For most people in New Brunswick, the idea of time-based pricing of electricity seems pretty foreign. We’re used to a flat rate per kilowatt-hour for the electricity we use. However, just like any other product we use, the cost of generating that electricity varies quite dramatically based on how it was made – we just don’t see it at our end.

At certain times we are paying significantly more than it costs to generate, and at other times, we are paying significantly less – i.e. the utility is losing money selling it to us.

Unlike other products though, we can’t (yet) economically store electricity in large quantities, so it has to be produced as and when it is needed. During the year, we tend to use more electricity in the peak of summer and the peak of winter for air conditioning and heating than we on a mild September day. In the course of a day, we go through cycles too – people tend to get up, go to work, eat, and go to bed at roughly the same time – and so the electricity demand curve mirrors our personal activity levels.

Using Ontario as an example (publicly available data), we can see that in 2009, electricity demand was 10.7GW at a minimum and 24.4GW at a maximum – an increase of over 125 per cent. The larger that the margin becomes between minimum and maximum, the more expensive our electricity becomes, as we have to recoup the building cost for these power stations that aren’t used very often.

In fact in 2009, while Ontario had enough installed capacity to be able to supply the 24.4GW of electricity, the electricity demand only exceeded 20GW for approximately 20 days during the year.

By flattening the electricity demand curve we would be able to operate fewer power stations more frequently, and thus reduce (or at least limit increases to) the cost of our electricity supply.

One method of doing this is through time-based pricing. When electricity demand is low, our electricity is generally produced from sources that are the cheapest to run (such as nuclear and coal), and so the cost of generating that electricity is low.

As demand increases, increasing expensive to operate power plants are brought online to meet the temporary need, such as natural gas and oil. Time-based pricing would see that the price we pay for electricity more accurately reflect the cost of generating it – so using power in the middle of the day in August (peak period) would cost more than using power in the middle of the night in September (off-peak period).

This would accomplish two things. First, people and companies would start to shift their behaviour patterns to match the new pricing profile. Dishwashing or laundry could be saved until the late evening or early morning.

Power-intensive industries could reschedule certain activities to obtain cheaper electricity. This would have the effect of lowering the peak demand, and increasing the off-peak demand. Second, it would hopefully reduce overall energy consumption. Air conditioners and heaters might get adjusted a couple of degrees during the day when no one is actually in the house, due to the higher cost of electricity.

Some new technologies are needed, and some are on their way, such as smart metres, capable of recording the amount of electricity and time of use, which would also be capable of displaying the current power rate to consumers to aid in decision-making. Smart appliances are on the horizon, such as washers and dryers that automatically run when electricity is at its cheapest, and fridges that will delay compressor cycles at peak price times.

Future electric vehicles have the potential to charge themselves during off-peak hours, and re-sell electricity to the grid during peak hours for a profit, thus acting as a giant national battery of sorts.

Jurisdictions such as California and Ontario have already rolled out time-based pricing, with 3.6 million customers in Ontario expected to be on the new system by mid-2011. Ontario has three price bands for electricity (not including transmission and distribution) – On-Peak at 9.1 cents per kWh, Mid-Peak at 7.6 cents, and Off-Peak at 4.2 cents. Without wading into the NB Power debate here, it would be interesting to know how the deal will affect the future of time-based pricing in New Brunswick, regardless of which way it goes.

Watt is a word most people have seen – from their electricity bills to the labels on many electrical appliances – but it is also a word that many of us don’t have a good understanding of. We can’t pick one up, like a kilogram; or walk one, like a kilometre.

We just have to trust that the light bulb we put into the light socket really does consume 60 watts of electricity. So what is a watt?

The watt is a unit of power, which means it tells us how quickly we are using (or producing) energy. For electricity, we measure energy in Joules, and so 1 watt means that 1 Joule is being used every second.

Energy can be stored in many forms, and the energy in your food is just as useful as the energy in a lump of coal, or in the water stored behind a dam.

