Thinking about making your home more energy efficient by installing hyper-efficient, long-lasting LED lighting? Not so fast.

Even the CEO of one of the world’s biggest LED makers, North Carolina-based Cree Inc, says homeowners will wait a long time to recoup their investment at today’s prices for LED lights.

“A change in lightbulbs, that’s probably a fairly long payback, we’re probably looking at 7 to 10 years depending on electricity rates,” Cree CEO Chuck Swoboda said in an interview. That’s why Cree is focusing on commercial customers for the time being, he added.

Cree’s LR6 downlight, which customers can install in their ceilings, costs about $100.

For homes and apartments, Swoboda expects the first big push towards LED lighting to come in new construction, once that market recovers.

“It’s not a significant incremental cost to put in effectively lifetime lighting into the project to start with. Obviously the new construction market is not great right now, but I think that’s the place you are likely to see LED lighting pick up first in the home,” he said.

And did Swoboda say “effectively lifetime lighting”? He backed that up by saying the company’s downlight lasts for a whopping 50,000 hours.

“To give you an idea of what that means, you are more likely to have children and send them to college before you’d have to change that bulb,” he said.

Photocredit: Reuters/Claro Cortes IV (Nearly 500,000 Cree LED lights were used to illuminate the exterior of Beijing’s National Aquatics Centre, also known as the Water Cube, shown above in a photo from 2008)

It was a disarmingly simple question but, embarrassingly, I didn’t have a clue when first asked that 18 months ago. Even though I’d have to describe myself as a genuine tightwad when it comes to expenditures, I simply had no idea, strangely enough, about how much money my four-person household was spending on electricity — nor how much carbon dioxide was being produced.

Now, after a year of carefully tracking the daily use of electricity, I’ve discovered a bit about when and where power is being used and, in theory, saved — without much pain. It seemed like a no-brainer and it honestly was not hard to cut our consumption by 1,000 kilowatt hours in 2008 to 5,000 kWh — saving about 200 euros and 500 kg of CO2 in the process. There were only minor sacrifices: rigidly turning off “standby” switches and unused lights, pulling plugs on little-used appliances, putting in energy-efficient lightbulbs, using the washing machine sparingly and the dryer only rarely, and replacing an inefficient dishwasher with a low-energy model.

In the past year, we used as little as 4 kWh on some days (in the summer) and as much as 30 on others (in the winter) — although most days were in the 10-to-17 range. Annoyingly, the house “wasted” about 3 kWh per day when we were away on holiday — largely due to the refrigerator, which I’ll be emptying and turning off next time. The 2008 total of 5,000 kWh (which amounted to an electricity bill of about 1,000 euros) isn’t bad for four people (one rule of thumb I’ve seen is 1,500 kWh per person/year) but I’m convinced that usage could be even less (the benchmark of 1,000 kWh per person/year is considered “thrifty”).

So the goal at home for 2009 is to cut electricity consumption by another 1,000 kWh (saving another 200 euros and 500 kg of CO2) to 4,000 kWh. Having a photovoltaic system on the roof (it produced 3,800 kWh that went into the grid) has helped wake me up to the mathematics and economics of power consumption and the goal of producing 100 percent of the electricity we need is now tantalisingly within reach. (The utility has to pay me 49 cents per kWh for the solar power I “export” into their grid while I have to pay 20 cents per kWh for the electricity I “import”.)

My wife was not exactly thrilled at first at my turning-the-lights-off crusade, which she saw as an unhealthy obsession rather than a good habit. But I was eventually able to win her to the cause. It didn’t hurt to promise her the “windfall” profits from the power savings. Saving another 1,000 kWh in 2009 won’t be as easy, I fear. A new A++ fridge (refrigerators are the real power guzzlers in most households) is at the planning stage and perhaps a new energy-saving washing machine, too. They aren’t cheap but they should pay for themselves through energy savings in the long run — and save a lot of CO2 in the process. Closely tracking the amount of gas for heating and diesel fuel used for the car in 2008 proved to be insightful as well: we cut both by roughly a third in 2008 by simply turning down the thermostat and driving less.

