Energy Use

In order to begin to establish and maintain a sustainable community in the Lake Tahoe area, we need to have some idea what kinds of energy we use, what we use it for, where we use it, and how this varies throughout the year.  Once we have this kind of information we can begin to develop ideas, and eventually plans, to transition to a more sustainable community that has a robust, reliable set of energy supplies.

What are the main sources of energy in use in the Tahoe area today (i.e., the year 2013)?  What are they used for?  By necessity, only qualitative information can be presented.  Getting quantitative information (how much energy used?  where does it come from? where is it used?  what for? by whom? what times of year? what does it cost?)

• Electricity provides energy for lighting, powering computers, telephones, TVs, appliances, power tools, etc.  These are all reasonable uses of electricity, when electricity is readily available, affordable, and environmentally safe.   There is simply no viable alternative for powering light bulbs and consumer electronics.   Electricity may also used, primarily in residences, for cooking and space heating.   This may have made economic sense when electricity was much less expensive and people were less concerned about burning fossil fuels, especially coal.  But today, we need to try to absolutely minimize the use of electricity for cooking and heating.  Anyone who replaces an electric stove, kitchen range, or installed electric home heating system should try to switch to gas powered units.  Not only will the energy costs go down, but the pollution generated through burning gas will be substantially less that was is generated when creating a comparable amount of electricity.  In other words, it's always more efficient to create heat locally than to burn fuels remotely, generate electricity, transport it to a home, and then turn it back into heat.
  
  NV Energy, the Nevada state electricity provider, appears to be moving away from coal plants and more towards the use of natural gas to produce electricity.  Electricity in the Las Vegas area is also generated from water power at dams (e.g., Hoover Dam).
• Natural gas for home heating and cooking - A small number of Tahoe residents may be lucky enough to live in fully passive homes, heated almost entirely by the sun.  An even smaller number may benefit from the occasional use of a solar over or food dryer.  But for the vast majority of Tahoe residential and commercial buildings, natural gas provides the source of space heating and cooking (unless electric stoves or range tops are used).
  
  It's become quite common for environmentalists, energy researchers and pretty much anyone else who knows even the tiniest bit about energy supplies to point out that natural gas produces less greenhouse gases (primarily CO2) when burned than an energy-equivalent amount of coal or liquid fuels.  While technically true, it ignores the facts that a) natural gas still produces substantial amounts of greenhouse gases, and b) modern gas extraction via fracking allows significant amounts of natural gas, primarily methane, to leak into the atmosphere.  Methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2.  So, for the immediate future and probably at least the next couple decades, Tahoe homes and businesses will need to continue using modest amounts of natural gas for heating and cooking, as no safe and affordable alternative exists right now.  But for the longer term, we cannot assume that supplies of natural gas will remain available, especially at prices we are prepared to pay.
• Wood fuels have been in use for millennia and continue to this day.  Residential use of wood and wood pellets can provide heating and, if the dwellers have a wood powered stove, then cooking power as well.  In theory, wood used for heating and cooking is carbon neutral, meaning it does not add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere (which are a prime cause of global climate change).  In practice, all wood delivered to residences is transported there by fossil fuel powered vehicles, so there is a modest pollution contribution.  The bigger issue is this:  Where does this wood come from, i.e., how far from the Tahoe region, and how much can truly be considered locally derived?  Also: How sustainably are the forests that provide this wood managed?
  
  Since almost all the lands in the Tahoe area are included in either national or state parks, it's going to be impossible to rely on the region's trees for more than a very small amount of the energy that Tahoe dwellers consume.  And to state the obvious: We don't want to do anything absolutely not a matter of survival to damage the natural beauty and biological sustainability of the entire Tahoe Basin.
• Solar, wind, geothermal, passive architecture.   Passive architecture is the design of buildings so that they receive and capture energy from their surroundings, in order to minimize the need for additional energy inputs.    Sometimes passive buildings even capture water, to reduce the need for municipal supplies.  Passive architecture is one of the keys for civilized survival in the Tahoe area, and a few houses aspire to being passive today.  Designing a passive house requires the use of lots of south facing glass to capture sunlight, plus a means to both store that energy as heat and prevent it from escaping when night time temperatures drop.  The problem today is that almost no existing houses and other buildings in the Tahoe area have been designed as passive structures.  A problem to be addressed is thus: To what extent can existing buildings, designed as "normal" fossil fuel consuming structures, be re-architected, re-engineered, to use substantially less energy?
  
  Solar residential and commercial energy use first and foremost requires direct access to unblocked sunshine at least during the hours of 9 AM - 3 PM.  Solar energy may be used to heat water (relatively inexpensive) and generate electricity (more expensive, but prices are dropping, subsidies may be available, and some new businesses are willing to pay all upfront installation and maintenance costs if the owner agrees to purchase all the electricity).  The major problems in the Tahoe area are: Many buildings are at least partially surrounded by large trees, thus do not have good solar access; a number of dwellings are condominiums which would not allow the construction of on-site solar systems; Costs - many home and commercial building owners do not have the cash and/or the incentives to install supplementary solar systems.  And this: there are no inexpensive ways to store electricity; retrofitting solar heating often involves substantial building modifications, not the  least of which is adding a lot of insulation to the walls and upgrading windows.
  
  The Tahoe area has some highly intermittent wind resources, but much of these are in the upper mountain areas, in forest service lands.  Thus producing local wind generated electricity seems unlikely.
  
  Geothermal energy (energy from the earth) may be available, but amounts and costs have not been well studied.

What can we do "right now"?   Conserving energy - not consuming any more than the minimum required - is almost always the least expensive approach.   This means that owners of residential homes and commercial buildings who want to both save energy and take a small step towards making the Tahoe region more sustainable should begin to:

• Upgrade/replace windows to well insulated double or triple pane ones.  
• Seal all cracks around seams and other places cold air may leak in, including fireplace flues
• Make sure the underfloor and attic insulation is substantial.  NV Energy can provide guidelines as to minimal levels you should have.
• Replace electric stoves and ranges with gas-powered ones
• Replace all incandescent lights that are one more than an hour per day with compact fluorescent or LED bulbs.
• Use Energy Star appliances
• Keep winter thermostat setting as low as you can tolerate.  Programmable thermostats can help.
• If you have a south facing roof with good sunlight exposure, consider adding first solar water heating and second solar electric panels
• A wood burning stove or fireplace insert may make sense, depending on costs of wood and transport distance.

Longer term, we need to recognize that the great majority of buildings, even if substantially retrofitted for saving energy, will still need very significant amounts of fossil fuel inputs in order to remain inhabitable year round.  How much of this fuel can be replaced with wood?  Are any other local fuel sources possible?  What about refrigerators: How can we minimize the need to electric powered food cooling?   Since we'll need many things, including energy, that are not produced locally, we will need to develop an economy that allows local communities to afford to import energy supplies and much more.  I plan to to explore this much more in future posts.