The easiest way to find more energy is to waste less. It is surprising how wasteful we have become in an age of cheap energy. Whenever I do an electric car conversion for a customer, I send out an energy consultant to do an energy audit. Most people waste more energy than what they would use to drive their car. A few simple changes and they get to basically drive for free. Ideas are cheap so I’m going to throw some out there right now.

Diesel electric trains have huge resistors on top of the engines to use as electric brakes. They engage the electric motors when going downhill to slow the train. The excess power turns these resistors glowing red. It just get’s lost to heating the atmosphere. New electric trains put that power back into the lines, so other trains can use it. It makes the whole system more efficient. It’s like the cable cars in San Francisco. The ones going down the hill help the ones going up.

There was a time when energy was expensive, so what did the first utilities do? They sold the waste heat. Buildings close to generating stations bought their steam from the power companies to heat the buildings. We should be using those kind of ideas today. I was in Indianapolis recently and I could see the smokestacks of the power plants out across the flat landscape. There was one within a few blocks of my hotel. I could see the smoke and steam rising as the plant fired up in the morning just as the sun was rising. The hotel had huge power lines coming into the building to run the individual heat pumps for each room. They had kerosene heaters just inside the doors, before entering the lobby. All this with a generating station a few blocks away wasting half of it’s energy right out into the air.

We should be situating businesses that require heat in their manufacturing processes near power plants. It saves energy and money. It makes good economic sense. it provides a hedge against the rising cost of fuel.

How about building a cement plant in the desert and using a solar furnace instead of a gas kiln to make their product.

There is a company in New Jersey that makes a building board from waste paper. I asked why their product was so expensive. It should be cheap since it’s make from waste products. their biggest expense is PROPANE! do you know how hard it is to dry wet paper in a place that has such high humidity. They could make the same thing in Nevada and just open the doors.

There is a lot of talk about using fuel cells to produce power.  They are at least as efficient at producing energy as coal fired power plants. but they are 100% efficient if you include the heat produced. This is called co-generation. How about this for some outside the box thinking… A laundromat that uses natural gas to make it’s power, but uses the waste heat to run the driers?

Air conditioners are just heat pumps. They pump heat from one place to another. Pump it out of the room and it get’s cool. The problem is that the hotter it is outside, the harder it is to get rid of and the less efficient it gets. Think of a big radiator outside getting rid of the heat from inside. On ships they pump the heat to a heat exchanger that is connected to the sea. It’s much more efficient to get rid of the heat into cold sea water. On land why not use a swimming pool. The inside of the building is cool and the pool is hot as a bonus! Speaking of swimming pools… how does anyone lose a home to wildfire when they have a swimming pool? sprinklers on the roof of a properly designed home run by a small pump…

I could go on. It doesn’t take that much imagination to figure out lots of way to maximize energy.  I drive an electric car and I have solar panels. I’m planning for passive solar heat. The price of fuel and energy can go through the roof and it won’t effect me. The whole country should be thinking that way. The whole world should.