The latest annual report issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which charts gas emissions into the atmosphere, reveals that in 2009 overall emissions had increased by 7.3% since 1990. The good news is that greenhouse gas emissions were at their lowest in 2009 since 1995.

The report, an inventory of green house and emissions and sinks between 1990 and 2009, also reveals that emissions decreased 6.1 per cent in relation to 2008. The organization believes this is due to a decrease in fuel and electricity consumption across all U.S. economic sectors.

The six main greenhouse gases included in the analysis are carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride and together they equal to 6,633 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.

Besides accounting for emissions, the inventory also calculates carbon dioxide emissions that are removed from the atmosphere by “sinks,” e.g., through the uptake of carbon by forests, vegetation and soils.

The document is prepared in collaboration with federal agencies and is the latest submitted by the United States to the Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The UNFCCC’s job is to set an overall global framework for nations to address climate change. The final report took into consideration comments received from stakeholders across the country.

According to the Wikipedia entry on American population, between 1990 and 2010 the number of people in the U.S. grew by 23%, which means that emissions grew at a proportionally lower pace. This could be due to a combination of factors, including the economic slowdown and the expanded use of renewable energy.

Article by Antonio Pasolini, a Brazilian writer and video art curator based in London, UK. He holds a BA in journalism and an MA in film and television.

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Last December, I moved into one of the most expensive places in the world to live, the gated community known as “Seadrift” in Stinson Beach, Marin County. I can count Senator Diane Feinstein and Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh as neighbors (though they only sneak out here upon occasion.)

The move ended up being a disaster on many fronts. Frequent internet woes, TV cable glitches, phone problems, and even a flea infestation (that required specialists and steroids), all plagued life in this beautiful spot nestled within nature preserves at the edge of the world.

But these inconveniences pale compare to what happened next, when I opened my first bill for my new home from Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), and saw that I allegedly owed $1,700 for electricity consumption that the stretched all the way back to December 2, 2010. When I called up PG&E, I found out that another bill was being sent the very next day that would add another $1,000 to my debt, which had within a very short amount of time ballooned into a $2,700 obligation.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, but my situation sums up the disappointing reality of where the super-hyped “smart grid” actually is today, putting aside all of the concerns about wireless radiation, privacy, and data security that have led to blockades in my own backyard. Let’s just focus on the bottom line for a moment.

PG&E installed a Silver Springs wireless smart meter last October. The nice lady on the phone at PG&E pointed out that she could see how my energy had spiked upon several days and that she suggested I move. I agreed with her at first, but as I put down the phone I started thinking about how ridiculous this situation was.

The reason my bill had been delayed for so long was that the readings were so abnormally high, so PG&E sent out a live human to check the meter. If I had received a normal bill at the end of December, I could have acted accordingly. My response to PG&E was simple: If the purpose of a smart grid is to give consumers signals so that they can adjust their behaviors and tweak technologies accordingly, then what good did this smart meter do?

The PG&E representative pointed out that if I had been set up to watch my energy usage online, I could have found out about this looming financial catastrophe much sooner. Oh, she then told me that aspect of the smart grid service wasn’t set up yet. (An insider at the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) told me PG&E is way behind in offering this one aspect of their smart grid roll-out focused on consumers – and not the utility – compared to the state’s other utilities.) Of course, if someone like me that is an energy expert can’t seem to find the time to be switching devices on and off and then going outside in the pouring rain to try and read a confusing smart meter to try and figure out what’s drawing so much juice, who will?

After raising this seemingly logical concern to four successive PG&E managers on the phone as I moved up the management chain, they finally agreed to send somebody out to make sure the meter was working properly. But I was told this person would not be able to help me reduce energy or pinpoint the source of high energy use. An “energy specialist” then called me on a Friday just as she was leaving the office, and told me to call her over the weekend, as she wanted to be in contact with me ASAP. I did call with no response. Five days have passed since she called.

I then turned to the landlord. After moving in, a fellow from a heating and cooling company did drop by to check out why one of the heaters wasn’t working. His advice: Don’t turn these electric-water heat floorboards on and off too much, because they’ll probably break. “Just keep them down low, because once the water is heated, they stay warm.” He assured my partner and her daughter that they didn’t really use that much electricity anyways. I worried about this advice – knowing how expensive electric heat can be – but life got busier and busier and I told myself we’ll just see what the bill looks like to see if what this heating contractor said was actually accurate. In the back of my mind, I kept wondering when that bill would come. But as anyone who has been a writer can attest, these are the sorts of things that fall through the cracks when one is under deadline after deadline after deadline.

Once I got the enormous bill, I spoke to the heating company again. He assured me that the advice of his fellow co-worker was all really relative. “Your landlord should get rid of those dinosaur devices and spend $10,000 to switch to propane.” Great advice, but that doesn’t help me now, or going forward as the landlord just sunk $50,000 into this place to fix up the exterior and has no interest in fixing a problem that costs her nothing. The same contractor told me that PG&E’s smart meters appeared to be having some peculiar problems with these sorts of heating systems, anyways, and that he had heard of a bill over $3,000. For some reason, this news did not make me feel any better.

