Carbon Footprint Reduction

PLEASE NOTE: YOUR READING ENJOYMENT WILL BE STRONGLY ENHANCED WHEN YOU READ THIS ARTICLE WITH YOUR LAPTOP, NOT A SMARTPHONE.

Reduce your CO2 Emissions with Effective, Realistic, No-Nonsense Lifestyle Changes

A WHITE PAPER ON QUANTIFYING THE CARBON FOOTPRINT REDUCTION WITH:
— a properly designed SOLAR PV system
— a custom-designed SOLAR THERMAL POOL or HOT TUB HEATING system
— space heating with a HEAT PUMP
— replacing an ICE vehicle with an EV

Realizing that — next to the threat of thermonuclear war — climate change has become the most detrimental threat to mankind, the goal of this White Paper is to give away a “do-it-yourself” tool that any person can use who is interested in reducing his/her carbon footprint. The tool comes in two parts: (1) an assessment of the person’s household energy usage, resulting with implicit recommendations how to reduce this household’s CO2 emissions, and (2) specific basic design and performance predictions of a solar PV system for the person’s residence, with concrete numbers by how much their CO2 footprint would thus be reduced. This design can then be used to assess the merits of a quote received from a contractor competing for the installation. As by-products, the benefits in terms of carbon footprint reduction from purchasing an EV, from changing to electric home heating/air conditioning via a heat pump, and from using solar thermal heating (for pool and spa) are being quantified.

We also discuss the benefits of supporting legislation requiring manufacturers of electric vehicles to adapt the batteries of their EVs as emergency power sources for homes during brownout periods, as well as requiring public electric power companies to provide incentives to integrate the batteries of EVs in their overall energy storage programs.

by Klaus Heinemann, Ph.D.
4/14/2022, updated on 1/29/2023

“The ruthless burning of fossil fuels has changed everything, save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

This is an adaption of a quote by Albert Einstein, in which I took the liberty of replacing his words “unleashed power of the atom” with “ruthless burning of fossil fuels.” Both are true. Both have become a sword of Damocles suspended over our home, planet Earth. The former has been under some sort of “temporary” control ever since the nuclear power nations enacted nuclear weapons treaties in the 1980s — but which have, however, very recently been undermined by Russia’s Dictator Vladimir Putin, who used the threat of thermonuclear war as means of blackmail upon humanity. The latter, burning hydrocarbons (coal, gas, oil) to generate energy, has slowly but steadily risen to the most threatening long-term challenge our planet has ever faced. It is what this White Paper is addressing.

Introduction

With almost everything we do, from turning on our TV to heating our home or hot tub or pool, to driving to work, or when we enjoy our grilled steak, we cause carbon-dioxide gases to be emitted into our lifeline, the atmosphere. This in turn gives rise for an ever so small but significant fraction of the heat we receive from the sun to be captured on earth, rather than escaping back out into space by natural heat radiation. This is similar to a “greenhouse” effect, where the translucent cover lets solar radiation come in but not escape at the same rate (Scientifically, the natural equilibrium of incoming heat and reverse “black-body” radiation is altered by our “unnatural” addition of CO2 into the atmosphere. As a consequence, the average temperature on the surface of our planet increases. Due to the similarity with the greenhouse effect, CO2 is called “greenhouse gas,” often abbreviated as “GHG.”

Even a seemingly small temperature increase has huge adverse GHG effects. Just a couple of degrees will create havoc. It will cause the polar ice caps to melt, which will cause the sea level to rise; and it will change the prevailing wind and rainfall patterns, which in turn will cause droughts and heat waves in regions that heretofore had just perfect rainfall and temperatures to grow the crops to feed people; and it causes floods and hurricanes in others regions, and on and on. Only the intellectually blind can still deny that we are already in midst of this deadly spiral. We cannot afford to ignore it any longer.

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Getting to Specifics

The amounts of the detrimental carbon-dioxide which we are emitting into our atmosphere are staggering. The actual aggregate numbers are meaningless to most people, because, say, a “megaton” means nothing without a tangible reference for such quantities. We therefore name only three important numbers/equations that are easy to remember and relate to our day by day energy uses with which we are all familiar, i.e., with gallons of gasoline, kilowatt-hours of electricity, and British thermal units (“therms”) of heat:

— burning 1 gal of gasoline or Diesel fuel emits about 20 lb of CO2 into the atmosphere (1 liter generates 2.5kg CO2);
— using 1 kWh of electricity causes 0.8 lb of CO2 emission on average where it is generated (1kWh ~ 370g CO2) ; and
— burning 1 therm (=100,000 BTU) of natural gas (i.e., methane, or CH4) releases 11.7 lb of CO2.
(propane is a bit worse, releasing 13.9 lb of CO2 per therm; 30 kWh of natural gas = 1 Therm release 6.5kg CO2).

