Eat your Energy Efficiency Vegetables before you have your Renewable Energy Dessert.

1) Replacing your most used incandescent lights with LEDs ranks as the #1 bang-for-the-buck energy efficiency and anti-global warming action by the respected energy think tank The McKinsey Company. (Skip Compact Fluorescents—the dumbed down cheap new designs don’t last and will leak mercury when they blow.) LEDs last 20 years and use 90% less electricity which comes mainly from burning coal. Start with all recessed cans in the kitchen. As lights make up 25% of your electric bill on average, you can save 15-20% of the average electric bill in an afternoon by just changing your lightbulbs. The Ecosmart line by Cree at Home Depot are dimmable, have a good mix of blue and yellow light and come in complete can light fixtures. You just unscrew your old can light, attach the new fixture to the pull plug, and push in the whole fixture. Done. Anybody can do this in 1 minute per fixture. Another benefit is that you can insulate right on top of these LED can lights in your attic—-no fire danger as there is 90% less heat too. This eliminates massive stupid chimney’s of leaking heat at every can light site. It makes LEDs Doublesmart. . .

Sylvania and others have 8 Watt screw in LEDs for low light areas like hallways. My own hallway had three old brass candelabras with 5×40 Watt lights each. I replaced them with 8 Watt LEDs—-plenty of light to walk through a hall and 25x/96% less electricity(24W vs 600W). These are the kinds of BIG Solutions that will get us to net zero carbon use in our houses and at work FAST IF WE ALL DEPLOY THEM NOW..

One caveat— People are going to be putting these 20 year lights in their wills—the kids will be fighting over who gets the LEDS…

2) Unplug your Vampire Electronics. An average American house has 20 Vampire Electronics—electronics that suck power even when you aren’t using them. Anything with a lit up light is still “On”. Vampires are now about 10% of the electric load. Let’s get smart and lower our electric load by unplugging them. (You can test how many Watts they are sucking with a Kill A Watt meter available at many libraries). The biggest sucker is the cable box at 28W, followed by flatscreen TVs, stereos, printers, gameboxes, computers, cell phone/ipod/ipad charge cords left plugged in (they still draw power), microwaves etc. The first thing to do is set up your main vampire forests with power bars that you can turn off with one switch. If you don’t want to be bothered with the physical unplugging, Radio Shack has wireless shutoffs with little antennas that you can turn off from a hand-held remote. For computers, use your deep sleep mode settings, and shift to cloud computing (much less energy used), or just turn your computer off at the power bar anytime you are gone more than 10 minutes.

Unplug your electronic vampires and save 10% on your electric bill in an afternoon. . If we all pull the plugs, we can shut down 10% of the coal electric plants in the United States and it won’t cost a dime.

3) Replace all of your main appliances over time: your refrigerator, washer, dishwasher— with much more efficient models. And retire that hot-tub and/or the extra fridge in the garage with a case of beer in it—it was a nice ride in those heavy finned cars with a throaty 400 horsepower, but the party’s over. Time to pay the piper. All refrigerators (the biggest electrical user in the house) that are more than 10 years old should be replaced now—the new ones use ¼-1/3 the electricity. Be sure to get a right-sized model (smaller) with the freezer on the bottom and no energy wasting features like a butter warmer (INSIDE A REFRIG!).

Shift to an energy-saving front load washing machine that uses less than half the electricity and water and make sure you get a very fast spin dry. Then you will save more clothes drier electricity or line dry time because you will have much less water to dry out of your clothes. WHEN (not if) you install solar electric panels on your roof—we all will soon as they become competitive— without subsidies—with fossil fuels in the next 3-5 years. The subsidies that mostly European taxpayers paid to get solar to scale are working and prices are coming down fast with manufacturing at scale, large scale deployment and better designs. Learn how to cook well with a solar powered electric stove. It can be done. Remember—the goal is net zero carbon energy use and we need to transition to an all renewable electric world with both central production from wind and solar farms and dispersed production from solar panels on our roofs.

4) Go net zero carbon energy for heating and cooling. In this economy a lot of us are staying put in the same old house. Retrofit that house to be really tight. Make a plan and over time, double your walls, super-seal the air leakage, and quadruple your insulation. You will save a lot of money on lower energy bills. And there are many Federal, State, and local programs, grants, and tax incentives to help you do this. Soon, real estate listings will soon have “ES—Energy Saving” scores—this will help you tout what you did to sell your house down the road and get more money back. And don’t forget a smart “HRV”—Heat-Recovery-Ventilator to get plenty of healthy fresh air and still keep the hot or cold air you want. Remember, the goal is Net Zero Carbon Energy Use in your house. The McKinsey Company rates this the second best bang-for-the-buck energy efficient thing you can do after installing LED lights. Ultimately, go all renewable electric by installing an electric heat pump or mini-split run off renewable electricity and pull all of the carbon burning devices OUT OF YOUR HOUSE.

5) Join or form a community group buy of solar panels—with mass purchasing you save an additional 10-20% to add onto the utility, local, state and 30% Federal incentives for a 70-90% discount off regular purchase price. Solarize Portland and The Sierra Club have programs. Paybacks are fast. If you have no money, but still want to do something, talk to SunRun, Solar City or Sungevity about a solar lease that will cost you nothing. Your bills will go down about ¼-1/3 and you will pay back the Utility and the Bank that loans the money with the savings in energy costs. It now makes both environmental and economic sense. A first phase can make enough electricity from the sun to kill coal electric use. Plan for a second and third phase expansion later to eliminate both natural gas heat by shifting to solar electric, and oil transportation by shifting to sun-power supplied electric vehicles.

6) Buy an electric car in the next few years. There will be at least 12 electric cars to choose from in 2012. The fastest payback on your rooftop solar system is to drive on solar electricity from your roof instead of expensive gasoline. A great combination.

End the nightmare—go Renewable Electric. 

We can kill coal by getting very energy efficient with our electrical use.

We can kill oil by shifting to electric transportation supplied by wind and solar power.

We can kill natural gas by super-insulating our houses and shifting to smart advanced electric heating and cooling.

Become less of a consumer and more of a restorer.

We Can Fix This.