If you install installation then you’ll save electricity right? Well – what if you installed so much insulation and consciously built window angles and included natural lighting – then you’ll no longer just save electricity, you’ll not need a furnace – or it’ll be smaller, and less ductwork, and less construction, and less labor. Meaning you’re saving a lot more than simply electricity. The bigger picture though – per Lovins, the founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, that the total amount of electricity sold in the USA has actually fallen since 2007 – is just a potential warm up if people really took efficiency seriously.
SOURCE: “If you keep investing well beyond that supposed cost-effectiveness limit, suddenly your marginal cost goes back down because now your house loses so little heat that it no longer needs a furnace, ducts, fans, pipes, pumps, wires, controls [and] fuel-supply arrangements,” Lovins said. Lovins displayed a photo of him with his latest harvest of bananas, grown in his 35-year-old passive solar home near Aspen, Colo. “Integrative design saved 99% of its heating energy and $1,100 of construction cost because the super insulation, super windows and so on cost less than the heating system they displaced,” he said. “Now over 160,000 European buildings do this.”
