The Gulf Oil Spill vs. Home Energy Retrofits | Hacker News Reader

The Gulf Oil Spill vs. Home Energy Retrofits

energysavvy.com

42 pointsamykring22 comments

This is a bizarre comparison. The problem with the oil spill isn't the lost energy, it's the destruction and the cost of clean-up.

The implication of this article is that retrofitting 75k homes somehow cancels out or equals an oil spill. At best, this amount of retrofitting reduces the risk of an oil spill slightly because one fewer rig would be built.

When a carpenter drops a beam on his foot, we can't say that the architect should have used one fewer beam to prevent the accident. Energy efficiency is great, but by itself, the amount of oil lost in the oil spill isn't really relevant to any cost-benefit analysis.

You are right that it's not an apples/apples comparison regarding environmental damage, destruction, loss of life, etc... No question.

The comparison isn't really trying to do that though. I think the point is to compare "oil spill economics" with energy efficiency economics.

That we have the rig in the first place is the issue...

You miss the point of the article. The article isn't saying that retrofitting 75,000 homes would "cancel out" the spill. The article is saying that the that would have been produced by that well could be saved by retrofitting 75,000 homes. I.e., it wouldn't have been necessary to drill that well if we had retrofitted 75,000 homes instead. Which is also a shaky argument, because proponents of oil would argue that extra oil would help to bring down the overall costs of energy, so we should drill even if we don't strictly "need" to. But I agree with the authors that investments in increased energy efficiency would be preferable to investments in oil drilling.

It's even shakier than that because what does the amount of energy currently spilled have to do with anything? Presumably they have planned to extract several orders of magnitude more oil from this well than what has spilled.

All this comparison did for me was emphasize how TINY the amount of oil is that has been spilled vs. overall US consumption. Googling around indicates that US oil consumption is on the order of 20MM BBL/Day, so the 60K BBL/Day spewing into the gulf is about .3% of oil used per day. Shocking to think about.

With the oil spilled in the Gulf, the US could be powered for approximately 4 minutes.

but how much oil will be needed to collect the oil that was spilled in the Gulf?

Don't forget, you're not off the hook if your home is heated with natural gas or electricity. This post makes the great point that energy is energy... No matter what it's made from (at least among the fossil fuels). The less coal and gas we use, the lower the demand for oil there will be.

I think you wanted to say "the more coal, and, preferably gas, nuclear, solar, wind and geothermal we use, the lower the demand for oil there will be"?

It doen't seem like energy effeciency and the oil spill have anything to do with each other. It just seems as if the global warming crowd are trying to use it to advance an agenda. The fact is you can look around your house and come to find out that most of the stuff you use is affected by oil..not just the energy. The problem is: this article is right to a point, we didn't need to drill that far off the coast. There is oil on land and in shallower water but the "environmentally friendly" people deemed it necessary that in order to get the oil we need and still be more energy independent, we must take more risk and drill in deep water. For people who like statistics, you should keep digging for more articles that deal with how much oil per water is actually there and how much the people in the gulf coast depend on the jobs that are directly effected by the oil companies.

What is really cool is that the $10k can often reduce a home's POWER demand by 30%.

Pricing varies, but this gets to around $0.12-$0.5/kW. BUT. That's kW not kWH (e.g power, not energy). So the power demand reduction translates to energy savings for the lifetime of the building or systems in it..

So essentially, my little corner of Seattle is wasting the equivalent of a gulf oil spill EVERY YEAR!. Ugh. At least there's no damage to the environment from our waste... oh wait... :(

Yes, that's one of the disturbing things about the oil industry. The oil companies have done their best to make sure usage of oil is as inefficient as possible, since that is in their medium-term economic interest... They go to tremendous lengths and expend (and destroy) significant resources to extract oil, and then they are actually hoping we'll waste a major portion of it.

It always confuses me when the energy company promotes energy efficiency. It seems like economic incentives exist for both promoting efficiency, reducing it, and greenwashing (doing one while promoting the other). It would be really interesting for someone to do an economic analysis and figure out what the bottom line is for the oil companies with regards to energy efficiency.

Ha. How would consultants make their money if this was easier to figure out?

It's natural for any smart person to ask "Why would someone who sells energy want to drive energy efficiency?."

The short version is utility spending on energy efficiency is largely driven by 2 key factors - one is regulation and the other is capital deferral.

On the regulation side, it's 31 flavors... E.g. you have decoupling, renewable portfolio standards which have efficiency components, efficiency portfolio standards, mandates to target all cost effective savings (e.g. WA), etc... Some flavor of this applies to about 35 of the 50 states.

On the capital deferral side, it's more about a utility getting more rate payers on the same capital assets. Turns out it's not easy to permit a new coal based power plant. So more users on existing plant may mean less revenue but more profit depending on the circumstances. In some markets (e.g. FL) the utility commission lets the utility charge consumers for conservation programs. So in these case, the utility has effectively marginal CGS/OPEX on a program which drives up profitability.

What's the market value of all that oil, or the impact to the market the immediate shut down of new oil exploration could incure? There has to be a reason ecomonically that this hasn't been solved naturally already - otherwise it's a no brainer. Maybe the coming rise in oil prices will push more attention to alternative energy and energy efficiencies like 2 years ago.

According to your math, homes in the US waste the energy equivalent of over 1,300 gulf oil spills every year. Ouch...

And for bonus points, although I haven't verified, he's probably measuring total energy content of that oil, not the amount we can successfully harness using mechanical means.

Yep - fun with math! Gallons of oil to barrels of oil to MMBTU's per barrel to MMBTU's per house per year (source energy vs. site energy). We totally geeked out on this. Minus points though for skipping the energy content in the natural gas that's leaking out of the well (apparently it's half and half). But our algebra skills reached a limit at some point once we felt like the point was made...

If nothing else, this article does a good job of drawing attention to enhancing home energy efficiency which is something we can all DO something about unlike closing loopholes in permitting processes for oil wells. It also made us think. Thanks, EnergySavvy!

Amazing how much energy and resources we can save just by living our lives more efficiently.

very timely! the one positive that can come out of this mess is awareness of what we can improve and how bad the direction we are headed is. hopefully we'll take the hint before it's too late...

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