The electricity-saving habit (or obsession) might not be the magic solution to climate change. It also might not be as glamorous as high-tech solutions. Having seen myself how much electricity (and CO2) can be saved with relatively minimal disruption, it’s opened my eyes to how large the savings could be on a more global scale.

So, let me ask you: How much electricity do you use each year? And how much do you think you could save this year?

Every once in a while you run into someone with so much energy that you find yourself wishing you could plug something into them to tap a bit of that excess power. On a dark, cloudy December afternoon, I spoke to Frank Asbeck, the chairman of SolarWorld and dubbed the “Sonnenkoenig” (Sun King) by a leading newspaper in his native Germany for turning an idea (mass use of photovoltaic) into a multi-billion euro corporation with 2,500 employees — in little over a decade.

Asbeck, 49, easily the most entertaining chief executive I’ve met in Germany, lit up the room with a 90-minute surge of ideas, witty comments and untempered optimism about solar power — a delightful respite from the economic doom and gloom of the current era.

But what especially interested me about him was his trip a day earlier to the Vatican, where he donated 2,400 photovoltaic panels worth 1.2 million euros that will produce enough electricity for the equivalent of 100 households (300 Megawatt hours) each year. So I asked: “Did you donate the solar panels to the Vatican because:

A) you’re a good guy
B) it was an advertising gimmick for solar power in general or
C) it was an advertising gimmick for SolarWorld.”

Asbeck answered: “First of all, I am a good person. And, secondly, we’re glad to do advertising in general for solar power because it’s a good thing and, thirdly, we did it as a gesture of thanks for a bit of inspiration I got from Pope John Paul II six years ago.”

Asbeck explained that the original idea to cover the 5,000-square metre roof of the Vatican’s Papal audience hall next to St. Peter’s Cathedral came in 2002 when he presented Pope John Paul with a sample solar cell made from sand (raw silicone) in the course of a general audience. “I showed him a solar cell and mentioned that we were able to produce energy from sand and sun,” Asbeck said, smiling at the fond memory. “And he said to me ‘God can do everything’. That gave me tremendous motivation to think more deeply about this photovoltaic technology and that we could be doing a whole lot more with it than we were. So as a small gesture of gratitude for that inspiration we installed the beautiful solar system.”

It all sounded very sincere from this extraordinarily energetic character. But, in this day and age, I still found myself wondering if his motives were truly genuine or not. What do you think?

Change to an energy-saving lightbulb – create a job?

Energy efficiency efforts in California over the past three decades have created or saved 1.5 million jobs and added $45 billion to payrolls in the state, according to a report from David Roland-Holst of the Center for Energy, Resources and Economic Sustainability at the University of California, Berkeley.

It comes as the Golden State is debating whether plans to radically cut carbon dioxide emissions will be a financial burden for California or spur economic growth in a state that already leads in energy efficiency.

When people save money on utility bills and buying gasoline for cars, it frees up money for buying other things from groceries to appliances to theater tickets, Roland-Holst said.

Money spent locally on hairdressers or at restaurants goes further to spur the economy than spending money on energy, which is less labor-intensive and often sends money out of state and out of the country, said Roland-Holst.

The report, called “Energy Efficiency, Innovation and Job Creation in California,” said that if California improves energy efficiency by 1 percent a year and meets proposed cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, it will create 403,000 jobs by 2020 and increase the state’s gross product by $76 billion.

California aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

Roland-Holst based his findings on household spending on electricity since the 1970s when California got a jump on the rest of the United States setting up efficiency policies, which have cut per capita electricity use in the state 40 percent below the U.S. national average, the report said.

Photo by REUTERS/Luke MacGregor

Can carbon capture and storage (CCS) save the world?

Is this the silver bullet everyone’s been waiting for? Or just pie in the sky? Is capturing and storing carbon dioxide the technology breakthrough to cut greenhouse gas emissions without getting in the way of economic growth and industry’s “addiction” to fossil fuels? Or is it just a “greenwash” — a token gesture by some of the utilities responsible for so much of the world’s CO2 to try to persuade an increasingly green public that the great emitters are doing something to fight climate change?

