Climate Change By The Dollar

One of my lil' neurosis is ensuring that I reduce my energy usage year over year. To make sure I'm following a downward trend, I've been trending the dollar cost for energy and water bills. Assuming that cost per unit does not go down year over year (which so far has been true), this should be a reflection of overall energy use.

Note that the large hills on the graph spurred on by heating bills (both water and central air) are shrinking each year. Air conditioning during the summer months is showing small increases. Over the past three years I have also replaced all light fixtures with LED lighting - which does help drop the constant spend month over month.

It is interesting that while both winters and summers are getting warmer, heating the house expends much more energy than cooling the house, providing an overall downward trend. Water use is also beginning to spike due to the lawn irrigation system, which is why I created the Sprinkler Switch project to only water when no rain has occurred recently or is forecast to occur that day.

This is an indirect measure of how our climate is changing, and only represents a four year sample size. The trends are still quite visible - and demonstrate how evolutions in home heating could significantly reduce energy consumption.

Energy Savings Inaction

First off, let me thank Dubya and the remainder of the inexplicable idiots once again for the passage of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Not only does this further line the coffers of the oil industry, but it also includes the asinine provision of moving the Daylight Savings time switch up three weeks. Why? Because people will supposedly be awake for more of the daylight hours, so they'll use less lights at home to see.

Let's just take a second to let this stupidity sink in.

Evidently Congress believes they can will the sun to stay out longer during the day. Not only that, but this idea has actually been tried in Australia during the Sydney Olympics. The result? A greater spike in morning electricity usage. Great job.

So not only does this not save energy, it completely screws with every computer in the known freaking world. I've been running ragged trying to patch a number of legacy servers, some to no avail, because they all expect the first week in April to be when DST changes happen. The past two months have been a sleepless blur. Now servers both at home and abroad will be off by an hour. International financial transactions are most likely to be at risk, since foreign DST changes will be different and servers are likely to go unpatched. This may cause enough disruption to make the so-called Y2K bug absolutely minuscule in comparison.

So nice job Bush Administration. Not only do you ignore things that might actually make a difference such as the Kyoto Treaty, but you pass bills that actually harm both the environment, business and industry and then call them "energy policy acts." Brilliant.