Stop Purchasing Our Product

 

The letter from Apple arrived via snail mail, itself a worrying sign, and  began ominously:

Your household efficiency rank is in the bottom quartile and declining.  You are spending more money on apps, purchasing more music, and using more bandwidth than your neighbors.  Our data show that you also have more Apple products in your household than is typical in your area.  

Please log into your account at LessAppleForLife.com for customized tips about how you can save money by reducing your demand for Apple products and services.

Why would Apple admonish its customers for purchasing too much of what it is in business to sell?  

It wouldn’t.  Neither would Google, Facebook or Twitter.  Yet each month my neighbors employed by these enterprises and I open a report like the one at right from our local energy utility.  The idea is to shame us into conserving energy by comparing our consumption to that of “more efficient” households in our neighborhood.  

Purchasing less is absolutely essential.  To save the planet, don’t you know.

However, it’s not so simple.  In typical left-wing fashion, saving money in my neighborhood first requires “investment” in a money-no-object ecologically advanced dwelling of the sort dancing in the heads of Greenpeace executives on Christmas Eve.  In short, a low energy bill hereabouts is another way of telegraphing, simultaneously, that you are very, very rich, and also incredibly caring.

My Silicon Valley neighbors overwhelmingly favor deterring consumption, except when it comes to the products and services responsible for their own considerable financial success. 

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  1. Profile Photo Member
    @GeorgeSavage
    Matthew K. Tabor: 

    Getting a customer to think “I am a [good/smart/trendy/moral/etc.] person because I purchase from [Company]” is a terribly valuable form of brand loyalty, particularly in a fast-moving sector like Apple’s. They sink or swim based on products and prices — that’s obvious — but these bits help a great deal.

    Edited 13 minutes ago

    Matthew, the letter from Apple was my invention, including the website link.  The actual site is http://www.pge.com/myenergy.

    I don’t mind companies selling products in ways that stroke the ego of the customer.  However, PG&E is a statist-captured entity promoting the liberal line using my money.  Regulators have created a scheme whereby the company makes a fixed amount of money no matter how much power it sells.  So the only way to improve margins is to sell less and do less, sometimes with catastrophic results.

    Meanwhile, a portion of my inflated electric bill is directed to PR campaigns telling me that “global warming is a choice;” exhorting me by implication to avoid energy use.  This is left-wing propaganda, not marketing. 

    • #31
  2. Profile Photo Inactive
    @MTabor

    “This is left-wing propaganda, not marketing.”

    Reality: These are not mutually exclusive.

    • #32
  3. Profile Photo Inactive
    @JohnMurdoch
    George Savage

    I … believe that the intense bias against increasing supply–generating and transmission–is an outgrowth of the leftist limits-to-everything worldview. 

    Working for a large public electric utility certainly seems to create a self-selected group of people with a “we must decide how you will live” statists. 

    Do the utilities become enamored of the “limits to growth” view because of their world view? Or because they recognize the futility of trying to expand transmission capacity in a regulatory environment where the ISO controls the transmission lines, and has no profit incentive to increase capacity? If nobody profits from building that line, who in the world wants to go to yet another public meeting this evening to be shouted at and vilified? 

    I’ve heard utility managers in California, Pennsylvania, and New York all say it: “you picketed and you protested and you blocked the transmission line; yet you continued to build new houses. Now you have a capacity problem, and you wonder why….”

    I don’t think that’s a reflection of a corporate weltanschauung  as much as it is an acceptance of the fact that the people get the government they deserve.

    • #33
  4. Profile Photo Inactive
    @JohnMurdoch

    George–

    I work in the biz–I have a bona fide “green job” developing energy meter management systems, and have patents in the tres-chic green field of “demand response systems.” 

    First, I recognize the graphics on that letter in your picture. Take a look at the return address on your envelope–I think you’ll find that it’s a direct marketing piece for an HVAC manufacturer named York (a unit of Johnson Controls, Inc.). If I’m right, it’s a marketing thing they do–buying the customer list of a utility, and steering respondents to local HVAC contractors who will explain the benefits (and significant energy savings) from a new heat pump/air conditioner/furnace. 

    Second, there’s a reason why electric utilities are regulated monopolies, but monopolies nonetheless: unlike practically any other manufacturing business, there is no such thing as inventory. Energy produced right now must be used within the next 1/60th of a second–somewhere. 

    • #34
  5. Profile Photo Inactive
    @JohnMurdoch

    (Cont’d from #26)

    The art of managing electric power production is generating just enough to meet your present demand; to have enough extra that when a new load is turned on, the power is there, and to have enough “spinning capacity” (generators that are turning, but not producing electricity) to bring online when a big demand spike hits. Think of it like this:

    Total generated power = power supplied to the customer + safety margin

    The trick is to make the percentage of power supplied as high as possible–and thus the safety margin (or, put another way, the energy/money wasted) as low as possible. You always have to have that safety margin–that’s how customers have come to trust the electric system. Think about it–when you flip a light switch, do you ever worry about whether the lights will actually come on? No–because you live on a reliable grid with sufficient capacity.

