.S. electricity consumption from 1990 to 1999: 21.53 Percent decrease in utility funding for energy efficiency from 1993 to 1998: 434 Percent of total U.S. coal consumption used to generate electricity in 1998: 905 Percent of all mercury emissions in the U.S. that came from coal power plants in 1999: 336 Number of lives cut short in the U.S. each year due to pollution from electric utilities: 30,0007 Number of cars necessary to produce the amount of smog-forming pollution that comes from U.S. coal power plants each year: 37,000,0008 Percent of total U.S. energy consumption from renewable sources in 1998: 7.59 Percent of total U.S. renewable energy consumption from hydropower and bio-mass (trash and wood incinerators): 9410 Revenue of the U.S. electric utility industry in 1999: $216,700,000,00011 Approximate combined revenues of all the governments in Africa: $124,000,000,00012 Percent of total electricity used by a standard incandescent lightbulb that is wasted as heat: 9013 Reduction in pounds of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere by replacing one incandescent light bulb with a compact fluorescent bulb, over the bulb's lifetime: 9014 Sources: 1 -- Calculated by dividing U.S. consumption in 1997 by the 1997 U.S. population estimate from the U.S. Census Bureau. 2 -- Calculated by dividing world consumption (minus U.S.) in 1997 by the 1997 world population (minus U.S.) at the U.S. Census Bureau. 3 -- U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration, Electric Power Annual Report, Volume 1. 4 -- American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, State Scorecard on Utility Energy Efficiency Programs 2000. 5 -- U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration, "U.S. Coal Supply and Demand: 1998 Review." 6 -- Clean Air Network, "Mercury Sources Factsheet (pdf)," Aug 1999. 7 -- ABT Associates, "The Particulate-Related Health Benefits of Reducing Power Plant Emissions (pdf)" Oct 1999. 8 -- Environmental Working Group, "Up In Smoke", Jul 1999. 9, 10 -- U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration, " U.S. Renewable Energy Consumption," Mar 2000. 11 -- Edison Electric Institute, "1999 Year in Review (pdf)." 12 -- Central Intelligence Agency, "World Factbook 2000." 13 -- U.S. EPA and U.S. Department of Energy: Energy Star: Compact Fluorescent Lights. 14 -- U.S. EPA, How you can prevent pollution prevention in your home, Aug 1998. - - - - - - - Todd Hettenbach is a law student at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, he was a policy analyst at the Environmental Working Group in Washington, D.C. Source: Grist Magazine, 3/20/01

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