With this unexpected debt now hanging over my head, I decided it was time to live like an Eskimo and just forget heat. Enough sweaters and caps out to do the trick. I’ll look for the long underwear I used to have to wear when I lived In Wisconsin. Winter can’t last forever.

Turns out I couldn’t turn off one of the electric-water heaters and had to go flip the circuit-breakers to adjust the temperatures. How long had this heater been running at full-blast? PG&E’s smart meter certainly wasn’t going to be able to tell me.

When PG&E’s comes out to check the meter, I was informed they won’t be able to tell me why the bills are high or offer me any tips or solutions. Here I am in California, one of the most progressive states in the nation when it comes to energy efficiency and the much hyped “smart grid” and I have no choice but to keeping paying the piper. I just have one dumb question for PG&E: How are these smart meters supposed to help consumers respond to price signals when we don’t know even when their bills are going through the roof until months after the fact?

Apparently, PG&E may have broken some laws by not sending me a timely bill. I’ll let you all know what happens in a future blog post.

Article by Peter Asmus, appearing courtesy the Matter Network.

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The high tech industry will play a significant role in the battle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as long as the Internet remains a level playing field. The opportunities for software companies to innovate in the energy generation and energy efficiency sectors are substantial if the priority of traffic over the Internet remains neutral (i.e., the FCC adopts net neutrality rules).

The smart grid is the main prerequisite to the Internet’s involvement in energy. The Obama Administration recently announced $3.4 billion in the development of the smart grid and related technologies. Much of these funds went directly to utilities to provide smart meters in homes and businesses. Southern California Edison has already started its rollout of smart meters under a program called SmartConnect; they hope to have 5 million smart meters active by 2012.

The fundamental breakthrough of smart meters is the ability to communicate information bidirectionally. Like a normal power meter, the smart meters can measure the energy consumption of the consumer, but they also can send that and other information to the local utility as well as to devices located on the property of the customer (e.g. smart thermostat, smart refrigerator, etc.). A completely new market for energy efficiency products will exist when users begin connecting these smart meters to the Internet. This connection will remove the shackles from energy software outfits such as OPOWER [view some of their current clean tech job openings on the CleanTechies Job Board] and Google.org.

The Internet has an infrastructure capable of revolutionizing energy use both at home and at the workplace. For instance, we all have widgets staring at us on our computers these days. Imagine having a widget that was giving you a real time view of the electricity consumption at your home or in your office and the ability to reduce that energy use from the convenience of your office chair. One could also schedule consumption levels based on their personal preferences and real-time electricity rates. Companies have already started sprouting up to focus on these emerging technologies and this market will only grow as utilities create the smart grid. Another dependency not often included in this discussion is a free and open Internet, more commonly referred to as net neutrality.

The reliability of software that uses the smart grid and the Internet is dependent on net neutrality to ensure Internet Service Providers (ISP) deliver bidirectional data as quickly as possible. If the Internet did not operate on a level playing field (e.g., PG&E’s Internet traffic was given priority over data from a personal web server), then the growth of distributed generation and other electricity control options could stagnate. How can someone make his car’s batteries available for use by the smart grid if ISPs constantly push the control signals to the back of their data transfer queue?

The free and open flow of data on the Internet is not only important for individuals and small companies looking to spread their message. Net neutrality is an important issue for those trying to combat climate change through improvements in energy generation and energy efficiency.

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umissgym: Is it just me, or is it hot in here?

The social media craze has hit building automation, as the campus at the University of Mississippi will soon be broadcasting its energy consumption via Twitter and Facebook updates.

In partnership with smart grid company SmartSynch, Ole Miss has created online feeds (also via RSS) detailing several of its main buildings’ energy use, ostensibly to “alter behavior to reduce electricity consumption and carbon emissions.” The UMiss project will study consumption from lighting, temperature controls, and appliances. The organizations have created an online application to monitor and report the energy draw so that building operators can learn where energy is being wasted and implement new conservation strategies.

Ole Miss’ extending the data from grid to the public web showcases (albeit in questionably productive manner) the merger of energy and IT worlds. Let’s just hope that some computer science student with hacking skills doesn’t think it’s cool to set the gym temp to 95 degrees.

Companies such as SmartSynch are adding IP technology to energy management equipment as part of the massive smart grid upgrade that is now beginning. These companies are unleashing data management tools crafted during the digital music era on an industry that by comparison functions with the sophistication of electricity innovator Thomas Edison’s cylinder phonographs.

Smart grid companies such as SmartSynch, GridPoint, and Echelon are on the cutting edge of figuring out the many possibilities in which internet, communications and networking technologies can make the grid more efficient. By harvesting the billions of bytes of information about the energy that flows across the grid, these companies, as well as big dog players such as IBM, Cisco, Google, Microsoft and GE, will invent a whole new world of applications that will drag the energy industry into the 21st century.

How we use energy in 2015 will look nothing like what we do today — thankfully. We already have several iPhone apps for managing energy consumption, and appliances that will reduce or cut power to avoid blackouts or when energy gets pricey. Having the dryer turn off and the flat-screen reduce its brightness momentarily to prevent the neighborhood from going dark is not only cool, it’s practical.

Appearing courtesy of Matter Network.

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