I sat in on an energy discussion with our editorial board and two members of senior management of San Diego Gas and Electric Co. last week.
All who attended the meeting agreed there is no short-term solution to the problem. California, to begin with, has a demand problem that is growing many times faster than new power plants can be built. If San Diego is to get l million new residents by 2020, as is the prediction, you can imagine what the demand will be like if it is tight as a drum now.
Solution: More supply through new plants and facilities. In order to expedite the construction, state government has to streamline the rules and regulations that govern the construction cycle.
No matter what the governor does, the start-to-finish construction time-frame is between two and three years. Basically, life in the area of energy production and availability is going to be interesting for the next several months.
I did come across some interesting facts about saving energy. Conservation is going to be with us for a long time to come. Here are some interesting ones I discovered:
– Replace incandescent lights (your average light bulb) with compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) which use 75 percent less energy to produce the same amount of light. If each household in San Diego replaced four 100-watt light bulbs around the house with an equivalent 27-watt CFL, more than 700,000,000 kilowatt-hours would be saved each year. That’s the same as saving 120,000 barrels of oil, or putting it another way, enough electricity to power l,000 homes.
– One CFL lasts as long as nine regular light bulbs.
– Install motion sensors on your exterior security lights. This will reduce the use of energy from nine hours to one hour. If just 10 percent of the homes in San Diego made this change, the savings would be in the 1,400,000 kilowatt-hours per-year range, or lighting for several hundred homes a year.
– Furnaces are huge energy users. If we just turn them down two degrees, we would save enough energy to heat 20,000 homes for a day. Let’s get crazy and go for five degrees and shoot for 50,000 homes.
– For real savings, try curtailing the hours you wash and dry your clothes. If you wash two loads of laundry per week and switch from hot water to cold, you save 3,300 gallons of hot water per year. If 10 percent of San Diego County households switched from hot to cold water, we would cut our natural gas usage by 2 million therms each year. To measure that, an average home uses 50 therms of gas each month.
To the balance sheet:
Credit: To Bill Randall and his team at Randall International in Carlsbad for not letting the FEAR of a recession bother him or his sales force. The manufacturer of luxury accessories for upscale hotels and resorts just inked a partnership with one of the world’s largest hospitality companies, Ecolab. The marriage between Randall, a $10 million manufacturer of luxury lotions, shampoos and other first-class products, and Ecolab, a $3 billion giant in the industry, is a real coup. Congrats to Bill Randall and his team.
Credit: To Yousef Abrahim of the engineering and capital projects unit of the city of San Diego for receiving the Earl Hayden Award for being the Project Manager of the Year. Yousef was the lead on the city/county animal shelter project. Congratulations, Yousef.