Friday July 07, 2006

Peak oil : energy & buildings

energybulletin.net -> fcnp.com :

In North America, we spend 90% of our time inside some building or other, where the temperature, moisture, and even the oxygen content of the air we breath are all kept at acceptable levels by cheap energy. During the last 50 years, cheap, abundant energy has brought major changes to our buildings. They have become taller, bigger, brighter and most have one thing in common: they now require massive amounts of energy to keep functioning. 99+ percent of the tens of millions of buildings in which we spend so much time are energy guzzlers and unless we can find some way to massively reduce their consumption of energy, large swaths of post peak oil civilization could quickly become very unpleasant places.

The first steps on the path to sustainable buildings are relatively simple and inexpensive : turn down the heat, turn up the air-conditioning and turn off the lights. The next relatively inexpensive step we will need to take is getting rid of the excessive lighting in our buildings, especially the incandescent kind. After adjusting the thermostat and unscrewing or replacing outmoded light bulbs, our journey to as-close-to-zero-energy buildings as we can get becomes more complicated — and a lot more expensive.

(2006-07-07 13:01:00 SGT) [Energy] Permalink

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