Earth Day and Creating Climate Wealth Summit
The Earth Day Network will co-host the Climate Leadership Gala, with Carbon War Room and the American Council on Renewable Energy. This event is expected to attract up to 500 leaders of industry, government and non-profit organizations to the EPA Atrium of the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington DC to celebrate recent achievements in forging a path to a post-carbon future. The Gala will feature the same caliber of A-List musical entertainment and speeches by luminaries and world leaders that made it one of the capital’s top-billed events of 2010.
Earth Day Network, Sir Richard Branson and Carbon War Room will involve investors, business leaders, policy makers and civil society in expert panels and working tracks designed to educate, excite, and catalyze them to identify market-based solutions for a post-carbon economy. Past panels identified challenges to scaling up six cleantech sectors with gigaton-scale CO2e reduction potential by 2020: energy efficiency, distributed generation, shipping and freight, grid management, electric vehicles, and aviation and next-generation biofuels. This event will also will announce the Women and Green Economy (WAGE) Leader Award.
Energy Conservation In Schools
A staggering six billion dollars – that is the annual energy bill to run America’s primary and secondary schools. Colleges and universities are also spending billions each year on energy. The least-efficient schools use three times more energy than the best energy performers. But schools in Hawaii can lower their energy bills by 30% or more by adopting a strategic approach to energy management. Schools are a great place to teach Hawai‘i’s children about energy and resource conservation. Schools can lead the way to a clean energy future for Hawaii.
Hawaii’s schools can help lead the way by improving energy performance, and Integrating energy conservation into the curriculum. Schools are central to their local communities and should reflect community values – like energy conservation. Beyond the educational value of creating energy-efficient schools, there is also a benefit to the bottom line. High-performance schools can lower a school district’s costs by up to 30%. Energy is one of the few expenses a school can cut without sacrificing educational quality. And building an energy-smart school doesn’t have to cost more to construct than a conventionally built school.
Hawaii’s schools can lead the way to a clean energy future by serving as classrooms to teach future generations about wise energy use, because the next generation is the key to Hawaii’s future. One of the most valuable lessons children can learn at school is the importance of conserving energy, and it is critical that our schools lead by example and take a proactive stance on implementing energy-efficiency measures.
Kauai Efficient Appliances
Appliances account for about 35% of your total electricity bill on Kauai, but you can reduce the amount of power they use by upgrading to new, energy efficient Energy Star models. Some of the new appliances work better, look better, and have more features yet consume half of the electricity of an older model. Switching from a 1990 refrigerator to a 2010 Energy Star model could save you about $200 per year. Or maybe you no longer need that old second refrigerator? The old beast probably costs you a fortune, particularly if you have it out in the hot carport or garage. In fact, upgrading your primary refrigerator to a larger, Energy Star refrigerator will be a savings over two smaller inefficient refrigerators.
When buying a new appliance, consider the energy efficiency of the item along with the sale price. This is like looking at the miles per gallon when buying a new car. The decision you make today will affect your electricity bill for years to come. The cost of energy efficient appliances is typically higher than standard models, but the money saved over time will more than cover the initial cost. To sweeten the deal, local energy companies often provide cash rebates for qualifying energy efficient appliances, including ceiling fans, clothes washers, dish washers, refrigerators, and room air conditioners.
Energy Star appliances are about 25% more efficient than average appliances. Read the Energy Guide labels to compare estimated annual operating costs between comparable models in order to select the most efficient appliance for your money. The Energy Guide labels are required on water heaters, refrigerators, freezers, clothes washers, dishwashers, and room air conditioners, and is only awarded to appliances that significantly exceed the minimum national standards.
Kauai Efficient Cooling
There are many ways to cool down your Kauai home without AC to save you energy and money. With all the bright sunshine we get in Hawaii, cooling your home can be a energy hogging task if you use air conditioning.
Under the sun, a roof can reach 150 degrees fahrenheit or more (even when it’s only 80 degrees outside) and transfer heat into your living space. Keeping the heat out of your home is essential to making your home energy efficient. Radiant barriers are thin sheets of reflective material installed in the roof, ceiling, or walls that reduce the transfer of heat and can reflect up to 85 percent of the sun’s heat.
