My First Week of Making Solar Electricity
In December 2025, we got a photovoltaic (PV) array installed on our roof. I was going to wait longer, but the 30 percent solar tax credit was going away at the end of 2025. We got in just under the…
energy security
Electricity Demand and the Duck Curve
You may think there's no more boring topic than electric utilities. Power plants. Transmission lines. Engineers with flat top haircuts and pocket protectors full of pens in their white short-sleeved shirts. Well, let me say two words that might help…
4 Ways to Define Net Zero Energy Use in Buildings
ASHRAE† is meeting in Denver this week, and my friend Robert Bean, the mastermind behind the Healthy Heating website, tweeted the other day that they're going on a tour of NREL's new net zero energy building. I'd love to go—both…
Why the IEA’s 2012 World Energy Outlook Could Be Wrong
"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." The Danish physicist Niels Bohr first said this, and it's true. Of course, we all like to try anyway, and I've done so myself with my articles on peak oil and the…
ACEEE’s 2012 State Energy Efficiency Scorecard Has Your Number
ACEEE's 2012 State Energy Efficiency Scorecard came out last week, and if you haven't seen it yet, download it now and have a look. Massachusetts, which stole the top spot from California last year, held onto the title of the…
US Energy Flows — Inputs and Outputs 1995 to 2010
I like to talk about the big picture of energy occasionally here. I also love data! Today, I'm not going to do a whole lot of talking at all. I mainly want to show you what I consider to be…
Two More Scary Indicators of the Peak Oil Problem
It's been a while since my last post on the big picture of energy, so today I present to you two more metrics that show we have a serious problem. Peak oil, as I've written here before, brings about a…
The ACI Home Energy Leadership Summit – Big Thinking for Our Industry
The ACI Home Energy Leadership Summit is an event sorely needed in our industry. Most of us focus almost entirely on understanding building science and figuring out the best home energy improvement measures or assessment techniques, but stepping back and…
An Elderly Couple in Maine Offers to Trade Their Car for Fuel Oil
On Friday, the New York Times published an article about the Hartfords, an elderly couple in Dixfield, Maine who couldn't afford to pay for fuel oil for their leaky, inefficient home. I heard about it through social media from a…
The Architecture 2030 Challenge and US EIA Projections
Buildings use a lot of energy. We spend the majority of our time inside them, controlling the temperature, using computers, charging cell phones, keeping our food cold, getting our food hot, taking hot showers...all those things we do in our…