Welcome to my blog! I’m launching this blog to answer your questions about energy, especially about your energy. Why do your bills look the way they do? What are you really paying for? How can you reduce the amount of energy you’re using without it costing you more in the long run?
There are lots of energy blogs and podcasts out there, but in my experience they tend to focus on policy, politics, and other things that we have little control over. I’d like this blog to be more practical and give you information you can apply in your home or business to make a real difference. This is a new thing for me; you can help me by providing your feedback and inputs on what you’d like to read about, and what matters to you. I will avoid debating whether climate change is real; there’s more than enough information out there, both true and false. I will just presume that you, like me, don’t like to pay for things that you waste. I’ll give you my perspective, which has its own unique bias and interests, and if that’s interesting to you, great! We’ll talk about energy companies, how the energy gets to your home or business (electricity and gas), what are the big (and little) sources of “demand” that you control, what you can do about it (and what you can’t do about it). I’ll start off by writing about topics that interest me, and then as I get your feedback, I’ll talk about topics that interest you. Sometimes, you’ll see me write something that you don’t agree with – and that’s when I especially would like to hear from you! Just be nice, please. Hopefully we can learn from each other and make the world a better place.
But before we go any further, let me introduce myself. My name is Stan Widener. I’m a mechanical engineer with a deep interest in energy, and 38 years of experience in the conversion of fuels to useful work. That includes my time in the nuclear power industry, designing and testing jet engines, designing and testing reciprocating engines (gasoline, natural gas, and diesel), and designing and testing large gas turbines for commercial power plants. That's me in the picture, how I look now, at least.
I know a lot about heat and how it moves from point A to point B, thermodynamics, mechanics, materials and mechanisms, fluid dynamics (how gases and liquids move from point A to point B), and high-technology systems. I grew up in the age before “high technology” meant computers and software, so the technology I’m familiar with is more hardware-oriented. I’ve spent a lot of time designing combustion systems to burn large amounts of fuel with large amounts of air to make large amounts of very hot gas. What’s a large amount? Well, think of the latest series of gas turbines built by General Electric for combined-cycle power generation. The “HA” turbine, which I helped design, has a nameplate rating of 384 MW electric output (60-hz) – from a single gas turbine. A combined-cycle plant with these turbines can achieve about 64% net efficiency, meaning that for every 1000 kW of fuel energy supplied, the plant puts out 640 kW of electric output.
I was laid off from GE in November of 2018 – a not altogether unwelcome event, given GE’s tragic performance lately. Since then, I’ve been researching the impact of small businesses and homes on the environment, by way of energy use. I have a firm belief that there are many of you who are spending more on energy than you need to, but you don’t know where to start to improve things. I’d like to help you.
I plan to write a new chapter in this blog on at least a weekly basis. Each post will focus on a particular question or problem facing individual energy consumers. These topics can be steered by you and your interests, if you subscribe and provide your feedback. Here are some examples:
- Energy Tariffs – what are they and how do they affect you?
- Watt’s a BTU?
- Your home matters – what household energy use contributes to climate change
- Dealing with the power companies
- Geothermal energy
- Hydronic heating systems
- Why should I care if my home has a smart meter?
- Light bulbs – what’s the real story?
- Taking care of your equipment
Another goal of mine is to provide useful content in the form of little things you can do easily and cheaply in your home or place of business to make small differences in your power use. These will be quick one-page guides you can download, or quick videos you can watch, to see what I’m doing in my home and for my clients. I will be learning as I go, so I may not get it totally right the first time, and you can laugh with me at my mistakes! Just be kind, please! And offer your suggestions – if I like them, I’ll work to incorporate them in the content. Stay tuned as I launch this content from my website.
See you again soon! Subscribe to get notified when new content comes out.