Richard Perez from Home Power Magazine exposes the U.S. electrical grid’s $25B–$45B maintenance backlog, driven by aging infrastructure and public resistance, while detailing his Oregon off-grid system—4.2 kW solar, wind backup, and passive solar design slashing wood use to 0.5 cords. He advocates for Energy Star appliances (saving up to $0.40/day) and LED lighting (1.5W replacing 40W), criticizing Bush’s energy policies as a "total disaster" amid $44/barrel oil and $1.8B annual subsidies for fossil fuels. Perez warns of economic collapse within weeks if Middle Eastern oil cuts occur, urging incremental shifts to renewables like biodiesel (1-year carbon cycle) or solar-powered RVs, despite small wind’s unreliability. Practical solutions—from retrofitting campers to testing products firsthand—highlight self-sufficiency as the only sustainable path against grid dependency and corporate resistance. [Automatically generated summary]
On my webcam, I have placed a photograph of our sleepy little town of Romana.
Or at least with a part of it.
Uh, taken from the air.
The helicopter in which I got arrived about three years ago.
Now, since that time, we have become a boomtown.
Boy, are we a boomtown?
I mean, new Walmarts and all kinds of stuff here.
It's going crazy.
We're one of the, according to the, I forget what it was, the, uh, the Wall Street Journal, I think.
We're the second fastest growing town, or even the fastest, in the whole country.
Crazy.
So, our little boomtown is kabooming.
In fact, we've got a new little restaurant.
This will take you back, back to the 50s easily.
We have a new little restaurant opening, just about to open.
Not so little, really.
You know, they're the kind right out of a 1950s American graffiti movie with the girls on the roller skates and the whole thing.
This town is like a blast back into the 50s period, so it'll fit right in.
I think that's pretty cool.
Perhaps on a local radio station, we ought to run a night of Wolfman Jack or something.
Wouldn't that be cool?
Anyway, that's an air photograph of our little town about three years ago before the big boom hit.
Now, I'm going to go ahead and mention this to you.
Tomorrow night, ABC Television is going to be here.
Why?
I don't know.
Peter Jennings is doing a two- or three-hour special that will be aired in February of 2005.
And they're going to interview me and come and shoot and invade and hang around like locusts.
So they'll be here tomorrow night.
I've had that happen a few times since I've been doing this program, having a major network in here while we're doing the show.
It's kind of, I don't know, it's kind of weird, actually.
I mean, they've got to get a camera right up in your face.
So we'll see.
Tomorrow night, by the way, we're going to have Stephen Greer here who got, you know how I'm always talking to Stephen about how potentially unsafe what he's doing is.
Well, he received a pretty serious telephone threat.
In fact, we've got a copy of it.
And you'll hear it tomorrow night.
He'll be our guest tomorrow night, Stephen Greer.
And so we're going to be talking ufology and UFOs and, you know, the government cover-up and all the rest of it.
In a moment, the other cover-up, at least a lot of people, of course, think it is.
I note the first one, two, three, four major national stories tonight continue to be about Iraq.
in a moment.
Now, I guess I shouldn't refer to the good people of ABC at ABC as locusts.
They're not.
It's just a sort of a state of mind.
You know, I don't like TV.
Being honest with you, I just don't like TV.
I like watching it, but I don't like being on it.
However, in this case, the reason I consented to do this is because they have promised, and I think this is very, very important.
They really have promised me that this is an objective, honest, non-chuckle factor look at ufology, and they hope to propel with this program a major investigation of what these things are.
And if that really is their goal, then no matter the inconvenience, I really could not help but be a part of it.
That's very important, and we've been all waiting for a major network to take a major, real honest God interest in this subject.
And they promised to do that.
So inconvenient or not, I felt obligated to be part of it.
So that will occur tomorrow night, and they'll be around.
Now, the Iraqi government has decided to give amnesty to people who have committed some crimes.
The Iraqi interim prime minister signed an amnesty Saturday intended to persuade militants fighting a now 15-month-old, been going on for 15 months, this insurgency to put down their weapons they're invited to and join the government to help rebuild the country.
However, the law pardons only what they call minor criminals, not killers or terrorists.
So it appeared very unlikely to dampen any of the violence, as some insurgent leaders called it, quote, insignificant, end quote.
