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The Power of a Shower

By Deb Niemeier On April 15, 2013 · 1 Comment

showerhead

I know I said my second post would be about solar financing, but I’m still working out the details. In the interim, I thought it might be interesting to relate a challenge I posed to my kids at the beginning of the year. I want our electricity and water bills to go down. They had a really good question: by how much? I suggested we should shoot for zero; they laughed, not being that thrilled about the prospect of showering in unheated collected rainwater.

Our compromise was that I would calculate the 3-year average of our water and electricity usage. At the end of the year, I would split any savings equally among the three of them or, if this year’s costs were higher, they would split the additional amount [...]

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Solar Purchase Motivations

By Deb Niemeier On February 26, 2013 · 7 Comments

IMG_2704Welcome to the first dispatch of eTakes, a blog on energy and the environment. I’m a professor of civil and environmental engineering. Over the next year, I’d like to use this blog to explore a wide range of topics with you, including ways to think about financing solar panels, the kinds of climate action plans cities in California are working on, how state agencies are reducing energy, and even investigating the amount of energy that is used to build my carbon fiber cello. I hope we can make this journey informative, insightful, and possibly even entertaining.

I recently installed home solar panels for electricity generation. I went into the process thinking it was pretty simple, but discovered that there were many decision points along the way. Today I thought I’d explore what motivates people to purchase solar panels.

There [...]

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