My name is Dan Chiras. I’m a writer and a teacher, an educator. I teach at the college level.
And I also travel the country teaching workshops and lecturing to groups about renewable energy and green building, community design and redesign.
And my role is really several. One is to teach, to get this information out in whatever medium I can, whether it’s speaking to groups, or whether it’s writing or teaching. But my mission is to get information out and, also, to innovate, to come up with ideas and a lot — create a lot of ideas that I try to get out, along with other people’s ideas. So it’s a matter of assimilating what others have had to say about these issues, and introducing my own ideas, and trying to create packages that will help people understand what our problems are, and where we need to go, and what we can do about them.
1. What would you say you personally are most deeply passionate about as it relates to this topic of power and energy?
I’m most interested — most passionate about finding ways to meet our needs that don’t bankrupt the earth; finding ways to meet our needs for energy. For example, that ensure the future generations can meet their needs, that we don’t foreclose on future generations, or even foreclose on our own future; ways that we can live sustainably on this earth in tapping into all the generous supplies of renewable energy.
2. Not everybody necessarily understands the sustainable energy and living dialogue at sort of a day-to-day level, a human level, a community level. What is that you see all of this as doing for the way people experience life on a day-to-day basis in their urban communities?
For a lot of people, they still flip on the light switch, and there’s light there. They go to the gasoline — they pump, and they pump. There’s plenty of gas there. So I think that a lot of people are experiencing this at a different level though. They’re starting to experience much higher prices and — both in natural gas and electric bills and for gasoline at the fuel pump.
And so I think that for most people it — this whole idea of sustainable energy has been sort of abstract until now. And I think more and more people are getting the connection that our national security is at stake here, the type of energy that we consume as a nation; that that is affecting our national security. We’re really — in a way, we’re paying for the war on terrorism in two ways: we’re paying all these military expenditures; and, through our [petrol] dollars, we’re paying terrorist nations and, ultimately, terrorist cells.
So we — I think people are starting to catch on that we have an issue here with climate change, with higher prices. And the threat of national security … I think it’s starting to come home to people, that they’re really getting that something has to be done. So I don’t think it’s gone out of this abstract realm, some futuristic kind of thinking. I think it’s become real concrete for people that we need to do something.
3. How will people incorporate these things or adopt them — take it from being in their minds as important to changing their behaviors and their lifestyle, and what effects that would have on day-to-day living?
I think that people need direction. That’s the thing. And I think energy is a very mysterious thing to them. You see turning on lights and turning off lights, the real obvious things. But in most of our homes, for example, most people don’t have the foggiest idea where that energy goes and how much leaks through windows or around leaky doors.
And so we really need a tremendous amount of education to help people understand where the leaks are in their daily lives and how much energy is being wasted. So that’s one of the most important things right now, is that people understand how much we lose. In this society, we probably waste 50 percent to 75 percent of the energy that we consume. So that’s like going to the grocery store, buying 10 bananas, and throwing half of them away, or three-quarters of them away. That’s how wasteful we are. So education has really got to be important. I don’t expect every consumer, every household, everyone who lives in an apartment, or a condominium, or a townhouse, or a single-family home, or anyone who runs a business to to become an energy expert. I think that we need is the education that there is a problem, and there are solutions; and that we’re part of the problem — we can certainly become part of a solution — and that there are resources, folks who come in and energy retrofit for you, can do a simple, cost-effective energy analysis on your home. I think that’s really where this is going to be going.
There are a lot of do-it-yourselfers who will get out there and do it. But there are a lot of people that need guidance. They need to know the problems, know what the solutions are, and know that there experts that they can bring in to tighten up their homes and capture all that [laughs] energy that we’re currently wasting.
4. Do you have any thoughts of what will make these ideas, implementing some of these ideas or changes in behavior, meaningful, like a proactive choice on the day-to-day person to implement?
Well, I think savings on the utility bill will be [laughs] very meaningful to a lot of people. And I honestly think that a lot of people get that we have a problem with global climate change and that knowing that what they’re doing is contributing in some small way, I think, will help. But I think the meaning is going to be in utility bills. Everywhere I talk, every place I go, people are showing me their utility bills [laughs] or talking about their utility bills. And [clears throat] Americans are getting hit really hard right now. And I think they’ll see a meaningful difference.
There is some metric to measure what their impact is and what the impact of energy efficiency measures. And that’s probably one of the most important things we can do as a nation, is become efficient first and then think about the renewal energy technologies that we can employ individually or collectively to make up the rest of our energy diet.
5. When you say “become efficient,” can you elaborate? What do you mean by that?
Well, just virtually every aspect of our lives, from the showerheads we use to the light bulbs that we use — those are really two good examples — to the way we heat our homes. Let’s take an example: the average — if you live in an older home, and you have an older showerhead, it probably is using five gallons to seven gallons a minute. And there are models now that are currently available that will use under two gallons a minute.
