Stimulus sparks surge in energy conservation industry
A coming flood of federal stimulus money for Georgia’s energy conservation industry has state officials scrambling to line up their buckets. Full Story »
Posted by Derek HawkinsReview
The article mixes the concepts of energy efficiency and energy conservation, two quite different concepts (see my comment) and fails to focus the main issue: Energy efficiency through weatherization is a local, case by case, task. The base technologies are general, their application are not. It requires highly educated and experienced designers and well trained manpower. A lot of public (and journalists) education is needed.
As most journal articles in the subject these one mix to different concepts: efficiency and conservation. We engineers originally created the term "efficiency" to quantify machine performance: It is “the ratio of (useable) energy developed by a system to the energy supplied to it. Energy conservation is different from energy efficiency. We “conserve” by turning the system “off” when we don´t needed its services and by optimizing the operation so that it is “on” only when needed. When we turn on a light, our concern is how efficient the bulb is: How much “illumination” we get for every watt of electricity supplied. If we do not need the services the bulb provides (illumination) we turn it off, and we conserve energy (whether the bulb is energy efficient or not)