Saving Oil in a Hurry

What if we had a sudden disruption of our supply of transportation fuel? What if there was an even steeper price hike? What if we were running out of gas like Juneau ran out of electricity? If this happened, it would be good not to flail around trying this, experimenting with that – wasting precious fuel in a trial and error approach.

In 1995 the International Energy Agency published Saving Oil in a Hurry. This report outlines the fuel savings that would be realized by the implementation of a variety of policies and the cost of implementation of the policies. For example, transitioning the workforce to telecommuting has a large impact on oil consumption, but it can require investment in infrastructure. The savings realized depends on what is required in terms of infrastructure to facilitate implementation. Car pooling and compressing the workweek turn out to be two polices that are very inexpensive to implement and have very large and large fuel savings respectively.

It is text like these that we should ask our Borough leadership to have in their energy tool-kit. You never know when you might need them. Thanks to Mike Denker, former chair of the Haines Energy Task Force, for the tip about the IEA publication.

Learning from Juneau's Electricity Crisis

Alan Meier, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, CA, Gayle Wood, AEL&P, and Charlie Food, CBJ, fielded questions yesterday on KTOO’s Juneau Afternoon – Our Electricity Crisis. Here are some tips for saving electricity in a hurry:

• Turn down the thermostat on your electric heat and electric hot water heater.
• Turn off the drier.
• Wash clothes in cold water.
• Turn out the lights in rooms you are not in.

Juneau has cut its electrical consumption nearly 20% and consumers have yet to see a bill. Dr. Meier thinks this might be an unbeatable record for rapid reduction.

Meier shed light on some nagging questions for power conservation: Is it more efficient to wash dishes by hand or in the dishwasher? Answer: A systematic comparison of hand dishwashers to mechanical dishwashers in Europe showed a huge range of energy consumption by the hand washers. In the end, the study concluded that it was more efficient to turn off the drier on the dishwasher, fill it up, and use it.

Another question: Do you use more energy turning lights off and on again than just leaving them on? Answer: It is ALWAYS better to turn a light off. No, lights don't use more energy to turn on; not even compact fluorscents.

Dr. Meier is an international expert on standby power, a major source of power consumption in homes and businesses. He recommends that you

• unplug everything that you can conveniently unplug to reduce “leakage,” sometimes called “vampire energy:” electricity that you are paying for, but power you are not using.

Dr. Meier cited studies that show a typical California home has over 40 products that are consuming power all the time even if they are switched off. Most homes have 10 to 50 of these products that add up and can represent as much as a month of an electricity bill. Unplug or reconfigure them so that they are truly off.

During a CNN conversation about standby power between Alan Meier and Assistant DOE Secretary Alexander Krasner, these culprits were brought to light:

• A washing machine uses about 2 watts in standby power to keep the electronic keypads ready to go even when it looks completely off.
• A DVD player that isn’t even playing a DVD consumes 11.32 watts with the power on; when it is turned off, it draws 6 watts.
• An electric toothbrush draws about 1.8 watts.
• A home computer, just standing by draws 65 watts.
• A microwave showing those two little dots is responsible for 3 watts.

Dr. Meier is speaking tonight 6 PM, in the commons at the Juneau-Douglas High School. The title of his talk is Saving Energy in a Hurry! His visit is sponsored by the Juneau Economic Develop Council. Dr. Meier also edits Home Energy Magazine – an excellent source of energy savings information.

Information Saves Power; Saving Power Saves $$

Over this past weekend , starting Friday, 25 April, AP&T was running diesel for 60% of our power. In an email to me this morning, Stan Selmer, AP&T manager, said that AP&T anticipates running 50% diesel, 50% hydro for the next 4 weeks. When Goat Lake goes down, our rates go up. (Don't don’t use your drier. ) But it’s good to know what’s going on, isn’t it? Knowing, you can conserve; not knowing, it’s business as usual. If we are on diesel, not knowing might lead you to inadvertently rack up higher and higher electric costs.