And that simple shower — we call it a ["low flow,"] but it’s really a high-efficiency showerhead — it gives you a great shower — will save a family of four up to $250 a year. So here you’re making an investment. And you can buy one for $5, maybe $15 if you buy a high-end model. And so that unit will save you — that $5 investment will save you $250 a year, up — if — for a family of four.
Well, let’s just say that you bought one for $15, and it only saved you $150 a year. That’s a ten-times return on your investment. Imagine if our stock portfolios performed as well as that. And there are other technologies as well, like the compact fluorescent light bulbs. They’re — they screw into an ordinary light socket. They use a quarter of the energy of a standard light bulb. A single bulb will cost you a couple dollars, but it’ll save, over its lifetime, $30 to $60 in energy use. And that’s just a couple examples of the kinds of things that people can do. Those are some of the common things. Those are some of the common things.
And another area we have to look at — into is the types of transportation we employ. For most of us, our cars are operating at about 20 percent or 30 percent efficiency. And there are a lot of technologies that’ll help us boost that efficiency: the plug-in hybrids which are coming; the hybrid vehicles which are available now. But the plug-in hybrids — and that’s an area where people can make a huge change as well.
Our homes are also extremely leaky. If you take the average older home in the United States, and you add up all the leaks in the building envelope — in the roof, in the walls, in the foundation; you add up all those leaks — there are little, tiny cracks here and there, cracks around windows, cracks around the door, cracks where the wall meets the foundation. If you add those up, it’d be equivalent to a 3-foot-by-3-foot window open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year: a 3-foot window, a 3-[foot]-by-3-foot window open 200 — 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Just sealing the cracks in the building envelope with caulk and [weather-stripping] — a very, very inexpensive way to seal up a house — can cut your energy — your heating and cooling bill by half, just overnight. And it might cost you a couple hundred dollars, at the very, very most, to do it. So that’s the kind of stuff that’s available to us. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit that’s available to us that’ll make our society so much more energy efficient, reduce our fuel bills, and make us a lot more comfortable in the process.
6. How would you quickly describe or characterize the current state of energy generation and use today?
The current state of energy generation and use … Well, it’s primarily fossil-fuel-based. And it’s primarily based on two fuels that are in — that were — are no longer going to be cheap. It’s — [41 percent] of our energy comes from oil. And the end of cheap oil is here. We’re not going to see cheap oil again in our lifetime, because we’re close to peak oil production in the world.
And so, from this point forward, within the next few years, we’re going to start seeing declining extraction, which means the price is going to go — continually rise. Natural gas is very similar to that here in the United States. We peaked in natural gas production, peaked in the United States, in 1973. And we’re looking at natural gas supply starting to declining. And so we get 23 percent of our energy from natural gas and 41 percent from oil. So 64 percent of the energy that we consume is in short supply, and that’s going to have a tremendous effect.
The rising demand and falling supply is going to have a huge impact on how we operate as a society. It’s clearly going to affect us economically. So I guess I would say this, is that we’ve pinned our future on fossil fuel resources that are — a couple of them are entering into an era of declining supply. And we’re also using primarily fossil fuels, which — the combustion of which is using carbon dioxide, which is heating up our atmosphere. It traps — CO2 is a greenhouse gas. And it traps the heat radiating off the surface of the earth, basically like putting a warm blanket on or covering up with a coat; it’s making the earth warmer, and we’re paying a huge price for that economically.
7. What do you see as the exciting trends in alternative energy?
The most exciting trend is that people are getting interested in it and they’re we’re starting to implement the technologies that have been around for a long, long time. There are a lot of new innovations, new technologies; more efficient solar electric cells. There’s some fantastic work being done trying to create solar cells out of more common, more inexpensive materials.
But, to me, that’s not anywhere near as exciting as knowing the — as the fact that we’re really starting to implement these technologies. A lot of states have renewable energy portfolios. [There's renewal portfolio standards] which dictate that they produce a certain amount of energy within a fairly short period from renewables. And I’m really excited to see that happening. I’m really, really excited to see that states like Colorado [are at now] 20 percent of their renewable energy, and they’re not too — [20 percent] of their energy in the not-too-distant future is going to come from renewables.
And so it’s the implementation to me that’s really exciting — [and a big scale]. I mean, wind is the fastest growing source of energy in the world. And second is solar electricity, which is pretty exciting, which still pales in comparison to the other fuels. But the growth is phenomenal.
8. What would you say is special or different about how these ideas apply to urban communities specifically?
Well, I don’t know if there’s anything special. There are certain renewable technologies that aren’t applicable, that don’t work very well in an urban setting. And our challenge in the urban setting is to retrofit what’s already here, is to retrofit existing structures. And there are some limitations: wind, for example, wind [turbines]; it’s just a poor choice for an urban, or a suburban, environment; there’s too much ground clutter; there are too many trees and [laughs] too many buildings that get in the way of the wind. And so it’s very, very impractical.And, yet, most houses have a roof that is fairly well exposed to the sun. So we have opportunities to install solar hot water systems for domestic hot water and solar hot water for space heating. We have opportunities to add solar electricity. And so the urban environment does create some — there are some limitations. But, clearly, it’s not so – the limitations aren’t so severe that we can’t tap into the renewables.
