The Green ROI

It seems to me that one of the major stumbling blocks on the road to becoming green at the residential or small business level, be it with some type of power generation implementation such as solar panels or a wind generator, or a smaller scale energy conservation measure like an A/C compressor unit replacement, ultimately comes down to the industry's inability to exactly prove what your return on investment (ROI) will be.

Let's face it, we're all capitalists here in the U.S. While many of us want to be "green", that doesn't necessarily mean we will totally abandon our capitalist roots and blindly plunk down the hard cash just because somebody says we should and oh by the way, this will make you "green"!

This all kind of reminds me of the Beatles song, Revolution...

"You say you've got a real solution
Well, you know
We'd all love to see the plan
You ask me for a contribution
Well, you know
We're all doing what we can"

To paraphrase this song with my own interpretation...

"We all want to change the world,
But ya gotta give us more than just a feel good speech!"

And it's to that end that my company, Wise Energy Online, has sought to provide a solution -- an energy monitoring application that can help you really nail down what you're spending now on a particular appliance, as well as the capability to keep track of your ongoing electricity cost savings once your green project has been completed.

Let's say you suspect that your 10 year old water heater is using more power than it should. You could probably wait and get another 5 years of service out of it, but if you swapped it out now for an Energy Star rated unit, you could also save some money on your electricity bill. How can you possibly make this type of decision without some cold, hard numbers? The answer is that you really can't.

But with our Wise Energy Online Monitoring Solution installed, you can find out exactly what that water heater is costing you each month. This and most of your other major appliances too, but let's continue on with the story. So you find out that you don't use the water heater as much as you thought and in fact it's only costing you about $10 a month, so while saving about 50% in electricity on this would be nice, it really doesn't make economic sense at this point and can wait until it really needs to be swapped out due to age. But boy, look at what you're spending on your air conditioning! Perhaps that would be the better area to concentrate on at this point.

That's how it should work! This is how you can assure yourself that the "Green ROI" is there and once this fact is confirmed, most any capitalist worth his/her salt would run, not walk, to the nearest hardware store or contractor to get things going as soon as possible.

If you're seriously considering any type of green project, you really should make sure you have the cold, hard numbers before charging off with your green superman cape on, with the intent of saving the world. An energy monitoring application could help ensure that you get some of that "Green ROI" in addition to the nice warm fuzzy feeling you get when you help change the world.

The American Lifestyle

I read an article the other day that basically said that the average American household uses twice as much electricity as the same household in Europe. While that statement isn't a complete surprise, it does beg quite a few questions as to why and more importantly, what can be done about it.

Sure, we Americans lead a different lifestyle; more reliant on technology, electric appliances and gadgets, we stock food in freezers as opposed to food shopping every day, and I'd wager we've got a lot more air conditioned homes per capita than any other country by a very large margin. So is that bad? I mean, by and large, we also support that habit; on average we work more, make more money, and work more efficiently (at least in theory).

So where's the problem?

Well actually I'm thinking there's two problems here. First and foremost is the cost... what happens when electricity isn't as cheap as it currently is? And secondly, what level of waste is embedded within the usage incurred by our American lifestyle?

I have to think that unless someone finally invents a perpetual motion machine or we actually get to the level of having a cheap nuclear fusion power source, the cost for electricity will steadily increase over the next couple of decades. And possibly by leaps and bounds if we keep spilling crude oil all over the place!

So I guess what I'm saying is... Enjoy that American lifestyle while you can, because "change is a coming" and if you want to continue on with your current way of living, it's going to cost ya!

Wise Energy Thinking - The Starting Point

Not being a naturally loquacious person, blogging has always been a task that I've been inclined to avoid. It's not that I don't think blogs have their place as I've certainly enjoyed and profited from reading other's contribution to the blogsphere -- rather it's more a matter of natural talents, or more correctly, lack thereof. Let's face it, if you know you're tone deaf, you don't usually contemplate starting a new career as music teacher.

And there's little doubt that my lack of interest in actually having a blog myself is intricately linked to the lack of a subject matter that intrigues me sufficiently to invest the time and effort. Being a self professed geek and heavily involved in computers, programming and the Internet, I have plenty of opinions on how and why things work as well as lots of experience in a wide variety of computer topics that might actually help a person or two who right now could be out there vainly googling for an arcane fact concerning the setup of OpenBSD's pf firewall or the best way to troubleshoot Internet access problems on a Windoze PC. But, unfortunately for those 2 people, while I have contributed from time to time on a few mailing lists, I never really took up the blogging challenge and therefore, in my mind, never contributed in a meaningful way to the world's knowledge base.

But now I do have a topic. Now the fires are sufficiently stoked that I need to find a way to make sure the world will start to take notice and "Do the right thing". Now I've got a subject that I'm willing to invest the time and effort into. So, in short, I need a blog! Here I am, now finally willing to take the jump and hoping the water will be just fine -- Anyone out there got a life preserver?

So what's the subject I'm so worked up about? Quite simply, it's America's insatiable need for energy. More to the point, it's the consequences of that need: the waste, the cost, and of course the effect on our planet. These are the items that I want to discuss. These are the types solutions that I want to be able to explore. This will be the "official" topic of this blog.

I've started a company called "Wise Energy Online" that creates a rather unique energy monitoring solution for homes and small businesses. So yes, there will be a commercial aspect to some of the postings. But, I'll endeavor to also provide general tips and tricks that I've learned from actually using an energy monitoring system on my own house, solutions that seem to work across the board to reduce your home's energy use and therefore the amount of money you'd spend on your next power bill. But also I'd like to touch on a wide variety of subtopics, from the improbable ROI of installing your own energy generation solution, to the lowly task of discovering "vampire" power use and what the possible payback really is.

So this is the "starting point", from here who knows what will happen or how it will effect the world, if at all. All I can do is try.

Chuck