The Oil Drum

The summaries of the first day of the ASPO conference can be found here and here. The second day's morning summary can be found here.

The overlying theme of this year’s conference was Time to React? The final session was set-up to respond to that question, or perhaps it would be more cautious to say to explore it. The session was guided by Eddie Hobbs of RTE , and began with Debbie Cook , a former Mayor of Huntington Beach, CA. She talked about how some the issues should be addressed in local government. She felt that the challenge that we face is more of an adaptive one than that of technology. Because they see some of the highest power costs in the United States, they worked to incentivize power savings for the utilities. As a consequence she learned the benefits of selling problems at the local level. And the scale of the local use was large, with 495,000 gal/yr of fuel used for City Services, 525,000 gal of fuel/year for Waste pickup and recycle (they pick up 4,500 tons of trash a week and recycle 60% though some is sent to China where it is burned to make energy). The City did an Energy Audit and learned that keeping a single Coke machine costs $500 a year in power.