I first learned about Friday’s switch to diesel by accident. I was talking to the Borough manager, Robert Venables, about the Alaska Energy Authority meetings (see my 25 April blog, “Left Out!”), and the manager mentioned that Mr. Selmer called the Borough to advise on the diesel/hydro status.

Apparently there isn’t any established protocol for letting the communities know about such a shift. I asked the Borough manager what he did with the information and he said he sent out an email to the members of the Assembly.

I understand that levels at Goat Lake come and go. And when they go, we go on diesel. But there is another component to why we have to go to expensive diesel. Our consumption. We have a voracious appetite for electricity, but we are not addicts. When there are negative consequences of use, we can cut back. Higher rates are negative consequences. When we go on diesel, our costs go up proportionately. Is it just way way too simple to think that one response to Goat Lake’s reduced flow is to reduce our consumption of electricity?

But someone has to let us know what is happening with the hydro/diesel equation. This morning Mr. Selmer said,

Stephanie, sorry but I don't have time to give you daily reports on hydro/diesel usage. We anticipate the diesel hydro mix to be about 50/50 for the next 4 weeks. Hope that gives you enough information.

I don’t blame him for sounding a little peckish. I’ve been bugging him. I just wanted to know how much diesel we were using. I think it’s a reasonable request from a consumer, but I do agree that it would be a hassle to respond to every consumer individually. So, I have asked one of AP&T’s biggest consumers – our Borough government – to formally request notification from AP&T when a switch to diesel is anticipated. I submitted a letter to the Assembly 24 April suggesting the following:

I think the community of Haines would be well served by receiving notification in advance of AP&T’s need to go to diesel. Given notification, it might very well be possible to prevent the need to fire up diesel. For example, notified that diesel will be necessary if consumption continues to exceed hydro capacity, users could institute planned conservation measures. Big users, like the Borough and the school district, might make a big difference. Theoretically, we might avoid the tipping point. We might avoid diesel.

I would like the Borough Assembly to do two things:

#1. Request AP&T to provide notification in advance of activating diesels. This could be done with a phone call to the Borough, to KHNS; by an alert on the AP&T website.

#2. Request AP&T to help educate consumers with well thought out conservation tips. Perhaps AP&T could “borrow” from the Ketchikan Public Utility Internet site. KPU has an excellent list of 20 “tips” from “turn off the lights when you leave the room,” to “perform energy audits.”

Creativity is not in short supply in Haines. People have come up with suggestions for disseminating our diesel/hydro status. Here are a couple: a digital display at the bank. Envision, temperature F, temperature C, Goat Lake levels. Another person imagined a graphic and continually updated bar graph display on the AP&T website, Goat Lake capacity compared to current consumption. Nice ideas.

If you would like more information from AP&T pertaining to the amount of diesel being used to generate your electricity, perhaps you could also send a note to the Haines Borough Assembly. It works well to email the Borough Clerk, Julie Cozzi, jcozzi@haines.ak.us. The next Assembly meeting is May 13.

Meantime check out the Ketchikan Public Utilities website for good conservation tips. Then you might read a very clear discussion about the power your electronics are consuming even when they are off {Why Your Electronics Suck (Energy)}. And in the words of the Conservation and Efficiency Workgroup for the Fairbanks Energy Strategic Business Plan (2007),

No matter what type of energy is used, its cost to consumers is a function of its unit of energy times the price per unit. When energy is expensive the user has limited choices; pay the high price, switch to a lower cost energy source or reduce energy costs by using less energy. The cheapest unit of energy is the one not used (p.31).

Left Out!!

The Alaska Energy Authority (AEA) is holding Energy Plan Town Hall meetings in 25 communities throughout Alaska "to discuss local energy resources and which resources they think could possibly be developed to help lower costs "- and Haines is not one of them!! How can this be? Let's see if we can turn this around.

