A few nice things....

I've had a few neat experiences over the last week that made me smile:

• The lady I buy my honey-based face moisturizer from at the farmer's market said she would refill my plastic containers for me.
• I ran out of the dried sage leaves I picked over the summer for my tea, and I found a really good deal on a sage plant at a local nursery that should get me through the winter.
• One of the guards at work told me how he makes his own dry oatmeal raisin mixture to take to work for breakfast, and just adds boiling water to cook it when he gets to work. I'm going to copy him. Now I don't have to buy the pre-packaged (and sugar-filled) stuff anymore.
  
• My dad showed me how he's hooked up his furnace to deep cycle batteries and an inverter in case the power goes out. The same set up will be good to hook up to a solar panel.
• Gord and the 'bag girl' at the grocery store chatted about being vegetarian while packing our groceries into our cloth bags.
  

Just a few nice things to be grateful for....

Picture courtesy this website

EPCOR and Foreshadowing

Beware: sarcasm ahead!

While listening to the news on the way home from work yesterday, and while driving to work this morning, spokesperson for the local electricity company, EPCOR, warned us all that power outages were a certainty sooner rather than later. He stated that our population has doubled and Alberta absolutely needs more transmission lines immediately, preferably yesterday, and that without them we'll all be in the dark in short order. His sound bites on the radio were full of urgency and anger, saying haughtily that Alberta shouldn't conduct itself this way -- it's like continuing to drive your car around when the low fuel light is blinking and you just keep ignoring it. The implication being that you should stop and fill up, you idiot! And, that we should just stop and build more transmission lines you idiot! Or we're all going to be freezing/boiling in the dark/light here any minute!! Be afraid, be very afraid!

Now, am I just suspicious and cynical or is EPCOR laying the groundwork for Nuclear Power! to come in and save the day? Ya sure, they're talking about transmission lines now, but with all that population growth it isn't just new transmission lines that we're going to need is it? It's more electrical capacity, to send down those bright shiny new wires. A few brownouts and blackouts or, horror of horrors, being asked to cut down your own personal power use, will convince people that of course we need more power plants, and thank goodness there is this nice power company just waiting patiently to build us a nice new power plant. And not a coal power plant, oh no. Alberta is way too 'green' for that, we'll build a nuclear plant, right here where we've been considering putting one all along, while we go through this open and transparent consultation process with the good sheeple of Alberta.

Whew, that was close! We almost had to cut down our consumption of something! Good thing we finally woke up and saw that metaphorical fuel light blinking and whipped into the nearest filling station before that last drop of fuel ran dry (or maybe that blinking warning light ain't so metaphorical?). Thanks Mr. EPCOR man, for scaring me into realizing that I need a nuclear power plant! Don't those come with hundreds of years worth of toxic waste though? Oh, don't worry my little head about that? Oh. Ok then.

Picture courtesy the Humble Narrator

Earth Hour Tomorrow!

Just a reminder that Earth Hour is tomorrow, from 8 to 9 pm your local time. I found out yesterday that my home town of Fort Saskachewan will be participating, which is very neat!

Not everyone agrees* that gestures like these make any real difference, or cause any long term habit changes, but I'm going to be radically optimistic and say that it sure can't hurt, and that you never know what small action will be the catalyst for bigger action!

*See comments

The Tao of Tea?

It's funny how sometimes when I'm at work, my green efforts are somewhat lackluster. It seems like when I'm at work, where my activities are so different from at home, that I forget to do the green things I would do automatically at home. I am reasonably good about bringing my lunch to work, so I don't buy pre-packaged stuff from the cafeteria, and I do bring home my baggies and containers to wash and reuse. But my weakness had been my teacup warmer.

I'm sure you've seen these little hotplate-like devices, that keep your hot beverage relatively hot for hours on end. I got mine for Christmas from a co-worker several years ago when we still did an office present exchange. I used it every day, sometimes even burning my tongue because of how hot it kept my tea! There were even times when I would accidentally leave it on overnight, coming to work the next day to a well-cooked cup of tea-goo.

I've been feeling more and more guilty using this thing lately, thinking that I really don't need my tea to be kept at a certain temperature. Surely I could do better at remembering to drink it while it is hot, and just dealing with drinking some of it cold, if I left it too long. So last week I unplugged the thing, and it sits on my desk now as a slightly elevated cup holder. I may just put it away and bring out my little cup pillow instead, that has herbs in it that smell nice when warmed by the teacup resting upon it.

