Alaska’s Capital Goes Green After Avalanche Cuts Power Lines
Juneau, the capital of Alaska and a popular cruise-ship stop, has had little to celebrate since an avalanche wiped out the lines supplying it with hydroelectricity. But four weeks later it has become a model for energy conservation, with its citizens doing everything from unplugging tumble-driers to regulating airport runway lights.
It is a crisis no American metropolis would wish for itself. On 16 April, a roaring snow-slide in the Coastal Range made matchsticks of pylons linking the city to the hydroelectric dam about 40 miles to the south that supplied 80 per cent of its power.
The good news was that the local provider had back-up diesel generators waiting to be cranked up in just such a situation. Less good is the expense. Residents, who already have to contend with a cost of living higher than almost anywhere in the US because of Juneau’s remoteness, were told to expect their power bills to quintuple during the three or four months that it would take to repair the lines.
Most homeowners will get their first glimpse of those new bills this week. But the pain may not be quite so bad as anticipated, thanks to an effort by citizens to cut back on energy consumption. It has been an unlikely go-green campaign that is already being seen as a lesson to the rest of America at a time when conservation, in times of rising oil prices, is touted for all.
Everyone has been doing their bit, including the city authorities, which took steps that included closing the municipal sauna, mothballing one of the two lifts in the main library and turning off the airport’s runway lights when planes are not landing or taking off. The hope is that some of the initiatives will endure after the avalanche damage is repaired, which may not be until early July.
Businesses have responded too. Televisions in display windows have gone dark. Department stores, hotels and offices have replaced some bulbs with energy-saving models and simply removed others.
At the convention centre, the thermostats have been notched down eight degrees to a not-so-toasty 60F. “Turn off, turn down, unplug,” Sarah Lewis, chairwoman of the Juneau Commission on Sustainability, said recently. “That’s what everyone is doing and being vigilant about and commenting when others are not.”
In all, the city, unreachable by road and with a population of 30,000, has managed to cut consumption by 30 per cent in less than a month, a margin some experts had thought impossible.
But the greatest contribution may have come from homeowners themselves, who have done everything from lighting paraffin lamps to rigging up clotheslines - tumble-driers being one of the greediest of household appliances - and forgetting the ironing. It seems that even in energy-guzzling America people can change their ways when the incentive is there.
“We sold all of our clothes pins the first day,” said Doug White, general manager at Don Abel Building Supplies. “I don’t think kids even knew what they were for, but they’re learning now.”
It is a phenomenon that was seen before in Brazil, when a drought starved the power grid of hydro-electric power in 2001. On that occasion, consumers were ordered to cut their use of power by 20 per cent or face fines.
It worked. “In two months, the whole country cut their demand by 20 per cent, and they never really returned to the same level of consumption after that,” said Alan Meier, of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.
©independent.co.uk
if they can do it, so can everyone else……………
Hanging the clothes out is a wonderful way to go greener. First, you get some exercise and have an opportunity to enjoy the outdoors. Then you save a bit of electricity and as a by-product, lower your energy bill. Of course, the clothes smell better, and if you do it carefully most don’t need ironing at all.
Rainy days here in Hilo, the ‘rainiest’ city in the country, make it more difficult, but waiting till tomorrow to do laundry works for me.
But, in this weird system, the power company charges me more if I use more kwh, but gives businesses and industry rate breaks if they increase consumption.
One of the biggest local complaints is that we have to wear coats for trips to the doctor or grocery store. The AC [which NO ONE ELSE uses] is set at the same 60 degrees that the heating plants in Juneau are set at.
in suburban America you are not allowed to hang your clothes out side. Most subdivisions have rules against it that are vigorously enforced. Thus we all have to use dryers. Will there be a movement to remove these arcane rules from homeowners covenants all across the nation? Who will be the first to suggest such a thing?
Necessity is the mother of invention…
In our case; Necessity is the Mother of Motovation.
Fascinating. This shows the benefit of generating energy at your home and/or business. What you don’t use you could be passing along to your neighbors. And imagine if everyone on the street had that going on, imagine if the grid didn’t have to depend on plants as much, and the people didn’t have to depend on electricity as much. What a concept, and we could totally have that for us and for future generations if TRILLIONS of dollars hadn’t been spent on the wars of the past few years.
ENERGY=POWER what happens when you run out of fuel for your tanks and planes and humvees? What happens when the grid goes down or the economy propped up by corporate graft and government crashes and the currency goes to rock bottom and you can’t buy bullets for your guns or pay the cops to keep people controlled? All of a sudden your suburban asphalt nightmare comes home but this ain’t a horror movie and those things on your lawn aren’t zombies they’re the people from the city looking for a new home or maybe just a free meal. Maybe the lights will be off at your house too and you WON’T have any food because the grocery’s been empty for three weeks. Maybe then you’ll realize that your house is standing on former farmland and the only way to get any of that food back is to make a stand and grow something instead of grass and ornamental shrubs.
You should ask yourself right now if you have water and power, food and shelter set up for yourself, your family and your community. If the answer is no to any of them you should consider it your responsibility to do whatever you can to address these questions. The tide of the new century is rising, stay ahead of the disasters, plan ahead. Don’t be afraid to learn.
hopeful brewer, EXACTLY! And our national politic needs to become more informed about off the grid power production in the sense of subsidising it. Germany promotes individual home owners solar development by financing ten year loans at 2% interest.
The national power grid is also required by law to pay back home owner’s excess power production at 7 times the retail amount. Property values are now determined by the amount of southern exposure they have instead of the view.
The energy power lords in the US have such minuscule vision and such monumental greed!