Those are the questions that were hurled at Vattenfall executives on Tuesday when the Swedish-based utility opened the world’s first CCS plant in a small town south of Berlin called Schwarze Pumpe. The company believes it will be economically feasible before long to capture carbon, liquify it, and store it permanently on a large scale underground. This is only a small pilot plant producing enough power for a town of 20,000. But if it works, Vattenfall plans to build two conventional power plants 10 times larger in Germany and Denmark by 2015 and from 2020 they hope CCS will be a viable option for large-scale industrial use.

Proud as Vattenfall CEO Lars Josefsson and other executives from one of Europe’s largest utilities were at the inauguration of the 30-megawatt lignite-burning plant on Tuesday that cost 70 million euros and removes 95 percent of the CO2 emissions, they were nevertheless pummeled by journalists from across Europe wanting to know about the economics of it (and were told they’re not bad but could be better), whether they have the permits to store the CO2 underground (not yet but expected soon) and whether it was just more “greenwash” (a definite no).

“We take our responsibility seriously,” Josefsson said. “This doesn’t have anything to do with ‘greenwashing’.”

Economists like Nicholas Stern have placed a lot of hope in carbon capture. He told a group of journalists in Berlin last year that with coal so abundant and cheap around the world, it is hard to imagine any solution to climate change without CCS.

But what do the economics of CCS look like? Vattenfall said that CCS will at first cut the efficiency rate from 46 and 43 percent (for hard coal and lignite) by about 10 percentage points — making it roughly 25 percent more expensive to produce the same amount of energy. But they are confident that those efficiency levels would soon be back to their original level before long.

“We aim to show that it’s feasible, that it’s economical,” said Josefsson. “It’s a long-term project. We’ll have to invest many, many billions for the next step. Vattenfall is prepared to invest many billions. We will make electricity clean.”

Vattenfall said the costs of the investment will pay for itself as prices for EU-wide trading in emission rights rise. Tuomo Hatakka, head of the Germany-based Vattenfall Europe unit, said the break-even point is between 30 and 35 euros per tonne — the current price is just under 30 euros but expected to rise.

“It shouldn’t lead to any additional costs,” said Josefsson. “We’re taking the fight against climate change seriously in Europe and we’ve got a market. This is only the start of a long process. There are incentives to solve the problem.”

So is carbon capture a silver bullet — or just ‘greenwash’? I’m not sure it’s the silver bullet, not yet anyhow. But the 70 million euros they spent on Schwarze Pump isn’t chicken feed either. Seeing some tangible steps taken like in Schwarze Pumpe is certainly a better way to spend a day than listening to politicians talking about what needs to be done.

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University  and is a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. ThomsonReuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

On April 16 President Bush gave a speech laying out a new United States climate policy goal - stabilizing US emissions by the year 2025.

During the course of this speech the President reported as progress a previous goal he had announced in 2002: that the “carbon intensity” of the US economy under his administration has been declining at the rate of about 18% per decade — the rate he targeted in 2002. Carbon intensity is the amount of carbon emitted by US fossil fuel combustion per dollar of US economic output.

There has been both just and unjust criticism about using this benchmark for progress on US climate. Just criticism is the fact that the US economy has long been ‘decarbonizing,’ including under the Clinton Administration, at a little less than 18% per decade, without any climate change policies.

The forces driving this include continual improvements in energy efficiency, structural changes in the economy like the growing information technology sector and environmental concerns unrelated to climate, like air pollution control. Therefore the US administration did not make clear to the public the actual meekness of the 2002 goal.

The US administration should not be faulted however for focusing on carbon intensity as a key metric for progress, in addition to total emissions. Carbon intensity must indeed drop if we are ever going to control emissions. It just has to do so fast enough to offset economic growth.

So, for example, the new goal of stabilizing US emissions in 2025 simply means carbon intensity has to decline at the same rate as US economic growth then: if the economy is growing at say 3%, then carbon intensity must decline at 3%. Eventually, to bring actual US emissions down, the intensity will have to decline at a faster rate than the economy is growing.

There is nothing wrong with framing climate policy this way (although many do not feel that US emission stabilization in 2025 is enough.)

Indeed, we ought to be speaking much more about carbon intensity so that it attains the same familiarity in the public mind as economic growth rates and population growth rates. It is going to be one of the most important economic and environmental numbers of the 21st century.