With these numbers we can gauge our own contribution to climate change:

— As energy conscious citizens, we are emitting anywhere around 10,000 lb (4600 kg) of CO2, or GHG, per year for our home comfort. We call this our “Carbon Footprint” (CF). Some of us are better than that, some worse. (This number includes everything for which we are being charged by our public power company (e.g., PG&E), but it does not include transportation and food).

— If we install a solar photovoltaic system on our roof, we can typically collect somewhere around 5000 - 10,000 kWh per year, thus offsetting a CF of 4000 - 8000 lb. of CO2 emissions. That is huge!

— We get similar savings when we get rid of our gasoline-powered ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicle and get an electric vehicle (EV), with savings of about 6000 lb of CO2 when we drive it 8000 miles.
(Furthermore, requiring legislative action, switching to EVs bears, in principle, two more huge societal benefits: their battery packs could be used as power source during “Public Safety Power Shutoff” periods; and they could be profitably incorporated within the peak power leveling/balancing program of public utilities).

— We can reduce our carbon footprint by about 3000 - 8000 lb of GHG when we replace our typical natural gas (or propane) burning space heater with an electric heat pump.

— And we can get approximately the same CF savings when we have a swimming pool and replace its gas or electric resistance heater with a simple, basic, unglazed and uninsulated solar thermal heater.

Thus, on average, as simple but useful generalization, we can become close to “carbon neutral” — or at least make a huge contribution toward this goal — when we implement just two of these features (and our household is not too energy wasteful to begin with), such as: go solar and get an electric vehicle, or go solar and switch to heat pump space heating, or get a heat pump and an EV.

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These are, of course, average numbers, not precise expectations. The rest of this web page is devoted to getting these numbers more accurate for your particular situation. For this, we employ two tools:

— a Home Energy Use Analysis, in which we convey how to “audit” (and potentially reduce) your electricity and gas bills, and
— the “SOLARCALCS” Solar System Performance Simulation software, used for properly sizing your solar PV system.

We invite you to click on a button below to get to these two tools.

Furthermore, without wanting to appear lopsided toward favoring one desirable means over another, an additional huge societal benefit can be achieved literally as side effect of turning to electric vehicles. Figure that, just in California, we have already about 1 million EVs on our roads. On average, each has a battery capacity of about 70 kWh. The technology to charge these batteries at home from the regular 240VAC power panel is already built into each of these vehicles. The inverters that do this work, by design, both bi-directional, i.e., they will convert 240VAC to the DC voltage required by the car batteries, and they would just the same convert the DC of the batteries to 240VAC, if so permitted.

The main EV manufacturers, following the lead of Tesla, have so far deliberately prevented this from happening. If just 30 of the 70 kWh stored in each EV in California were made available to the power companies for use during the peak hours, this would act as a 30 million kWh storage facility. Even if only 1/3 of all EV owners would participate in the program, that is still much more than the California power companies would ever need for power balancing, and it would save them several billion dollars in investment dollars for storage equipment.

Why is this not done? It would eliminate a lucrative backup power market, which currently enjoys sales of battery storage at the going rate of about $1000 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) stored. Legislative intervention is needed to correct this situation.

We cannot jeopardize the continuance of the Grand Original Design, as it pertains to this Earth, by ignoring this impending climate crisis. Only when we act on this profound interplay between our man-caused GHG emissions and climate change with world-wide disastrous consequences, we will preserve this planet for the future of our children and grandchildren and beyond. We, each one of us, have no choice but to reduce our “Carbon Footprint.”

In midst of all the adversity we find ourselves in, we must choose Goodness, even if it appears everything but “good” or “inexpensive” in the moment.

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We point to our books “Expanding Perception” and “Phenomena: Code of the Grand Original Design” for much more on this subject.

All information in this website is copyrighted.
2022-23 Klaus Heinemann

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