Last Sunday after meeting, Phil Seybold talked to an audience of 20+ at First Friends Meeting Richmond about sustainability, green building, saving energy and the environment. Click HERE for the mp3. It should play in your browser.
Phil (and the audience) provide a lot of information but a couple of things really stick out: 1) Reducing the energy requirements of your house, i.e. conservation, through the use of compact flourescent light bulbs, effective use of storm windows, and insulation will pay for itself very quickly - on the order of a year. 2) When accompanied by conservation, alternative energy solutions such as solar panels and wind turbines, are much more cost effective than you might think. I have heard a figure of $9/watt installed for solar panels. Looking at our last electricity bill, we used 860 kWh for the month. Divide that by 30 days = 28.6 kWh per day. If the avg. number of peak sun hours is 5 then we would need to harvest 5.7 kW during each hour that sunlight is available. Multiply that times 1.43 to account for system losses** and we come up with 8.2 kW per hour. $9/watt times 1000 watts = $9,000/kW times 8.2Kw = $73,788. A second mortgage! But if we can find ways to reduce our energy use by 2/3rds that figure goes down to $24,571. A new car!
If that is the simple cost of sustainability, and we know it isn’t always simple, then we have a starting place. There is no risk to going down this path. The technology is proven. It is reliable. It makes use of a limitless energy source. There _is_ risk to continue down the path of burning coal to power our homes.
I’ve wanted to upload this for a week now. Thanks to Phil Seybold (Phil, if you have a website send me a link and I’ll add it here), Doug Gwyn and First Friends Meeting Richmond, and the Cope Environmental Center for allowing me to record this. I hope you’ll give it a listen because I think it’s really important to make this a regular conversation.
**Real Goods
[technical details]
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