Probably from the point of view of their crimes, I'm sure it is.
So what does that mean?
If you were a pickpocket, if you stole a painting out of a museum, you would be pardoned.
But if you continue to blow things up, no.
An al-Qaeda terrorist suspect detained in England was sent to the U.S. in early 2001 by the principal architect of the September 11 suicide hijackings to perform surveillance on economic targets in New York, according to U.S. officials and government interviews with other captured terrorist suspects.
They said the suspect claimed, get this, folks, that he has associates in America, possibly in California.
The heightened state of alert in New York, Newark, New Jersey, in Washington, is a, quote, grim reminder of terrorist threats that still face the U.S., said President Bush on Saturday.
He defended the elevated warnings in the face of criticism that they were based on old intelligence, quote, And the pre-trial hearing for a soldier photographed with naked Iraqi prisoners recessed Saturday without any ruling on whether the vice president, Dick Cheney, and other high-ranking administration officials must testify.
An aspiring politician and video game designer who faked his own beheading, can you believe that?
Faked his own beheading by Iraqi militants awoke on Saturday to learn, oh, look at that, television stations around the world were showing his homemade video, his hoax.
Benjamin Vandeford, 22, said he posted the 55-second clip, which seems to show a knife sawing against his neck on an online fire-sharing network in May.
circulated in cyberspace before crossing over to the major media airing on arab television and of course the whole world why somebody would well A series of witnesses played six top al-Qaeda fugitives in Africa, and what were they doing there?
They were buying up diamonds in the run-up to September 11th.
This is according to a confidential report by U.S.-backed prosecutors obtained by the Associated Press.
The first-person accounts detailed by the prosecutors add to the very long-standing claims of Al-Qaeda that millions of dollars was laundered before September 11th.
John Kerry said Saturday, the restriction on stem cell research, we just did a program on that, imposed by our president was a triumph of ideology over science and, quote, only adds to the loss and pain, end quote, of millions of Americans suffering from potentially curable disease.
At this very moment, he said, some of the most pioneering cures and treatments are right at our fingertip spot because of stem cell research ban.
They remain just beyond our reach.
The Democratic presidential candidate said in his party's weekly address, well, how many of you have a pet that you would pay $50,000, and we all love our pets, don't we?
$50,000 to have cloned?
Well, if you love your pet that much, now you can do it.
Reuters, two cloned kittens have been born using a new cloning method that may be safer and more efficient than traditional methods.
Genetic Savings and Clone.
That's what they're calling themselves.
Genetic Savings and Clone promises to clone anyone's pet for $50,000 or so and began with the chief executive of that company and his pet.
The two kittens, Tabui and Baba Ganosh, were born to separate surrogate mothers in June, said the company.
Its report was not submitted for the traditional scientific review process and has not been scrutinized by cloning experts, but the company is less interested in scientific questions and medical promise of cloning and much more interested in its business model, helping people make copies of their beloved pets.
So they claim they've got the science down to a paw, but they don't really care about that.
They actually, they're in biz.
So this is cloning commercial cloning a reality.
So I know there are some people with the money out there who love their pets so deeply that they would clone the little guy or gal.
Would you be one of those?
Just $50,000?
When performed by a skilled team using sufficiently advanced technology, clones resemble their donors to an uncanny degree.
Just as we predicted, they say, it's a happy day for our clients.
Some experts have argued that cloning pets is a gamble, as non-genetic factors like conditions in the mother's womb can affect coat color and temperament.
So, I don't know, would you really get the same exact pet?
Well, probably not.
But the question remains, how many of you would love your pet so much?
And there are plenty of people that you would clone the little guy or gal.
Well, now you can.
This is not future shock.
This is now.
The Poset Meteor Shower is on the way, you know.
Conditions this year, they say, are very favorable, with no moonlight to worry about, no nasty moonlight to ruin everything.
Some are already being seen each night now, but the best is yet to come.
In fact, they will increase in number each night for the next few days, reaching a maximum late in the night of August 11th and 12th when get this.
Up to 100 meteors per hour may be visible under good conditions.
The shower occurs when the Earth passes through the trail of particles left by Comet Swift Tuttle, named after its discoverers.
And then Jeff sends this, and I have no way of knowing if this is really a Bush quote or not, but you know, the President is certainly in the middle of a big fight to retain office, and he's under a lot of pressure.