The more I think about it, the more it seems like one of the lessons of tea is that there is a time for everything. That just as it takes time to make a good cup of tea, there comes a point when the tea cools down and tea-time is over. And that the in between time is made for enjoying and savoring the tea while it lasts. In the bustle of the day, it is good to take time for tea, and good to get back to work afterwards.

At Last: 2007 Riot for Austerity numbers

Over at Learning to Step Lightly, Alexah has been diligently posting her Riot For Austerity updates on a monthly basis. In contrast, I've been procrastinating for many months, always telling myself I'll post them when I get one more month of numbers tallied up. And always hoping that the next month would lower my averages. But, this never happened and it's time to face up to the truth of the numbers for 2007.

In a nutshell, we consumed less of some things and more of others compared to 2006. I had hoped to make further reductions in every category, especially since we weren't even actively trying to reduce our consumption in some areas yet in 2006. Halfway through 2007 we joined the 'Riot' and really stepped up our efforts - at least I thought we did.

Here are the comparisons. The first number listed is the North American Monthly Average (NAMA) for a 2-person household, where applicable.

Electricity (lighting, cooking)

• NAMA: 916 kWh
• Our 2006 average: 316.7 kWH which equals 34.6% of the NAMA
• Our 2007 average: 327.58 kWh which equals 35.8 of the NAMA. We subscribe to Bullfrog Power, which is 100% wind power. According to Riot rules, we get a 4:1 credit for wind power, so we do actually meet the 90% reduction target in this category. But it would be nice to reduce the actual kWhs, nonetheless.
  

Natural Gas (heating, hot water)

• NAMA: 106 gJ
• Our 2006 average: 8.93 gJ which equals 8.4% of the NAMA - 90% reduction goal met
• Our 2007 average: 9.29 gJ which equals 8.8% of the NAMA - 90% reduction still met, but it's close.

Water

• NAMA: 6000 gallons
  
• Our 2006 average: 1600 gallons which equals 26.7% of the NAMA
• Our 2007 average: 1416.67 gallons which equals 23.6% of the NAMA - a bit lower, so this is good. Using the shower/tap grey water for flushing the toilet seems to be helping.

Garbage

• NAMA: 270 lbs
  
• Our 2006 average: 15.125 lbs which equals 5.6% of the NAMA - 90% reduction goal met
• Our 2007 average: 67.41 lbs, which equals 25% of the NAMA - this is a big jump but I know why it went up so much: we took some things to the landfill for some people who would otherwise have had to pay to put in in their city landfill. The good news is that we salvaged quite a lot of what had been originally slated for the landfill and we are using that stuff ourselves around the house and yard/garden.
  

Vehicle Fuel

• NAMA: 316 litres
• Our 2006 average: 308.58 litres which equals 97.7% of the NAMA. This is our Achilles heel - we live in the country and drive to the city for work. One vehicle is a diesel and logs about 600 kms per week. The other vehicle is gasoline powered and logs about 250 - 300 kms a week.
  
• Our 2007 average: I only have the figures for my diesel car so far, and we seem to be headed for about the same level of consumption as 2006. The good news is that the second vehicle is now a smaller car instead of a pick up truck, presumably with better mileage, so our 2008 numbers should be lower. But until we move closer to work, or find some way to work fewer days a week, this number will remain too high.
  

Consumer Goods

• NAMA: $1667 (US or CDN, they're at par with each other these days)
• Our 2006 average: $1019.51 which equals 61.2% of the NAMA
• Our 2007 average: $1010.63 which equals 60.6% of the NAMA - virtually identical. We have started changing what we spend money on more so than how much we spend, as we slowly acquire things like gardening tools, some hand-crank lamps, some good kitchen knives and other things on our list of things to prepare for a self-sustaining lifestyle. This number could well go up, as we invest in rain-collecting equipment, and maybe dig a well.
  

Food

• I didn't keep very good track of our proportion of bulk, locally grown, organic foods vs. long-distance/non-organic food consumption, but I do know the former increased, since we had a little garden in 2007 and went to the farmer's market almost every week for fresh produce. I doubt I'll keep good numbers on this actually, we're just steadily working on eating more and more locally as time goes by.

So there it is - we've done alright in some areas and not great in others, although we are at least below average in every category. And I'll try and post these numbers monthly from now on!