But, again, in the urban environment, we see a lot of old buildings that need energy retrofitting first. They need to be tightened up. We need to make use of that energy in the house much more efficiently so we’re not wasting so much. And that’s America’s number-one goal right now. If I were energy czar, that’s what I’d do. I — we’d have a nationwide energy conservation program. And we could literally save 30 percent, 40 percent, 50 percent of the energy that we’re consuming right now, lower everybody’s fuel bills, and help reduce global warming.
9. As you look to the future, what are your dreams for how shifts in energy use will affect the way we live in our communities? What are your personal dreams for the future of how lives are affected?
Well, personally, my personal dream is that we go as close to 100-percent renewable as possible. We need to probably reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 60 percent, maybe 70 percent, to actually halt the warming of the planet that’s occurring now with devastating economic impacts.
So I could easily see — and I dream of the day that we will be getting 60 percent, 70 percent of our energy from the sun, and from wind, and from [micro-hydro], and solar hot air systems. That’s what I see, is efficiency — become very, very efficient — and then supply most of our needs through these renewable resources.
And a lot of people worry. They say, “Well, we can’t do that because the wind doesn’t blow all the time.” But we have an interconnected energy system. And so the wind may not be blowing here one day, but it’ll be blowing up north 50 miles from here. So the nice thing about the way the system is set up is that we have this interconnectivity that we can tap into. And energy can be shifted around as needed.
10. Through efficiency and innovation, can we really supply all our energy needs?
No doubt about it. There is so much solar energy available. There is so much wind energy available it would make your head spin. There’s enough wind energy just in the states of, say, North Dakota. If we could tap the wind energy in North Dakota and Texas, it would supply all of our electrical needs.
Now, no one is proposing that we do that, that we set up wind farms all across those states. But that’s abundant it is. The solar energy … hundreds of times, thousands of times, more solar energy strikes the planet than we need on a single day. So there’s just an abundance of renewable energy.
And if you look at the whole United States, you’ll find there’s certain areas where solar is quite prevalent; there are other areas where wind is prevalent; there are other areas where biomass would be — would help us supply our needs. So by mixing — by developing a system that uses a variety of these different renewables, we could easily meet all of our energy needs, without a question.
11. Out of today, what are your inspirations from the competition that you were privileged to be a part in terms of contributing and reviewing ideas and just making some selections? What inspires you?
Well, I think I was delighted to see the amount of [systems] thinking that occurred as the entrants, the people who entered the competition, who were thinking in terms of systems of creating, within a community, a variety of different energy resources … And they also looked at energy in a different way. When we think of energy, we think of turning on a light switch and getting light, or pumping gasoline into our car and driving off.
But energy runs through every aspect of our society. When you recycle, you save energy. If you capture rainwater off the roof to water your garden, you’re actually saving energy because it takes energy to purify the water in a municipal system and to transport it to your home. So I saw a lot of the systems thinking, which, I think, is vital to our success, is to think about the whole system and how food production, local food production, how local water production, recycling of gray water, capturing rainwater off the roof, and all the traditional energy issues — how people were thinking about all of those together. And I think the energy impacts will be tremendous.
12. Any maybe not shifts in perspectives or ideas but inspirations? … Any sort of new inspirations or new energy that’s energy?
I think energy is there. I feel energized by this process. I’m eager to see the end product when this gets put into action. That’s what really excites me, is the thought of taking all of these ideas, taking not just the top two or three proposals, but taking all of them, and picking the best ideas, the most practical ideas, the most economical ideas, and the most earth-friendly ideas; pulling all those out and creating a package, an entire package; when we move onto other areas of this competition, creating a whole package of ideas; and then actually seeing it implemented in a real community: that’s very exciting to me.
13. Tell me about that. What’s exciting about that?
Well, the excitement that this has been area that we’ve overlooked for so long; that when we creating a sustainable future, when we think about how we chart a pathway into our future, most of the thinking is about new technology: it’s about new homes, and new cars, and new trucks and busses, and new factories; it’s thinking about starting from scratch. And we honestly don’t have the luxury of bulldozing all of the existing infrastructure, all of the existing buildings and houses, and starting over. We have 125 million single-family homes in this country, many of which are energy hogs, resource hogs; they’re literally like patients on an internal — in an intensive care unit. They’re so dependent on the outside supply of energy and resources, just like a patient in an intensive care unit, that — and so we don’t think about, what would we do with those; how do we make them more independent; how do we make all this existing infrastructure more sustainable. And, to me, that’s what really exciting here, is that we’re finally thinking about what we do with what’s already here.
