The Gulf Oil Spill vs. Home Energy Retrofits

This is a bizarre comparison. The problem with the oil spill isn't the lost energy, it's the destruction and the cost of clean-up.<p>The implication of this article is that retrofitting 75k homes somehow cancels out or equals an oil spill. At best, this amount of retrofitting reduces the risk of an oil spill slightly because one fewer rig would be built.<p>When a carpenter drops a beam on his foot, we can't say that the architect should have used one fewer beam to prevent the accident. Energy efficiency is great, but by itself, the amount of oil lost in the oil spill isn't really relevant to any cost-benefit analysis.

All this comparison did for me was emphasize how TINY the amount of oil is that has been spilled vs. overall US consumption. Googling around indicates that US oil consumption is on the order of 20MM BBL/Day, so the 60K BBL/Day spewing into the gulf is about .3% of oil used per day. Shocking to think about.

Don't forget, you're not off the hook if your home is heated with natural gas or electricity. This post makes the great point that energy is energy... No matter what it's made from (at least among the fossil fuels). The less coal and gas we use, the lower the demand for oil there will be.

It doen't seem like energy effeciency and the oil spill have anything to do with each other. It just seems as if the global warming crowd are trying to use it to advance an agenda. The fact is you can look around your house and come to find out that most of the stuff you use is affected by oil..not just the energy. The problem is: this article is right to a point, we didn't need to drill that far off the coast. There is oil on land and in shallower water but the "environmentally friendly" people deemed it necessary that in order to get the oil we need and still be more energy independent, we must take more risk and drill in deep water. For people who like statistics, you should keep digging for more articles that deal with how much oil per water is actually there and how much the people in the gulf coast depend on the jobs that are directly effected by the oil companies.

What is really cool is that the $10k can often reduce a home's POWER demand by 30%.<p>Pricing varies, but this gets to around $0.12-$0.5/kW. BUT. That's kW not kWH (e.g power, not energy). So the power demand reduction translates to energy savings for the lifetime of the building or systems in it..

So essentially, my little corner of Seattle is wasting the equivalent of a gulf oil spill EVERY YEAR!. Ugh. At least there's no damage to the environment from our waste... oh wait... :(

Yes, that's one of the disturbing things about the oil industry. The oil companies have done their best to make sure usage of oil is as inefficient as possible, since that is in their medium-term economic interest... They go to tremendous lengths and expend (and destroy) significant resources to extract oil, and then they are actually hoping we'll waste a major portion of it.

What's the market value of all that oil, or the impact to the market the immediate shut down of new oil exploration could incure? There has to be a reason ecomonically that this hasn't been solved naturally already - otherwise it's a no brainer. Maybe the coming rise in oil prices will push more attention to alternative energy and energy efficiencies like 2 years ago.

According to your math, homes in the US waste the energy equivalent of over 1,300 gulf oil spills <i>every year</i>. Ouch...

If nothing else, this article does a good job of drawing attention to enhancing home energy efficiency which is something we can all DO something about unlike closing loopholes in permitting processes for oil wells. It also made us think. Thanks, EnergySavvy!

Amazing how much energy and resources we can save just by living our lives more efficiently.

very timely! the one positive that can come out of this mess is awareness of what we can improve and how bad the direction we are headed is. hopefully we'll take the hint before it's too late...