Electricty Info from EPCOR

Well, after several rounds of email between myself, EPCOR and the Office of the Electricity Consumer Advocate, I received information about the price that large commercial consumers of electricity pay in Alberta. The bottom line is, EPCOR says they pay essentially the same as small business and residential customers do. The big consumers apparently have to pay the "flow through price" for electricity, which is a price that can fluctuate on a second-by-second basis. Small business and residential customers pay a price that is set monthly, which is sort of an average of what the price has been for the month.

This surprises me. I really expected that the big consumers would get some kind of bulk rate. I asked straight out if there were any other discounts that these consumers received that small customers did not, and I was told no.

I have a hard time really believing this. I have become quite skeptical over the past couple of years, and suspicious of big companies and the 'spin' they put on everything. So it could be that I am just biased and that what EPCOR is telling me is actually the whole truth. But it just seems to run contrary to how the world operates these days, i.e., that big consumers get discounts for buying in bulk. I will have to put this matter on the 'back burner' (?solar oven?) for now and mull it over for a while.

No reply

A few days ago, I blogged about my suspicion that large commercial consumers of electricity are given a cut rate on their electricity prices. I had emailed our local electricity provider here in this part of Alberta, EPCOR. I did receive a reply from them, but their response was just a regurgitation of the information available on their website that pertained to residential and small business customers, not large commercial customers. So I replied to their email, letting them know that I hadn't asked about residential rates, but large commercial electricity rates. I receive an auto-reply saying I would receive a real reply in 3-5 days. It is Day 6, so I sent them another email asking for an answer, or to be directed to someone who could answer the question for me.

I'm willing to bet this email will be ignored just as the previous one was.

If that's the case, I will have to find another way to get the information. Maybe I will have better luck with a phone call, much as I hate making phone calls like that. I think I will have to ask Greenpa how he was able to get his information, that in his area of the US commercial companies pay half price or less for their electricity.

Tomatoes!

While watering the garden today I noticed that a few of the tomatoes on our one tomato plant are almost ready to pick! I have never attempted to grow tomatoes before, so this is quite exciting to me. I have been amazed overall that the things I have planted have actually grown, for the most part, and amazed even further that bugs or plagues or some other such disaster hasn't yet befallen the growing plants.

I am toying with the idea of canning a few things, but I'm not sure if I'm brave enough to try that. I don't have any of the equipment, but I'm sure I could find what I needed at Value Village or somewhere like that. I probably won't try doing that until next year anyway, when I have some more produce to make it worthwhile to preserve by canning.

Oh, and stay tuned for an update about the EPCOR situation I wrote about in my previous entry....

We are Bullfrog Powered!

I received email notification today that as of this month, our house will be considered "Bullfrog Powered." Bullfrog Power is a Canadian company based in Ontario that recently started offering services in Alberta. Here is how Bullfrog explains how it works:

When you sign up with Bullfrog Power, you don’t need to switch electricity suppliers. Your electricity supplier tells us exactly how much power your home consumes. We then inject green electricity onto the grid on your behalf to match the amount of power you use. You continue to pay your local supplier for your basic electricity service, and receive a separate bill from Bullfrog for the greening of your power supply. And because you continue drawing power from the grid in the same way, there is no change in service reliability. It’s that simple.

Bullfrog uses the extra 2 cents per kilowatt hour we pay to ensure that an equivalent amount of Alberta-generated wind-powered energy is injected into the power grid on our behalf. The email they sent me today says this will cost us an extra $7.22 per month, based on our electricity consumption over the past 12 months. More wind power generation means less coal-fired power, which the Bullfrog People tell me will result in our household reducing our greenhouse gas emissions by this much per year:

• CO2: 1.24 tonnes
• NO: 2.08 kilograms
• SO2: 3.16 kilograms
  

This also reduces our consumption number for the 90% reduction project, since according to the project organizers, "Hydro and Wind are deemed to have a 4 to 1 payback over other methods - you get 4 times as many." According to our power company we used an average of 360.981 kWh per month over the previous 12 months. Since we get a 4:1 credit for wind power, this is the equivalent of 90.25 kWh per month. By the 90% rules we are permitted 91.6 kWh per month, which means we have slightly exceeded the 90% reduction target! The best part is, I know we can go even lower once we convert more bulbs to CFLs and keep our TV turned off.

I invite any Albertans or Ontarians reading this to check out Bullfrog Power for themselves and consider spending the extra 2 cents per kWh. You can probably offset the extra cost by taking some conservation measures, and do even more good that way!