That's right, you can heat your house with 10 light bulbs too:
In Maine and New Hampshire, where the winter temperatures can reach 15 degrees below zero, the best way to cut heating energy is to "build a better box" with materials that are readily available, Foley said. Homeowners in his area can cut their heating requirements in a new house by at least 50 percent by doubling the amount of insulation that would normally be used, installing windows with three panes and conscientiously plugging air leaks.The only observable difference is the exterior walls, which can be as thick as 12 inches.
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Even more insulation can reduce heating requirements to the point that the heat given off by the building's occupants, appliances and lighting, plus the passive solar heat streaming in through south-facing windows, is sufficient for the entire house. This approach, called the passive house, was pioneered in Germany in 1990. About 9,000 such buildings have been built in Europe.
The first passive house in the United States was built in Urbana, Ill., in 2003 by Katrin Klingenberg, an architect and a professor at the University of Illinois. She said she can heat her 1,200-square-foot house with 10 100-watt light bulbs.
To accomplish this in Urbana, where the temperature can fall below zero during the winter and rise above 100 during the summer, her walls are 16 inches thick, the insulation in her attic is 16 inches thick, the windows have three panes, and the underside of her concrete floor slab is insulated to a depth of 14 inches. (There is no basement.) Her house is 90 percent more energy-efficient than a conventionally built house in Urbana.
This is why I favor getting energy prices right -- e.g., incorporating all externalities that the market misses (note to "free market" disciples: no, the market doesn't capture everything). If energy is priced correctly, people will have all the incentives they need to build houses that put a premium on energy efficiency. Heck, people might even go so far as the example cited above and heat their home with the equivalent of 10, 100-watt light bulbs. Essentially, they would then have no energy bill at all. Sounds pretty good, right?
Unfortunately, most houses currently are built with almost no attention being paid to slashing the amount of heating and cooling necessary. That's very unfortunate, because making all our homes 90 percent more energy efficient than they are now would be very easy, and doing so would dramatically slash U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
Currently, the U.S. residential sector emits around 1.2 billion metric tons of CO2 per year, around 1/6 total U.S. CO2 emissions. A 90 percent reduction in residential CO2 emissions would cut nearly 1 billion metric tons of CO2 emissions per year from what we're currently pumping into the atmosphere. Doing so, by the way, would make new coal-fired power generating capacity, like Dominion's proposed new plant in Wise County, utterly unnecessary. It would also save consumers a huge amount of money while helping the environment in the process. Talk about a "win-win-win..."
So why aren't we doing this? Basically, because builders and consumers for years have assumed cheap energy and not really worried about building homes the most energy efficient they can be. That may be changing now, but we can't count on the vicissitudes of market prices for energy. This is a classic case of government policy serving a crucial role, in setting energy efficiency standards for new and existing housing stock, as well as in internalizing "externalities" to the price.
So far, unfortunately, most politicians have shown no understanding of basic economic, let alone any clue when it comes to energy or the environment. That's certainly been the case in Virginia, where all you hear is the same, tired old mantra about how it's coal yesterday, coal today, and more coal tomorrow. That's not leadership, it's ignorance, laziness, and (frankly) cowardice. If we're going to solve our energy security and energy-related environmental problems, all that's going to have to change. The question is, who's going to step up to the plate and start leading?
P.S. By the way, this isn't rocket science, people have been building passive dwellings since time immemorial. I mean, what do you think people did before electricity, a/c and central heating, anyway?
The problem is that it is hard to retrofit. Yes, you can put in new windows (which isn't at all cheap), but if you have thin walls, it won't help as much as you might thing.
Retrofitting outward might be very difficult, but inward may work. In fact, the Florida example requires only an inch and a half. That's very little square footage a home owner would need to give up for a much more energy efficient house. Twelve inches would start taking bigger chunks of livable space away, but if the choice is less space or no power, that's pretty easy.
I'm also thinking about windows. Lets face it, windows are not used 24 hours a day but they're bleeding energy 24/7. How about some sort of window insert that blocks much of the energy loss for use after bed? Or during the work day (in conditions where the sunlight isn't needed for passive heating)? I know it sounds a bit crazy, but there is so much time when windows serve no purpose except to waste energy.
For that matter, even venetian blinds help to block the sun on summer days and reduce the amount of heat coming into the house.
Right now, I cannot get a new mortgage to build a new house. Despite having good credit and plenty of equity in my current home, I cannot even get my current loan refinanced. Believe me, I've been trying. The credit market is totally collapsing. The only way that I can get a new house is by literally building it myself, one nail at a time. Which is what I am now doing.
My crappy little 1,000 sq. ft. house is horribly inefficient. It was built over 80 years ago. It costs me about $1,400 each winter to heat. As it stands, getting the cash together for a minimum order of heating oil in the middle of winter is generally a nightmarish financial proposition. I just don't have the money. There's often a trip to the pawnshop involved.
If you increase the cost of energy to heat my house by, say, 50%, then my whole family would be screwed. I would literally not be able to afford to heat my house. My wife and children would have to go stay with other family members to avoid freezing. Probably my pipes would freeze and burst. It would be a horrible disaster for my whole family. You'd also have a lot of low-income people who, in desperation, resort to using their ovens for emergency heat, which always leads to high numbers of residential fires and deaths.
Pricing energy high enough to force extremely efficient new construction is a great way to get upper middle class people to build smarter houses. And it would also crap all over the poor, pushing people who live right on the edge as it stands and forcing us into total disaster right in the middle of winter when things are hardest for us all as it is.
Energy is already expensive. If I had the money to build a new house on a whim, don't think that I wouldn't have done that long ago. Taking more money out of my pocket is not going to bring me any closer to being able to realize that dream.