Suffolk Exec is Trying to Set Up A Sound-Region Energy Summit for July 24

The idea of holding a closed-door meeting among public officials in the Long Island Sound area to talk about regional energy needs is a good one, and Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy, who is planning just such a summit for July 24, is off to a good start, with Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal having accepted Levy's invitation.

This press release summarizes who else is invited -- New York's governor and attorney general, for example -- but other than Blumenthal, the list seems light on Connecticut officials. They need to be there too, or else all the good interstate feelings that came out of the anti-Broadwater effort might dissipate. 

The 26-Toilet Mansion: How Much Energy Use is Too Much?

Rich people who live in big houses in Greenwich are upset that an even richer person wants to put up an even bigger house in their neighborhood – specifically one with almost three-quarters of an acre of floor space and 625,000 cubic feet of volume.

I’d never heard of a house being measured in cubic feet, but I guess it’s a good gauge of vastness and cavernousness: a 625,000-cubic-foot house must have some high ceilings.

I think what’s really galling the neighbors though is the realization of how hard it will be to keep up with the Joneses (irrelevant aside: did you know that the Joneses in the phrase 'keeping up with the Joneses' were Edith Wharton's family, on her mother's side?). The Greenwich Time reports:

Another concern for residents is that the mansion has far more floor space devoted to Turkish baths, Finnish baths and other amenities, than living space normally found in single-family homes, Lee said.

"A single-family doesn't need 26 toilets," he said. "Why are there 26 toilets there?"

The owner, by the way, is a woman named Olga Korgan. Here’s what her lawyer says:

"It's the way people who can afford it like to live," he said.

To me it raises other questions: how much energy does a 26-toilet, 625,000-cubic-foot house use? And isn’t it time for local communities to start changing zoning regulations to make sure houses have as small a carbon footprint as possible?

They already regulate how much paving you can have, how close to the wetlands you can build, how close to the street and neighboring properties you can build, how tall the house can be, etc. All those are more or less important, I guess. But if limiting the affects of climate change requires a million small actions to go along with a few big ones, energy efficiency in houses is a good place to start.

It Would Be Nice If We Could Pick Up the Pace on Clean Energy Projects, Even Small Ones Like This Proposal for Block Island

I suppose it’s wise to go slowly before we approve new clean energy projects, like the wave energy project that Rhode Island and a company called Oceanlinx are working on for the waters off Block Island. On the other hand, we’re sort of in a global climate crisis, and speed can be a virtue. Here’s how the Block Island Times describes what still has to happen to get this small – 1.5 megawatt – project built:

The state energy office hasn’t yet decided whether it will be the state or Oceanlinx that applies for permits. Once that is decided, there could be a long wait: procedures for permitting by the state’s Coastal Resources Management Council and the federal Energy Regulatory Commission are still being written, although Dzykewicz said federal permitting for a pilot plant has been issued before and should take no more than six months.

Most crucially, it won’t be clear until early next year whether the General Assembly is willing to approve $45 million in revenue bonds to finance the project.

If the state legislature fails to create a state power authority next session, then the state’s Economic Development Corporation could initiate the bonds, said Dzykewicz — but the General Assembly would still need to give its blessing.

We wouldn’t want to act rashly and end up making things worse. On the other hand, as I said once before, if we’re going to move slowly, we need to hurry up about it.

Personal Energy Consumption and How to Cut It

One of the hardest things about living in the outer suburbs for someone with an environmental conscience is figuring out how to cut down on the amount of energy we use.

To use the most obvious example: Almost everything we do requires a car. The supermarket is a mile away, along a narrow road with no sidewalks that is downhill going and uphill coming home – just far enough and dangerous enough and strenuous enough to make it inconvenient to walk with a lot of groceries. Most of our kids' friends live in our town but none live within walking distance, and the hills on the backroads and the traffic on the bigger roads are a disincentive to biking, to say the least.

Here’s the amount of driving my wife and I had to do last weekend, to get the kids to and from their social and recreational events: a 3-mile round trip to karate lessons; a 5-mile round trip to a little league game; a 5-mile round trip to a birthday party; a 20-mile round trip to another birthday party; two 5-mile round trips to pick up each kid after the birthday parties; a 42-mile round trip to a dance recital; a 24-mile round trip to pick up kid at a friend’s house after the dance recital; 14-mile round trip to birthday party. That’s 113 miles just to ferry kids back and forth. We drive a 2004 Honda CRV and a 1996 Subaru Outback, which I’m happy to say has about 105,000 miles on it. So I guess we used about five gallons of gas – not outrageous but when you add in the time we spent sitting in the car, it’s an expensive, gas-consuming activity. And considering that my commute is about the same -- 120 miles a week -- running the kids back and forth used as much gas as getting to and from work.

Our house needs a new roof, thanks to a couple of incompetent contractors. The roof is flat and the house is on a hill in a small clearing, so it gets plenty of sun. We thought it would be a good time to look into photo voltaic cells. I haven’t gotten any further than using the energy-saving calculator that the NYSERDA website links to, but based on that it seems as if a solar energy system for our house would cut the amount of energy we buy from NYSEG by almost half, which isn’t bad. To do that, though, we’d have to lay out almost $9,000 for a PV system, and that’s after several state-subsidized incentives that seem both generous and easy to take advantage of (to get the incentives, you have to use a state-authorized PV installer; most of the incentives actually go directly to the installer, so he is responsible for the paperwork; and all the parts and equipment are guaranteed for five years). Cutting our electricity purchases by almost half seems like a lot to me. But the financial savings aren’t that great – almost $600 a year, at today’s electric rates. So it would take us 15 years to make up our $9,000 investment.

Our friends who run the Fountainhead wine shops in Norwalk and Bedford Hills, and the Fat Cat Pie Company in Norwalk, sent out a mailer last week that has the usual promotions and information about their wines. But it also said this:

Save your cooking oil for Fat Cat Car
We are in the process of converting the engines of two diesel cars to use recycled vegetable oil to facilitate locomotion. The cars will be on the road delivering pizza from Fat Cat Pie Co., wine from Fountainhead and coffee and breakfast from Fat Cat Joe. They will be up and cruising Fairfield County in April so look out for Fat Cat Cars coming to a neighborhood near you soon…

I guess that’s one way to do it.

Out on Block Island, where all the electricity is created by diesel-burning generators, the state of Rhode Island wants to put wave-driven turbines in the ocean. The estimate is that it would cut electric costs for local consumers by 15 to 18 cents per kilowatt hour, which unless I’m completely muddle-headed sounds like a 15 to 18 percent reduction. One of the concerns of course is that cheaper electricity will prompt Block Islanders, who use relatively little electricity (probably in part because air conditioning in summer is rare), to use more, negating whatever gains the waves create.

A couple of weeks ago Andy Revkin wrote a piece for the Times Week in Review about reducing our carbon footprint, and he quoted Charles Komanoff, an energy economist who I remember from my days as a reporter because he used to travel to White Plains for hearings (about Indian Point, I think) by putting his bike on the train and then cycling to the hearing room. Andy quoted him as saying:

"There isn't a single American household above the poverty line that couldn't cut their CO2 at least 25 percent in six months through a straightforward series of fairly simple and terrifically cost-effective measures."

A couple of days later, Komanoff wrote on Gristmill that he had gotten a dozen e-mails from people questioning his assertion and wanting to know how they could achieve what he said they could achieve. Here's what he says -- a list of unglamorous but, considering that he knows what he's talking about, no doubt effective things to do.