    The problem comes when customer demand rises–close to total generated load, and clearly heading for higher than the load presently being generated. You have to provide that load–so where does that load come from?

    • #35
  6. Profile Photo Inactive
    @JohnMurdoch

    (Cont’d from #27)

    You can (a) increase output from plants already online; (b) buy power from the regional grid; (c) bring new plants online (either plants you own, or “merchant” plans sitting on your grid waiting for the spot price to rise above a given threshold); or (d) start turning stuff off. East of the Mississippi that means brown-outs–dropping the voltage to as low as 100 vac. West of the Mississippi it means blackouts–leaving people in the dark. 

    The peak period for demand happens late in the afternoon on sunny summer days (typically 4 pm to 6 pm). Office/manufacturing use is still high, and people are coming home from school or work. Air conditioners are being brought online–there’s a pretty big spike in demand. How does the utility respond?

    In the short term, you try to have enough load onstream; you then try to add load to meet demand, by spinning up your own plants, buying power from a merchant plant (three guys and a gas turbine sitting on a big natural gas feed) for big bucks per MWh, buying power from the grid, or blackouts.

    • #36
  7. Profile Photo Inactive
    @JohnMurdoch

    (Cont’d from #28)

    Over the long term, you try to smooth out that big demand spike late in the afternoon. The “conventional wisdom” in electric utility industry circles is that you focus on improving the energy efficiency of residential HVAC systems–because that’s the big spike that comes onstream at 4 pm. If Southern California Edison can change the set points on your thermostat for just 30 minutes (for you, 4 to 4:30; for Rob, 4:15 to 4:45; for somebody else, 4:30 to 5:00 pm; and so forth) you can smooth that spike out a bunch. (This was the basis for the spectacularly unpopular proposal to permit California utilities to change your thermostat set points remotely, without your consent, a few years ago.)

    A different way to approach the problem is to persuade larger electric users (particularly commercial businesses) to reduce load. One way is to use time-based tariffs: power prices go WAY up at 4 pm, encouraging the manufacturer to schedule energy-heavy processes to end by 3:30.

    Yet another way to approach the problem, and one I’m heavily involved with, is called “demand response.” 

    • #37
  8. Profile Photo Inactive
    @JohnMurdoch

    (Cont’d from #29)

    When there’s high demand, the utility asks larger customers to voluntarily reduce their load. But it’s more than simply voluntary: the utility will actually pay the customer to turn load off. If you turn off 100 KW of load (a thousand 100 watt lightbulbs) that’s 100 KW of capacity I now have to supply all those home heat pumps coming onstream at 4 pm. If I pay you $0.15 per KWh–or $0.60 per KWh, that’s a lot less than I’m going to pay a merchant plant or the grid operator for additional power. 

    In practice, it’s not just about generating electricity: the problem is supplying electricity to a given area. At peak loads, the transmission lines to a given substation may be at capacity–you simply cannot jam more energy in. You could bring an entire nuke plant onstream, but it won’t get any more electricity to any meter downstream of that substation.

    (You’re in southern California, right? The Imperial Valley is a good example of this problem. Very little new transmission capacity in the past 30 years, but they keep issuing building permits.)

    • #38
  9. Profile Photo Inactive
    @JohnMurdoch

    (Cont’d from #30)

    In theory, demand response (paying customers to shed load) is more cost-effective than big utility rebate programs to replace HVAC equipment, adopt CFL lamps, and so forth. Because you can easily identify the grid segments that are capacity-constrained, you focus your efforts on recruiting commercial customers in those segments, and focus your rebates and incentives to get them to install systems (a shout-out for dimming fluorescent lamps!) that reduce energy without closing down the plant. 

    In practice, there are challenges…how to quickly and efficiently tell those customers that a demand event is occurring, and how to make it feasible for those customers (who, typically, aren’t big enough to have a building facilities manager to sweat stuff like this) to respond automatically. 

    All of which is to say, if Apple acted this way, it would be nuts. But Apple is manufacturing a product with a shelf life of longer than 1/60th of a second (literally). For the electric power industry, it really would make the utility more profitable if you would buy that higher-efficiency heat pump for La Casa Savage.

    • #39
  10. Profile Photo Inactive
    @JohnMurdoch

    One more thought about this: in practically every situation the problem with electric capacity isn’t with generation–it’s with transmission. You can build a generating plant (particularly a natural gas-fired plant) in a small, industrial setting–it’s not that big a deal. The problem comes when you have to expand the capacity of transmission lines into an area–particularly when that means building big high-tension lines. That’s a hideously long, painful, expensive process–just to get the permits. Building the line isn’t a big deal–but getting approvals from every municipality along the route, and dealing with the throngs of overwrought earth mamas who are convinced that magnetic radiation causes autism (or breast cancer, or rickets, or seizure disorder) means adding new transmission capacity can take a decade. Or more. 

    That’s how you end up with grid segments with insufficient capacity–no municipality checks with the utility to determine if there’s adequate electric capacity before issuing a building permit. But that same municipality won’t let you build a transmission line to serve that customer.

    • #40
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