David W. Hafemeister

Defining a standard metric for electricity savings

The growing investment by governments and electric utilities in energy efficiency programs highlights the need for simple tools to help assess and explain the size of the potential resource. One technique that is commonly used in this effort is to characterize electricity savings in terms of avoided power plants, because it is easier for people to visualize a power plant than it is to understand an abstraction such as billions of kilowatt-hours. Unfortunately, there is no standardization around the characteristics of such power plants. In this letter we define parameters for a standard avoided power plant that have physical meaning and intuitive plausibility, for use in back-of-the-envelope calculations. For the prototypical plant this article settles on a 500 MW existing coal plant operating at a 70% capacity factor with 7% T&D losses. Displacing such a plant for one year would save 3 billion kWh/year at the meter and reduce emissions by 3 million metric tons of CO2 per year. The proposed name for this metric is the Rosenfeld, in keeping with the tradition among scientists of naming units in honor of the person most responsible for the discovery and widespread adoption of the underlying scientific principle in question—Dr Arthur H Rosenfeld.

Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air

The fact of global climate change is, famously, contested but, as the scientific evidence has accumulated, a broad consensus has emerged that warming of the earth is indeed happening and that this is anthropogenic. Now the main debate (we will ignore here the minority of naysayers) has moved from ‘whether’ (it is happening) to ‘what’ (to do about it); this debate is not going well, if the measure of success is practical actions, globally agreed (or even agreed on a nation-by-nation basis), to reduce the rate of emissions of greenhouse gases with the aim, ultimately, of reducing the actual amount of such gases in the atmosphere.This article reviews Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air by David J.C. MacKay . 372 pp. , 2009. Price:

Energy in Buildings

33.00(paper) ISBN 978-0-9544529-3-3.

Progress in CTBT Monitoring Since its 1999 Senate Defeat

In 2012, residential buildings consumed 20.4 quads and commercial buildings consumed 17.7 quads, or a total of 40 % of national energy consumption is expended with buildings. The U.S. spends about

Resource Letter BELFEF‐1: Biological effects of low‐frequency electromagnetic fields

1 trillion a year for energy, construction, renovation and operation for buildings. Reducing this fraction could significantly stabilize national security, improve the environment and enhance the national economy. Buildings dominate the use of electricity at 28 quads/year, which is 73 % of US electricity consumption of 39 quads/year. Buildings built prior to the oil embargo of 1973–1974 were often an energy disaster, built without insulation, wasting winter heat and summer air conditioning alike. New buildings now consume one-half their former level per square feet because energy intensity of big buildings dropped from 270,000 to 100,000 Btu/ft2-year of primary energy. But these gains are being countered by homes that grew from an average of 1,400 ft2 in 1970 to today’s 2,225 ft2. This increase is caused with more bathrooms and other design extras. US home ownership is about 66 %, which means that in 1/3 of residences the landlord makes the energy decisions while the renter pays the bills.

Space Reactor Arms Control: Overview

Progress in monitoring the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) is examined, beginning with the 2002 National Academy of Sciences CTBT study, followed by recent findings on regional seismology, array-monitoring, correlation-detection, seismic modeling, and non-seismic technologies. The NAS-CTBT study concluded that the fully completed International Monitoring System (IMS) will reliably detect and identify underground nuclear explosions with a threshold of 0.1 kt in hard rock, if conducted anywhere in Europe, Asia, North Africa, and North America. In some locations the threshold is 0.01 kt or lower, using arrays or regional seismic stations, but with an increase in background events. As an example, the 0.6-kiloton North Korean test of October 9, 2006 was promptly detected by seismometers in Australia, Europe, North America, and Asia. The P/S ratio between 1–15 Hz clearly showed that the event was an explosion and not an earthquake. The advances in seismic monitoring, described in this article, strengthen the conclusions of the NAS study. Interferometric synthetic aperture radar can, in some cases, identify and locate 1-kt tests at 500 m depth by measuring subsidence to 2–5 mm. InSAR can discriminate between earthquakes and explosions from the subsidence pattern. InSAR will not give a rapid response, but InSAR can locate nuclear tests to within 100 meters, excellent for on-site inspections. Cooperative monitoring can detect yields of 10 kg next to a test site and less than a gram when two meters from experiments without revealing nuclear secrets.

Reflections on the GAO report on the nuclear triad

This Resource Letter provides a guide to the literature on the interaction of extremely low‐frequency electromagnetic field (ELF/EMF) interactions with biological matter, and on the possibility that such interactions could have a harmful effect on human health. Journal articles and books are cited for the following topics: ELF/EMF theoretical interactions with biological cells, organs and organisms, magnetic dipole interactions, sensing by animals, biomedical–biophysical experiments, epidemiology, and litigation–mitigation risk issues.

Energy conservation in large buildings

Unshielded nuclear reactors provide the lightest and most survivable long-lived sources of electric power available to support military satellites. Restricting their use now, before a new generation of larger space reactors is tested and deployed by the US and USSR, could help prevent an arms race in space. Space nuclear power systems have been used by the United States and the Soviet Union since the 1960s. The Soviet Union has used orbiting nuclear reactors to power more than 30 radar ocean reconnaissance satellites (RORSATs). Two RORSATs have accidentally re-entered and released their radioactivity into the environment, and a third, Cosmos 1900, narrowly avoided a similar fate. The United States is developing much more powerful space reactors, of which the SP-100 is farthest along, primarily to power satellite components of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). A working group associated with the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) and the Committee of Soviet Scientists for Peace and Against the Nuclear Threat (CSS) has been studying a proposed ban on orbiting reactors. A proposal by the FAS/CSS group that includes such a ban is attached in the appendix to the Overview. The first five papers in this section, all by members of the working group, summarize the technological and historical background to nuclear power in space and show that restrictions on orbiting reactors are verifiable. The final paper, by Rosen and Schnyer of NASA, surveys the civilian uses of nuclear power in space. The overview is a nontechnical introduction to the issues of space reactor arms control, including the proposed ban on orbiting reactors.

Infrared monitoring of nuclear power in space

A report of the U.S. General Accounting Office on the nuclear triad revealed that vulnerabilities of the U.S. triad were vastly over‐stated, that the performance of new projected strategic systems were over‐estimated, and that the performance of existing U.S. strategic systems was under‐estimated. These exaggerations enhanced the psychological (Freud) aspects of the Cold War and compromised logic (Newton).

Advances in verification technology

As energy prices rise, newly energy aware designers use better tools and technology to create energy efficient buildings. Thus the U.S. office stock (average age 20 years) uses 250 kBTU/ft2 of resource energy, but the guzzler of 1972 uses 500 (up×2), and the 1986 ASHRAE standards call for 100–125 (less than 25% of their 1972 ancestors). Surprisingly, the first real cost of these efficient buildings has not risen since 1972. Scaling laws are used to calculate heat gains and losses of buildings to obtain the ΔT(free) which can be as large as 15–30 °C (30–60 °F) for large buildings. The net thermal demand and thermal time constants are determined for the Swedish Thermodeck buildings which need essentially no heat in the winter and no chillers in summer. The BECA and other data bases for large buildings are discussed. Off‐peak cooling for large buildings is analyzed in terms of saving peak‐electrical power. By downsizing chillers and using cheaper, off‐peak power, cost‐effective thermal storage in new commerc...