Installing attic insulation will absorb heat passing into the home through the roof. Insulation can reduce ceiling temperatures by more than 15 degrees making you more comfortable in your home.
Hot air can get trapped in your attic and keep your house warmer than necessary. A ridge vent located at the highest point of your roof uses the low pressure created by wind traveling across your roof to suck out the hot air. Ridge vents should be combined with an eave vent or a soffit vent (located at the lowest part of your roof) so that fresh air can be let into the attic to replace the hot air.
Solar-powered attic fans use clean, free energy from the sun to draw out the hot air and reduce attic temperature by as much as 40 degrees.
The easiest way for direct hot daylight to enter your house is through your windows. The best strategy to cool your home is shading. You can try overhangs, awnings, or trees to shade your windows that face the sun during the day. Inside drapes, blinds, or tinting can also help block out the sun’s rays.
Trade winds blow about 90% of the time in summer and about 50% of the time in the winter, so by opening the windows you can harness that energy and let your home cool using natural resources. The further apart the open windows are (opposite corners of the house) the more efficient the wind will be in cooling your home.
Ceiling fans can also create a gentle breeze that can take over comfort duties when the wind quits. Using an Energy Star ceiling fan instead of a typical room air conditioner can save about $446 per year.
Kauai Efficient Lighting
If every American home replaced just one light with an Energy Star light, we would save enough energy to light more than 3 million homes for a year. A compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL) will save about $30 over its lifetime because it uses 75 percent less energy and lasts about 10 times longer than an incandescent bulb. One bulb in every home will save about $700 million in annual energy costs, and prevent 9 billion pounds of greenhouse gas emissions per year, equivalent to the emissions of about 800,000 cars. Lighting a home on Kauai only consumes about 8% of your electricity bill, but it is the easiest place to start making reductions. Daylighting, compact fluorescents, and light emitting diodes (LEDs) are bright ideas to consider.
Daylighting is the practice of placing windows, skylights, daylights, or openings so that during the day natural light provides effective internal lighting. New technologies, such as the Solatube daylight allow you to bring light into rooms that are not directly below the roof. These improvements also currently qualify for a 30% federal tax credit as well. Also, consider several small skylights instead of one large skylight for better distribution. Nature provides the best light available – and it’s free.
CFLs are miniature versions of full-sized fluorescents, and screw into standard lamp sockets giving off light that looks just like incandescent bulbs. They use 75% less electricity than out-dated incandescent light bulbs and last about ten times longer (over 8000 hours versus under 1000 hours). They also produce about 75 percent less heat, which reduces cooling costs and helps you stay cool.
LEDs are small, solid light bulbs with diffuser lenses which are extremely energy-efficient. Currently, the high cost of producing LEDs is a roadblock to widespread use, but researchers are finding new technologies to drive the price of LEDs into a more competitive range with CFLs. The benefits over CFLs and incandescents are: they use only 2-10 watts of electricity, they last up to 10 times longer than compact fluorescents, they hold up well to jarring and bumping, they produce less heat, and they are mercury free.
Kauai Energy Efficiency At Home
If all the households in Hawaii cut their energy bill in half, we would save one million dollars per day in energy costs. Therefore, energy efficiency in the home is the cheapest, safest, and fastest option we have available. If you want to get started cutting your home energy bill in half, you may want to do an energy audit to see where you can make the greatest difference in your energy consumption. You can do an energy audit yourself, or you can hire a professional to tell you where savings can be found.
A typical Hawai’i home uses:
40% – Water Heater
15% – Refrigerator
12% – Air Conditioner
8% – Lighting
8% – Cooking
8% – Clothes Dryer
5% – Misc
3% – Dishwasher
1% – Clothes Washer
You can find resources online for completing your own home energy audit, including the Department of Energy. New tools make it easy to measure how much energy your various appliances and devices are using, and different electricity monitors are available at home improvement stores. Many of these monitors allow you to plug in an electrical appliance, and it will measure how much energy the device is using and will tell you how much it costs to operate it. More sophisticated models can track exactly how much electricity your home is consuming at any given moment, allowing you to switch on or off various appliances and electric devices to see how much they are consuming individually. Some of these will interface with your home computer and allow you to record changes so you can track your usage over time. These are incredibly useful tools for helping you identify where you can make the biggest energy improvements and save money.
