By Nick Hein, 2/26/20

A year after Ken and Barb installed their solar array with the help of Legacy Solar Co-op, it’s been performing even better than expected -producing more than 100% of their electric needs. That’s gotten them thinking, since their utility doesn’t pay them as much for the excess, they’d like to use it to offset (or eliminate) their natural gas usage. They wonder if replacing their current furnace, water heater and appliances with the most efficient models available, their rooftop array could produce all the energy they need to use in a year. Then they could completely disconnect the natural gas service.* So it looks like they could become 100% net-zero, and now the question is whether they should. Let’s join Ken and Barb one evening as they discuss it.

“Barb, I’ve been reading about something called ‘Deep Energy Retrofits’ where homeowners upgrade their insulation and mechanical systems so their solar array can provide all the power they need. It looks like something we could do.” “OK, I can see how that would be a good idea for the planet since we’d be completely free of fossil fuels, but does it make sense for us financially?” asks Barb. Ken replies: “I’m not sure yet, and it probably depends on how much we spend on the upgrade, but I read an article from one person who did it and found that it paid a better return than his 401k. He also liked the fact that the return was more predictable and the investment was going into his home.” (1) Read more

Nick Hein, 10/6/19

1. The Call to Action

A good friend of ours spends her summers in the Adirondacks at a family-owned wilderness camp north of Utica, NY and invited us to come and visit. As the summer was nearing an end, my fiance’ and I realized that we hadn’t taken a vacation and decided to go a few weeks after Labor Day when most of the vacation travel had settled down. However, this was also the week of the climate strike Day of Action and we wanted our travel to align with it even if we would be far away. We began considering our options for low-impact travel. Read more

Nick Hein, 4/25/19

1. Introduction:  Why have a strategy?

Earlier articles in this series have discussed sustainability in terms of the simple, low-risk, short-payback tactics with obvious benefits.  However, when it comes to the bigger and more expensive opportunities you need a strategy that will guide you to the most effective ones first and help you plan how to pay for them.  Currently the most common strategy is the payback calculation. This is a strictly monetary metric that says if you get your money back in a reasonable amount of time, and continue to save after that, then the project is worth it.  The problem with this approach is that it may miss synergies that can come about by combining projects, and can’t adapt to changing conditions.  In this article we’ll also talk about Fossil Energy (FE) reduction, and a 100% Renewable Energy (RE%) target strategy.  The new metrics have the benefit that they are absolute, meaning that they don’t depend on a baseline that might change over time.  As such they mark progress toward an absolute goal instead of a relative one. Here we’ll also track the traditional metrics like energy cost and payback time.

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Nick Hein, 1/28/19

Previous articles discussed the sustainability stair climb in general terms.  In this article we’ll outline a specific strategy to make real progress toward long-term sustainability goals.  Here’s why it’s important.  Your financial investments right now may be making 2-8% in conventional places like banks and money markets.  Alternatively, sustainability can give you a return from 10-80%, and your investment stays in your home where you can see and feel it.  In this article you’ll learn how to calculate that return and how to make it snowball so you can re-invest it. 

Rebates or other programs give you short-term rewards for changing behavior, but if you’re going to climb the whole stairway you need a way to see longer-term progress and set bigger goals.  A $100 rebate doesn’t help you as much as saving $100 every year, and using fewer fossil fuels this month doesn’t motivate you as much as eliminating them completely.  

In this article we describe how to track money saved during your sustainability efforts, in addition to the intangible benefits such as time-savings, convenience, comfort, safety, and quality of life. This will involve using spreadsheets, which we’ll show in sections.  There will be a link to the complete file, which should work with most spreadsheet programs.  Read more

By Nick Hein, 8/23/18

What is sustainability and how do you DO it? The answer depends partly on what you WANT it to be and what you CAN do. In this article we’ll describe the Sustainability Stair Climb basics. In future articles we’ll give some specifics, including the big step that solar PV from Legacy Solar Co-op can help you climb.

Introduction

First of all, what is sustainability and how do you DO it? There are the things in our daily lives that we need – like heat, light and food. Sustainability is just managing those resources so we’ll continue to have them as long as we need them. For our larger society it means clean air, clean water, healthy soil and wild places where nature can recover and regenerate the resources we’ve used. We can each do our part by making sure that we use only what we need and return things in the best possible condition. In our homes and lives we have some control of how we do that. So where should we start? Do you have an overall long-term plan or are you just committing random acts of greenness to collect rebate checks? I’ve found in my own journey, that I accomplish more when I have a plan. Read more