Steven Haagenson, Executive Director of the Alaska Energy Authority, wrote in a 25 April email to me, that he "...would have liked to have met with every Alaskan to engage them in participating in the energy solution. If we went to numerous meetings, we would get bogged down in the process and implementation of our rapid deployment strategy. As the next best solution, we selected 34 communities to visit and then whittled that down to 25. I know your task force has been active, as I have had communications with one of your members."

So I asked Mr. Haagenson (email and phone) what criteria was applied to select communities. I haven't heard back yet. It just seems so odd to me that the only community in Alaska that has bothered to establish a task force to look into energy, that has published a report that is circulating nationally (see Post Carbon Cities), that has a mayor who has stated a goal of creating a model for using renewable resources to power the municipality, that is actively investigating a wood-fueled heating system for its school, that is fielding a request from an electrical power supplier to open up a lake at the head of a fish spawning area for additional hydro capacity, is not considered absolutely RIPE for a discussion about local energy sources, which to develop, "and which they prefer not to develop and why."

Mr. Haagenson has invited us to comment via email (energycoordinator@aidea.org), the postal service or phone calls. That's great, but isn't it way way better for us to hear each other and to altogether hear AEA at a Town Meeting? Obviously AEA thinks it's better for communities to gather around this issue. And I bet they'll figure out a way to come here if enough of us ask them, so please send Mr. Haagenson a little note (shaagenson@aidea.org) saying that you want to come to an AEA Town Hall meeting in Haines to figure out how "to provide stable-cost energy now and ensure affordable, reliable energy for our children and our grandchildren." Just for good measure, copy the Borough Clerk with your request (jcozzi@haines.ak.us). Throw my email in the CC spot too (sscott@aptalaska.net). I'd like to know how you feel about meeting. Thanks.

Haines Farmers Market Vendor Registration Forms

Haines Farmers Market vendor registration forms have been strategically distributed around town. You can pick one up at

• the Post Office
• the Borough Office bulletin board inside the foyer
• the Library
• the First National Bank
• Howsers
• Mountain Market

or call me (766-2718) or Sid (766-2696) and we'll mail you one (email or snail mail - your choice).

Our vendor categories include locally grown veggies and fruits, garden and house plant starts, wild local food, seafood, home made products, and locally made arts and crafts. Vendors can rent a space (we provide a table) for $5 per market, payable to the Southeast Alaska State Fair. There are 6 markets so we are offering a "deal" - rent space in advance for all 6 markets and get one market rental for free! Ten percent of your sales go to the Farmers Market account to cover publication and management. Prior to each Market, vendors and their products will be advertised along with special events particularly planned for that market.

The Haines Farmers Market is a community organization dedicated to providing a place for local growers, artists, and craftspeople to sell directly to consumers while providing consumers opportunities to buy locally grown produce and locally made products directly from producers. Besides that, the Market aims to enhance the quality of life in the Chilkat Valley by providing a community activity that fosters social gathering and interaction. Whether you participate as a vendor or as a consumer, you will be doing a good thing for Haines!

Don't Have a Garden Spot? Sign up for a Community Garden Plot April 26.

The Haines Community Garden is located in an extraordinarily sunny spot at the Southeast Alaska State Fairgrounds. This year Katheleen Menke is organizing users. She sent me this announcement today and asked that I post it. So here goes:

There are still spaces - small, medium, and large - available for the 2008 Community Garden. The next sign up meeting for garden spaces will be Saturday, April 26, at 1 PM, at the Community Garden. Spaces are available on a first come, first serve basis. There is a $10 deposit and a plot rental fee - from $4 to $20+ depending on the size of the plot. New and returning gardeners are welcome. Assigned spaces and open spaces are posted at the Garden. Visitors and volunteers are welcome anytime. For more information, call 766-3517. You can also be added to the email list for periodic notices and updates by contacting Kathleen Menke, ci@akmk.com.