The energy stored in all three of these things can be converted into more useful forms of energy such as heat, light, sound, movement, and even more food – we just need different machines make it so.

The coal needs to be burned, the water dropped, and the food eaten. So if we could relate the watt to the amount of food we eat, it might become a little easier have a physical understanding of just what is in a watt.

A healthy adult body will burn about 2,000 calories in a day. The calorie is just another unit of energy, and is equal to a little over 4,000 joules – so it takes roughly 8,000,000 joules of energy a day to run an adult body.

That means on average, a typical North American uses about 100 joules a second, or 100 watts.

All things considered, that is a surprisingly small number. Before the advent of CFL bulbs, many people had (and some still do) several 100-watt bulbs in their house. Each of those bulbs was using the same amount of energy that a typical human requires to go about their daily business.

Add up all of those light bulbs in your house (and all the other users of electricity), and all of a sudden we see that the average Canadian house uses enough energy to support about 35 people – and that’s just your house.

It can be a little overwhelming to realize just how quickly and easily we can use up massive amounts of energy, without giving it a second thought. I’ll admit to borrowing (and adjusting) this fact from David Hughes of the Geological Survey of Canada.

If you took the average New Brunswicker and put them on a treadmill, and asked them to start walking to generate electricity, they could probably manage to generate 100 watts of electricity. If you paid them to do that for 40 hours a week, with two weeks of vacation and statutory holidays, it would take almost nine years to generate the same amount of energy as in a barrel of oil, and you’d have to pay them $140,000 even at minimum wage.

Makes you realize that even $100 a barrel, oil is still a pretty amazing deal – especially considering the average Canadian puts the equivalent of almost nine barrels of oil into their vehicle each year.

So what do we pay for different forms of energy?

For gas, we pay about $0.03 for a million joules of energy. It costs pretty much the same to buy that amount of energy in electrical form.

However, in food form, it costs roughly 11 times as much ($0.35) to buy that energy in potatoes, and 130 times as much in chicken ($4).

It’s easy to forget just how cheap the energy really is that we use in our homes and our cars – it just seems like a lot because we use such astronomical amounts of it. Most of the energy we use has been converted to and stored in its current form for millions of years – and we are consuming it an alarming rate, primarily because it is so cheap and readily available.

It’s staggering to think that in the last 25 years we have used as much oil as the rest of human history combined. I know, this is not a good news story for this festive time of year, but understanding is the first step to making a change.

In recent years the topic of energy efficiency and the role it will play in reducing our energy use and carbon dioxide emissions has become increasingly popular.

There is a societal belief that if we make cars, appliances and houses more fuel and energy efficient, then we are doing ‘our part’ to combat climate change.

The challenge is that we really need to focus on reducing the amount of energy we use, and unfortunately, improving energy efficiency does not always lead to energy reduction. This may seem counter-intuitive at first, so let’s look at some interesting statistics.

I found a car advertisement dated Oct. 20th, 1983. It was taken from The Daily Telegraph – a British newspaper – and advertises the ‘new’ Peugeot 205. This vehicle seems rather unremarkable at first – very 80’s – and does little to grab your attention until you start to read. This car was capable of getting 60 MPG (or 3.9 L / 100 km) on the highway, and 43 MPG in the city (5.4 L / 100 km). By today’s standards that is phenomenal. It is on par with today’s best performing hybrids, and far exceeds the fuel economy of most conventional cars available at present.

So what happened? Did we forget how to build fuel-efficient cars? Actually no, we didn’t. In fact, since 1983 we have made huge strides in improving fuel efficiency.

In 2007, the average car being sold in the United States used almost exactly half the amount of fuel per horsepower compared with cars built in 1983. Unfortunately, that same car weighs over 25 per cent more than it did 1983.

We’ve dropped the average 0-100 km/h acceleration time from 14 seconds to less than 10 in the same time period, and most importantly – to make our heavier cars go faster – we’ve more than doubled the horsepower in the average car, from 107 to 223.