Oh yes, the edible landscape, grow-food-not-grass makes for a beautiful yard. Also,
use gray water (from the shower or laundry) and soaker hoses, not water evaporating sprinkler systems.
The sequence of events is this. First the total available electricity is reduced and made very much more expensive. Then people find ways and means of reducing unnecessary electric power consumption. It rarely works the other way round, some fanatic readers of this site not included, that people spend their time and biological energy working out how to make do with less electricity, when it is cheaply available.
Lets extend the example to other spheres of modern living. There is the supply of water, the availability and cost of transport fuel, supermarket food stocks versus fresh local food, single family cooking versus large group kitchens. The total number of hours of paid employment work requiring high energy costs of transport, office and machinery, versus the time spent on minimizing energy costs, instead of maximizing short term profit. There are many aspects of individual, family unit and community owned energy cost of living resources which could be energy cost shared and spared, with reassignment of human work. The laws of physics say that everything costs with energy loss and entropy gain. Thats real carbon money.
Sun drying clothes in Juneau could take a long long time!
Kayaker: It’s the wind that dries the clothes. Also, Juneau has sun half the night.
The world’s worst electric problem is peak power consumption. All we need are meters (on fairly large users at first, it’s cheaper) that register power usage on demand, and then peak power consumption can be accurately billed.
What if, say, for the 11:00-5:00 period on a hot July day, your electric bill was going to go up 500%? Would you be savvy enough to overcool your house just before 11:00, saving on your AC needs at peak power time? Would you turn off the bathroom light? Would you postpone your computer use at all? Would you hang up the laundry? Maybe.
Negawatts mean fewer brownouts. No blackouts. No stoplights going dead for an hour in your town. What’s that worth to your community?
Next, suppose that part of your power was from an intermittent source, say, wind or solar, and the power company could accurately predict hourly power availability two days in advance. Let’s say that your community’s pumped hydro power storage is a bit limited. Could you run the community’s electric grid a little more efficiently with selective negawatts during power crunch time?
I live in South Korea, just north of Seoul, and I’ve been to Japan a couple times. It seems to me that virtually no one in both countries has a clothes dryer. Almost everyone lives in apartments and yet they hang their clothes to dry on good old fashioned drying racks. You see them everywhere. It’s just a natural part of life here. Some folks have them on their balconies, others dry their clothes indoors. I personally dry mine indoors because of the air pollution. In any case, it is not a big deal to do it. I adjusted quite easily. Drying all your clothes on the line is the way to go.
Because I don’t live in a development with covenants, I didn’t pay a lot of attention, but either the state leg, or the County Council recently was working on doing away with bans on solar clothes dryers [as we call them when the sun is out]
As for the wind drying the clothes, I remember as a kid we would hang out clothes when it was well below freezing. First the clothes would freeze, then the wind would dry them. That is one of the best clothes softener ever.
In Havana, clothes are also hung on balconies and roofs and back porches to dry. All the while I was there, I washed my clothes by hand and hung them out. It’s easier to do some every day then to make a big project of it, except for bedding and towels, of course.
Funny how all these backward, primitive, “third world” places do as a matter of course what is unthinkable or illegal in the US ‘burbs.
Here in Malaysia, we wash a few things most every day. Soaking the clothes over night then rinsing them well gets them cleaner with less detergent than working them to death by hand, let alone beating them up in a washing machine. On sunny hot days, most days here, clothes are dry and almost starched in a couple of hours. Like most tropical buildings, we’ve got good sized porches. Most clothes are hung under them so the they don’t fade in the sun. The porches also take care of the long rainy season, tho the clothes may take a day to dry.
Hand washing is exercise to be sure. But I find an hour rinsing a couple shirts, a pair of shorts and a sarong or a batch of light towels a lot more satisfying than an hour at a high tech gym. And cheaper too.
My mom managed to dry clothes for three boys and a husband back in NJ with a clothes line for years. Yeah, they froze in the winter but dried in the low humidity air. Rainy period? Clothes in the cellar. Or hung in the garage, since the car was made to withstand the rain. And ironing did go faster than it did after she got a “modern” drier.
Best of all, you almost never have to forgo wearing something because it’s in the wash.
Some years ago, a Japanese professor (can’t recall his name) invented a washer for the 21st century that utilizes ultrasonics that not only gets clothes clean but cuts water useage and eschews environmentally destuctive laundry detergent-a true advancement.
But when he tried to introduce his idea here, the washer mfrs. (GE Ecomagination, et al) and their uber ally the laundry mfrs. circled the wagons and declared war on a man who wanted share a vision while saving the environment and giving the public a beter way to wash.
As with many other inventors and their ideas, he was declared persona non grata and sued for milions, and his invention was blocked from being shipped to US shores!
I remember the show on TV about the ultra-sonic washer.
At May 18th, 2008 5:31 am jpoverseas wrote>>My mom managed to dry clothes for three boys and a husband back in NJ with a clothes line for years. Yeah, they froze in the winter but dried in the low humidity air. Rainy period? Clothes in the cellar. Or hung in the garage, since the car was made to withstand the rain. And ironing did go faster than it did after she got a “modern” drier.<<
jpoveseas we did the same thing back in the 70’s in NJ too. But then a new natural gas drier showed up and the clothes line went to the ash bin of history.
NMBILL I saw an episode of Star Trek Voyager, where the “Sonic Shower” was the norm, and the chief engineer, B’elanna Tores, used it to get the grime off after working on the warp drive. As you can imagine water would be tough to find in space and the Sonic Shower makes perfect sense on a Star Ship. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait until the 24th century before they become available