In case the Community Garden can't provide enough space for your growing enterprise, consider becoming a "yard farmer." Mike Denker sent me a link this morning to a Wall Street Journal article by Kelly K. Spors: Green Acres II: When Neighbors Become Farmers. Kip Nash of Boulder, CO, is a "yard farmer." He convinced his neighbors to let him turn their lawns into lettuce - or tomatoes, or bok choy, or garlic, or beets.

Between May and September, he gives weekly bagfuls of fresh-picked vegetables and herbs to people here who have bought "shares" of his farming operation. Neighbors who lend their yards to the effort are paid in free produce and yard work.

Mr. Nash works two jobs. Most of us do - two or even more. He is a school bus driver. So he is supplementing his income with yard farming. Think about it. You might be able to feed yourself AND turn dill into dollars using your plot at the Community Garden or by striking a bargain with your neighbor - land for lettuce. In fact, lawn owners who would like to cut less grass and eat more broccoli just might want to contact the Community Garden organizer and let her know that they would welcome overflow gardeners seeking plots.

Money Matters

There are lots of good reasons to grow your own food. It’s more nutritious than food flown and trucked hundreds if not thousands of miles. Thus if you also can cut down on your trips to town for gardening supplies, you can consider your contributions to the effort to reduce CO2 emissions. Gardening is a good workout; and it probably puts some distance between you and all your electronic gadgets – which might be a good thing. See “Does Power Corrupt?” Electropollution.org

But another good reason is that the cost of food is skyrocketing. According to the United States Department of Labor, Consumer Price Index Survey,

The food index rose at a 5.3 percent SAAR (Seasonally Adjusted Annual Rate) in the first quarter of 2008, following a 4.9 percent increase in all of 2007. The index for grocery store food prices increased at a 5.9 percent annual rate, reflecting increases in each of the six major groups ranging from annual rates of 0.7 percent in the index for dairy products to 15.7 percent in the index for cereal and bakery products.

Math is not my strong suit but I do love numbers. Sometimes translating activities into numbers clears things up. I have recently begun to track my expenses. (Some people have been doing this forever, but I am a late bloomer in the world of budgets and personal finance.) Since I have become a responsible spender, I know exactly what I have spent on food Jan., Feb., and March - which is evidently 5.3 percent more than I spent the previous quarter (for which I didn’t keep records.) Doing some backwards math, I had to spend about $85.00 more in the past 3 months to buy the same amount of food that I bought in the previous 3 months. And that’s just for me – a “family” of one.

The truly alarming increase is in cereal and bakery products. Bread – the staff of life. As far as I know, there are very few grain growers in Haines. Nancy Berland grew some oats last year; and I have grown buckwheat; I believe that grain has been grown on the Nelson homestead out Mud Bay too.

The point is, that until we figure out how to produce grain locally, we are stuck with importing flour. But we can offset these costs by growing our own vegetables. It’s not too far fetched to imagine that you can save $100 in groceries over the next three months growing your own salad greens.

And you might just have a chance to recoup some of your gardening costs if you try your hand vending at the Haines Farmers Market. The first Market will be June 14. Information for vendors is now available. Check out the public bulletin boards. Or give me a call and I will send you a registration brochure (either snail mail or email).

“Grower” or “Kitchen Gardener”? Doesn’t Matter – You Can Still Qualify to use the Eye-Catching Alaska Grown Logo.

You know how it goes: one link leads to another. So link by link, this morning I landed at a blog called Money Changes Things and a post by BPT titled : The Book of the Year: The Earth Knows My Name.

I haven’t read the book but I might add it to my pile. The full name of the book is The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic Americans. The author is Patricia Klindienst. You can read a collection of reviews here. But be sure to order it through your local bookseller, The Babbling Book (766-3356).

What caught my attention was BPT's attempt to name a special kind of grower - the kind of grower who I think lives in Haines and just might sell a thing or two at the Haines Farmers Market:

English lacks a word for people who grow their own food while working a day job… . “Gardener” connotes flowers more than edibles; “farmer” and “grower” suggest full time professionals, and “subsistence farmer” conjures up hardscrabble sharecropping. Our closest term is kitchen or cottage gardeners.

