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Date Published: 22/10/01
Author: Mike Tidwell Forget Kyoto. Mike Tidwell explains how he and his family cut emissions by 96 per cent in their own home. |
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It’s a lovely, breezy, autumn day, temperature around eight degrees, not a cloud in the sky. Inside my house I set the thermostat at a toasty 22°C then reach for a cold beer from the refrigerator while turning the television to an American football game. Later I’ll unwind with a hot, steaming bath while listening to classical music CDs. Just another glorious day of modern Western life – and profligate energy use – leading inexorably to runaway global warming, right?
Wrong. All but a tiny fraction of my household energy budget comes from renewable, CO2-neutral sources. The electricity arrives from photovoltaic panels on the roof, the heating from a thermostat-controlled pot-belly stove that burns corn kernels and warms my entire suburban home, and the hot water from a separate rooftop panel that converts sunlight to infrared heat.
Obviously, I’m a very wealthy man to be able to afford such extravagant gadgets. Everyone knows that amazingly effective renewable-energy technologies are out there. The problem is that average people – the very people who need to change if we’re ever going to stabilise the climate – simply can’t afford them. Right?
Wrong again. In my case, I’m a hopelessly middle-class, self-employed writer with a four-year-old son. No rich uncle died allowing me my wife Catherine and I to become self-indulgent techno-nerds. And we didn’t scrape together years’ worth of savings to make this dream come true. We made all of our energy changes abruptly, within the past year, and now we’re spending the handsome sum of – get this – $9.50 (£6.64) per month to pay for them. That’s all. For 31 cents (21 pence) a day at our home we’ve gotten off the planet’s back almost entirely. And here’s the best news of all: most of these planet-saving technologies are available and affordable right now for any homeowner willing to do a little bit of research, borrow a modest sum of money, and spend that money wisely.
For Catherine and I, last January’s bombshell findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change first set us to plotting our home energy revolution. Planetary warming of 5.8°C by 2100 is doubly horrifying each time you look down at your innocent son playing with building blocks on the carpet. We knew that the modest targets of the Kyoto protocol wouldn’t pass muster, either. Most scientists believe the world’s CO2 emissions must drop 80 per cent below current levels to stabilise the climate.
So that became our goal: 80 per cent. If we could cut our household CO2 emissions by that amount – or at least by 50 per cent – we would have done our part. It was the least we could do in a nation where our government sabotages even modest international efforts to stem climate change. If our leaders won’t lead, we Americans owe it to the rest of the world to get the job done ourselves, house by house, neighbourhood by neighbourhood.
So, Catherine and I came up with a budget: $7,500 (£5,245). That’s what we would spend, no more. And being of modest means, we had to borrow the money in the form of a home equity loan.
Our very first investment was a book called 'Homemade Money' (1), for people wanting to save money through improved energy use. The first step, we learned, was to eliminate unnecessary energy consumption and to use more efficiently the energy you can’t live without. So we switched to compact fluorescent light bulbs, bought an extremely high efficiency refrigerator (it consumes less than half the electricity of our previous ten-year-old unit) and began drying our clothes on a line. With these and other painless changes, including never ever illuminating an unoccupied room, we cut our electricity use a remarkable 45 per cent from 3,900 kilowatt hours in the year 2000 to an annual rate of 2,200 kilowatt hours now.
With our electricity demand now well trimmed, it became plausible to meet at least part of that demand with our own solar generation. And here’s where we encountered the first of several big and pleasant surprises: we could go solar, in a very big way, even on a very tight budget. We quickly learned that our state of Maryland offers $3,600 (£2,500) grants toward solar photovoltaic systems plus a $1,200 (£840) tax credit. Grant in hand, we then went shopping for solar panels and got another big surprise: a solar advocacy organisation in our region was heavily discounting the price of panels thanks to a subsidy from the US Department of Energy. Taking advantage of both of these programmes and installing much of the system ourselves, we were suddenly able to realise our greatest dream: 36 solar panels on our south-facing roof – generating all of our electricity.
Amazingly, having tackled the big hurdle of electricity, we had almost half of our original $7,500 budget still in hand to apply to our next big challenge: we had to find a new source of heat for our house.
But what would it be? Thankfully, a small company in Hutchinson, Minnesota answered the question. Twelve years ago, ex-farmer Mike Haefner, president of American Energy Systems, engineered the first ever corn-burning stove designed to heat modern homes. This relatively small and easy-to-install stove easily heats a 2,000 sq ft home (ours is 1,600 sq ft) and comes with a thermostat for extra convenience. The stove can store up to three days’ worth of corn in a side bin, which it self-loads with a low-energy electric auger. Just set the thermostat to the temperature you want and enjoy the radiant heat.
Burning corn contributes almost nothing to global warming. Like all plant material, corn absorbs CO2 as it grows, and, with this stove, the corn burns so efficiently that the net CO2 released is negligible. Moreover, corn is much cheaper than natural gas – we’ll save more than $500 (£350) per winter – and it’s easily purchased even by big-city dwellers at outlying feed stores, the closest being 30 minutes from my suburban Washington, DC home. (I’m currently forming a cooperative with other corn-burners in my neighbourhood to buy from a nearby organic farmer who will make deliveries.) And corn is an almost endless energy source. Studies show US farmers can grow 10 times more corn than is needed to meet all US energy needs. It’s easy, good for farmers, good for the climate, and saves money.
Even after all these purchases – fridge, bulbs, photovoltaic panels, stove – we still had enough money to tackle our last major source of greenhouse gas: heating our water. And here we got lucky. My local energy consultant stumbled across a used but perfectly good five-year-old solar hot-water system and sold it to us installed for $1,000 (£700), instead of $3,500 (£2,450) new, thus closing out our expenditures at just over $7,500. The solar system preheats the water for our natural gas heater. Thus, on sunny days, our hot water comes from the sun and on cloudy days we get as much help from solar as we can and then the gas burners bring the temperature up to the 48°C we desire. So we’re guaranteed hot water year round.
Here’s the bottom line: except to cook our food with natural gas and heat our water on really cloudy days, we now contribute nothing to global warming through home energy use. In the process, we’ve reduced our estimated CO2 contribution from 19,488 pounds per year to just under 864, a drop of almost 96 per cent. If every household in the industrialised world made only half of these changes we would be well on our way to solving global warming.
We also do very well by doing good. Our changes save us an estimated $930 (£650) each year. That’s $77.50 (£54) per month. The monthly payment for the $7,500 loan is $87 (£60), a difference of just 31 cents a day, a small price to help preserve the planet. And in 10 years, when the loan is repaid, that $930 will go straight into our pockets.
But where’s the catch? Surely such an abrupt switch from fossil fuels entails some sort of hidden sacrifices?
Actually, there are none. Yes, twice a week in the winter we have to reload the stove with corn. That takes about five minutes. And since the stove radiates heat, a room can only be warm if its door is left open, meaning someone wanting an extended period of complete privacy might get a little chilly. Other than this, our lives of modern comfort are essentially unchanged.
Except for one more thing: we now live with greater hope for our son’s future and that of the whole planet.
If we can make such big changes so quickly and for so little money, the rest of the world, when it finally makes up its mind, can do the same.
Mike Tidwell is a freelance writer and climate change activist in Takoma Park, Maryland, USA.
'Homemade money: How to Save Energy and Dollars in Your Home', by Richard Heede, Rocky Mountain Institute 1995, $14.95, ISBN: 188317807.
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