If there’s one thing most political partisans should agree upon, it’s painless ways to cut our energy costs. While many states are working to cut or contain energy costs within their borders, similar approaches are not happening at the congressional level where energy efficiency advocates find themselves back at the same place they started a year ago.

Mel Brooks’ 2000-year old man used torches in his cave, but today’s lighting is a tad more sophisticated, having gone through half a dozen stages, each producing more light out of less energy i.e., efficacy, than its predecessor.

Torches made of moss and animal fat, and crude oil lamps were the mainstay for indoor lighting until the processing of animal fat into wax gave us the candle in roughly 3000 BCE (efficacy: about .1 lumens/watt). That option worked for much of early recorded European history but, during the Islamic Golden Age (roughly 900-1000 AD), a Persian doctor refined kerosene from crude oil and used it in the first manufactured oil lamp and the first street lights in Andalusian Cordoba, now Spain.

For decades, R&D firms have been striving to bring down the cost of large-scale batteries to be cost-effective for utility-scale power storage. Units have already been installed at a handful of US utilities, with systems having 10-20 MW of peak output. All are designed mainly to help grids ride through brief problems, such as the failure of a power plant or transmission line, while power is switched to other sources or lines.

The home run trot is one of the iconic moments of a baseball game. While an energy audit is not as dramatic, the end result can put building managers in a similar position as the slugger who reaps the rewards of a job well done.

Many building managers have found profitable opportunities through energy audits (also called “assessments”) of the energy-consuming systems in their facilities. As with most investments of time and money, the process involves several steps.

When it comes to energy-related information, utility bills barely scratch the surface. Using them to understand where your budget is going is a bit like trying to read the scoreboard for a sport you don’t understand. But learning how to manage such information can soon have you “batting 1.000”.

To get a grip on what’s happening, smart facility managers may use several types of tools, depending on the data source:

The advent of light-emitting diode (LED) lamps and fixtures for the area and spotlighting has created both opportunities and pitfalls. Dimming, in particular, has presented some new challenges.

Many LED product vendors have labeled their units as “dimmable” using standard incandescent dimmers. If the dimming level is relatively minor (e.g., 20%), that may indeed occur successfully. Dimming for energy savings during off-hours, cleaning, or daylighting may, however, involve reductions of 50 to 70%, while architectural dimming for presentations or events may require dimming by 95%. In such cases, dimmed LEDs have demonstrated unacceptable flickering or fluttering.

During the process of delivering electricity, some power is lost through wire resistance, transformers, and other physical causes. Losses may also occur due to theft of service and meter error. Such line losses occur at two levels: while transmitting power at high voltage to a utility’s zonal boundary, and again when distributing it at the lower voltage across a utility’s territory to customer meters.

Solar power from photovoltaic (PV) panels, when secured through long-term contracts, has become competitive with power supplied by utilities. Under a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA), a developer designs, installs, owns, maintains, and operates the PV system at a customer’s site, and sells the power generated by the system to the customer at a competitive rate. Through such arrangements, many facilities are now securing years of lower cost and pollution-free electricity.

Several members of the Luthin Associates staff have been purchasing deregulated energy products since the early 1990’s, and during this period we often noted a fairly strong correlation between natural gas and oil prices. It was also a common occurrence when meeting with a CFO for him or her to correlate the rising cost of electricity with the current price of oil.  While this correlation may have once been valid, changes in the market and the evolution of the nation’s energy production infrastructure have diminished the importance of oil in the electricity markets and simultaneously enhanced the significance of natural gas as a price indicator.

Catherine Luthin was selected to serve on the Council for Women in Energy and Environmental Leadership (CWEEL) Board of Directors. She was chosen along with a prestigious group of peers to serve on this important inaugural board for a two-year term (2010‐2011).