So while our scientists and engineers worked hard to make our engines twice as fuel efficient, we also decided to double the size of them. The end result is that our average vehicle today consumes about the same amount of gas it did over 25 years ago.

Unfortunately, this problem isn’t just limited to cars – it applies to our homes as well.

Between 1990 and 2006, the energy used by the average refrigerator sold in Canada dropped by a staggering 50 per cent; dishwashers by an even more impressive 64 per cent; electric stoves by 31 per cent; and the list goes on.

In that same time period, however, total energy use in Canadian households actually increased by five per cent.

Why? Population growth is part of it – but what is more concerning is that we started to build bigger houses (up four per cent), and then started to put fewer people inside each of them (down eight per cent).

It is for these reasons that, despite all the talk we hear about energy efficiency and conservation, the World Energy Outlook still predicts a nine per cent increase in the amount of energy used in North America between 2006 and 2030.

We have an incredible amount of talent in this country and around the world to make massive gains in terms of energy efficiency, but we need to be careful not to negate those gains by always demanding bigger and better. Buying a new energy efficient fridge is a progressive step – but not if you put your old one in the basement to keep your beer cold!

Energy efficiency is important, but it’s critical that it go hand in hand with maintaining or reducing the size and power of the goods we consume so that our total energy consumption begins a downward trend.

So next time you’re out buying a vehicle, ask yourself whether you really need 225 horsepower, or whether 150 (or less) would do just fine.

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is a process where carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) is captured from the gases leaving a fossil fuel burning site, compressed into a liquid, and stored indefinitely in underground geological storage. It allows industries that burn fossil fuels (such as coal fired power stations, oil and gas facilities, cement factories, e.t.c) to continue burning fossil fuels while greatly reducing the amount of carbon dioxide released into the air.

There are a variety of different ways to do this, from chemical absorption processes, to combustion of fuels in pure oxygen, but all of them have the same effect: approximately 90% removal of carbon dioxide from the gases being emitted to the atmosphere.

Why hasn’t anyone heard of it?

Well, while the technology has been around to do this for decades, there is simply no economic reason to do so at the moment. Adding CCS to an existing combustion plant will increase the operating cost of the facility dramatically. A coal fired power plant would expect to see a 20-30% drop in output as a direct result of implementing CCS, meaning less electricity to sell to the public.

A few demonstration plants have sprung up around the world, showing us that it can be done, such as in Weyburn, SK, or Sleipner in the North Sea, or even In Salah in Algeria. The UK government has committed to building the worlds first coal fired power plant with commercial scale CCS, while Norway and the province of Alberta have also committed significant funds for large scale demonstration projects.

Many of these initial projects are driven by enhanced oil recovery, where injection of carbon dioxide assists in the recovery of oil. These projects are useful in the early stages of CCS technology, as the additional revenue from the oil makes CCS more economically attractive, so the technology gets developed; however, in the long term CCS will hopefully be used purely for carbon dioxide storage, and not to increase oil production.

Is it safe?

Carbon dioxide is an inert gas, meaning it doesn’t really react with anything under normal conditions. The idea is to inject the gas deep underground (we’re talking km here), into old, empty oil and gas fields, or even saline aquifers (underground water formations too salty to drink). With correct site identification, we should be confident that these sites can safely contain carbon dioxide indefinitely, since the same rock formations that held oil and gas in place for millions of years will hold the carbon dioxide in place. Obviously there is a need for prudent regulation, to ensure that projects that are developed are safe both for society and the environment.

Isn’t this just like pretending we don’t have a problem?

In a way, yes. It allows us to continue burbing fossil fuels, without having to search for alternative, inherently cleaner forms of energy. However, it does give us the opportunity to act now. I personally see it as a temporary solution. It allows us to take drastic action now to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions at a reasonable cost to society, while giving us perhaps another 50-75 years (hopefully sooner) to find a better long term solution. There is plenty of room out there though, with the US Department of Energy stating that there is potentially enough underground storage capacity in the US and Canada to store 900 years worth of our current emissions from large emitters.