I am trying to get my toes wet as a professional grower, but really, I am a kitchen gardener. So when Amy Pettit, State of Alaska , DNR, Division of Agriculture, Alaska Grown program, called me this morning, we talked about business licenses. “Do all Alaska Grown users have to have business licenses?” I asked.

I didn’t know the term at the time, but I could have asked if kitchen or cottage gardeners who occasionally offer Alaska grown produce for sale at the Haines Farmers Market have to have business licenses. According to Amy, the Alaska Grown program will “work” with you even if you don’t have a business license. I think it would be pretty neat to see a lot of vendors sporting Alaska Grown logos at the Haines Farmers Market this season. It’s easy. Follow this link. Leave the business license line blank. Then snail mail or email the application: amy.pettit@alaska.gov or kirk.brown@alaska.gov. If you want some local help, give me a call and we can do it together. If you come over, we can look at my introductory Alaska Grown package that is being snail mailed to me today.

Low Carbon Foot Print Products: Made in Haines

The Haines Farmers Market is gearing up for it’s third season. Check the dates to the left. Any day now, potential vendors will be able to pre-register. Look for forms in all the usual places: Howsers, Mountain Market, Library, PO. This year, the Market has some support from the Alaska Division of Agriculture, Alaska Grown program.

Any grower with a business license can get certified to use the Alaska Grown logo. Certification is free (a business license, of course, is not. It costs $100/year. It’s worth it. )

You can download an Alaska Grown application and mail it to the address on the form, or you can attach it to an email sent to kirk.brown@alaska.gov. I had to call for that information. Mr. Brown’s email is not on the form.

I wish more growers in Haines would participate in this program. For one thing, retailers that sell Alaska Grown products are listed on the Alaska Grown website. That’s nice. Free advertising. I'd love to see Alaska & Proud, Howsers, and Mountain Market listed here.

For another thing, in this carbon conscious time, consumers are more and more anxious to buy good products that haven’t traveled half way around the world to get to them. Stop Global Warming hypothesizes, “If we ate locally produced food only one day a week, 5000 pounds of carbon would be saved each year.”

Calculating carbon footprints is tricky. Just check out all the calculations that go into figuring out the carbon footprint of a bag of Walkers Crisps potato chips. The Carbon Trust, a private UK company, spent months coming up with the figure of 75g of greenhouse gases given off in the production of one 33.5g bag of Walkers. They took into account the energy used in farming, manufacturing, packaging, distribution, and finally – disposal.

So, reduce your own carbon footprint by eating local produce sold at the Haines Farmers Market this season. Buy lettuce grown in the Chilkat Valley instead of lettuce flown from Chile. Bring your own bags!

Merchants are not Mind Readers; Consumers are not Telepaths

Wouldn’t it be easier if local retailers just “knew” what I wanted and stocked it? But they don’t. And they won’t unless I tell them. But I’m a little shy and I am way busy, so I begin to rationalize like this: Whose responsibility is it to discover what ‘sells’ in Haines? Is it the merchant’s responsibility to survey the consumers; or is it the consumer’s responsibility to communicate needs and wants to the retailers?

Either way, engaging in that potentially mutually beneficial dialogue costs time and maybe even money. This is true from both perspectives. As a consumer, can I take the time to petition each retailer to see if they will bring a pet product to town for me – especially when I know I can pick it up at Freddy’s on my next trip through Juneau? As a merchant, do I want to have those “what if” conversations (as in, “What if I stocked brand X? Would you buy it?”) with regular and potential customers? Or could it be that initiating this two-way communication is just not “optional” if we are all committed to building a sustainable local economy?

Rationalize though I may, I can’t escape the conclusion that just like this is “our” town, it is “our” responsibility to find a mechanism that makes it easy in Haines for retailers and consumers to let each other know what they have and what they want to have. The mechanism should be efficient. It should spend as little of the merchant’s and consumer’s time and money as possible.

So here’s an idea: How about a public electronic bulletin board where consumers can post names of products they are interested in buying? Merchants can check every so often and “feedback.” Maybe there is a good reason why that particular product isn’t stocked in Haines; maybe the merchant just requires enough expressed interest to “tip” him or her into pursuing acquisition. I am sure that there are many private conversations taking place every day between any one merchant and any one consumer. We do, after all, talk to one another. The point is to bring the conversations out in the open so that merchants don’t lose business because a consumer doesn’t know that Store X can actually get that product. In fact, I have a neighbor who was nonplussed to learn that my new appliances came through a local retailer. Since those appliances did not appear in the retailer’s store, she assumed they were unavailable so ordered from an out of town supplier – obtaining no particularly wonderful price advantage and forgoing what I consider the advantage of letting someone else deal with freight companies and delivery options.

I think that a belief in “mind reading” is probably relationship Enemy #1. We have all heard our spouses, partners, boyfriends, girlfriends, children exclaim, “How could you NOT know how I felt about x?!” Not knowing is a function of not telling, not communicating. I believe that a successful “Buy Local” campaign will need to include a strong commitment on the part of both Haines merchants and Haines consumers to build a good relationship. And I have no doubt that that relationship will flourish if it is built on good two-way communication – happily devoid of mind-reading and telepathy.

So I’ll get us started. I just adopted a kitty. I would like to be able to buy Good Mews kitty litter. I can get it at Fred Meyers for $7.49/30 lb. bag – not including a $73 round trip ferry ticket. Can anyone help me buy it locally?

A Working Definition of "Sustainable" Agriculture

When I start to wonder about something, I tend to go to "google." (Silly I know. There are other search engines but I am used to this work horse.) I was astounded to learn that the adjective "sustainable" is attached to just about every concept you can possibly imagine. But when coupled with Alaska, I stumbled onto Alaska's SARE Program and thus the USDA's Western Regional SARE. SARE stands for Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education.

I began to be concerned about the definition of sustainable when someone warned me that "sustainable" can be a "hot button" term. Gosh, thought I, how can that be? Doesn't "sustainable" just mean that the practice can go on and on and on without doing harm or using up non-renewable resources? What's so objectionable about that?

"Sustainable," I've come to learn, might push buttons because it is an adjective that turns out to have rather significant social connotations. An activity doesn't qualify as sustainable until it can be said to promise a good quality of life. Nice. The way I look at it, this means that people can expect to work for liveable wages.

Sustainability implies more than jobs, profits, environmental and resource stewardship. To be sustainable, it seems an activity has to pro-actively look to the future and see that what is done in the present will in all probability promise a good future for the group as well as for the individual. It is not "all about me;" it is not even necessarily about now except that the definition implies that growing a system that is sustainable will not be done on the backs of slaves or underpaid labor.

The Alaska SARE website states that the US Congress has defined sustainable agriculture as plant and animal production practices that will, over the long term:

1. satisfy human food and fiber needs;
2. enhance environmental quality and the natural resource base upon which the agriculture economy depends;
3. make the most efficient use of nonrenewable resources;
4. sustain the economic viability of farm operations; and
5. enhance the quality of life for farmers and society as a whole.

Then they simplify it.

Sustainable Agriculture is economically viable: if it is not profitable, it is not sustainable; socially supportive: The quality of life of farmers, farm families and farm communities is important; and ecologically sound: we must preserve the resource base that sustains us all.

So, if these are buttons you would like to push, go to Alaska's SARE program where you can find information on sustainable production; you can download the Alaska Sustainable Agriculture Newsletter; you can find out about attending the annual statewide sustainable agriculture conference that takes place in Fairbanks; and best of all, you can apply for grants.

And if you want face to face contact with Alaska's SARE representative, try to catch up with Michele Hebert she comes to Haines May 18 to conduct the week long Alaska Master Gardener's class. Maybe I'll see you then!