And in fact, Jeff says, Art, the pressure may be getting to Mr. Bush.
He came up with a gem of a fraudulent slip yesterday.
At the signing ceremony, I don't know if this is true.
At the signing ceremony for a $417 billion military spending bill, the President said, quote, Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we.
They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.
I find it a little hard to believe the president would have uttered such words, but you know, these things do happen.
So I don't know.
You tell me, did the president actually say that?
Does anybody have that on tape?
How do you think he's doing?
Do you think the president is going to be re-elected?
Have you made up your mind yet?
I am told the next president of the U.S. will be decided by those who have not made up their mind.
I would be one of those.
I have not made up my mind yet.
Traditionally, in times of war and conflict, sitting presidents are retained by an American people who don't want to change things in the middle of a conflict.
On the other hand, we're on the downside of this conflict where there has been a lot of political pressure because of the death of American men and women in Iraq, and so it's a hard call.
Traditionally, presidents during good economic times are retained.
Do you think these are good economic times?
Remember the famous quote, do you think you are better off than you were four years ago?
Do you?
As you look around at your lifestyle, your salary, your general happiness with your life conditions, are you better off than you were four years ago or not?
If that is the question, then perhaps you have the answer.
Yeah, he was on the escape route, but I'm talking about the first Gulf War.
And that probably put him on notice, and he could have buried all these weapons.
But what intrigues me is that never is there mentioned anything in the news about how we, America, gave or sold weapons of mass destruction, biological and well, but that's pretty common knowledge, really.
Or if he did, it certainly would be worth having a tape of.
A lot of things get said during the stress of a campaign that, of course, the candidates don't mean to say they deserve to come rolling out from the high desert in the middle of the night.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coastal.
unidentified
Don't count me, sir.
You know it don't count me, sir.
You don't count me, sir.
You know it don't count me, sir.
Got to pay your dues if you want to see the blues out.
We'll be right back.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
The moon.
Beautiful.
Some.
Even more beautiful.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, my God.
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from East of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
From West of the Rockies, call ART at 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach Art Bell by calling your in-country sprint access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Oh, yeah, you know, because they promised it would be a very serious, you know, kind of for the first time, one of the big three networks looking at UFOs, and so it was irresistible, much as I do not like having TV here.
unidentified
Well, you know what?
In this war against disclosure, you're not just a soldier.
For you, sir, I am going to ask Dr. Greer, bearing in mind, this is an emergency room surgeon, right?
An emergency room doctor.
And so I'm going to talk to this doctor tomorrow night on your behalf, and I'm going to say, hey, Doc, what do you think about taking some DMT and eating up with the aliens?
My guest tonight is Richard Perez from Home Power Magazine.
And we're going to talk about energy.
God knows, it's probably, it should be at the top of our national priority of things that we ought to be getting done, actually should have had done already.
But we are going to talk about energy.
Oh, my, what a topic that is going to be as time goes on and the last of the oil pumps from the ground.
A lot of people are sick in Iraq, my dear, because of the depleted uranium shells that we, on top of, of course, what the shells did, but the depleted uranium shells that were used, it'll be around for a thousand years or so.
And there are claims that there are many, many sick already.
Well, what I noticed is in the last year or two, I'm calling, by the way, from Springfield, Oregon, and listening to KOH.
But anyway, what I've noticed is the, you know, every time you scooch out of your car, normally if it was kind of a cloudy, overcast day, you know, a lot of moisture in the air, high humidity, then you wouldn't get shocked.
But then you reason with yourself, and you say to yourself, well, if the only way I can survive is in a hole with a big piece of metal above me, then what do I have that's worth going back to?
And do you think that will be either one of these men?
unidentified
Not really.
No.
We have a porous border.
You know, if these people are going to come through this country, I believe that we need to teach them English and they need to become Americans as other generations of immigrants have come to this country and became Americans.
I think it would be my guess that the president will be re-elected.
And that's just my guess.
It's pure guess.
But I think the American people, in the end, are rather unlikely to change horses in the middle of a conflict.
unidentified
And I believe because we are fighting an enemy from the seventh century who, just like the president said today, will stop at nothing to turn this world into a Muslim world.
And I don't understand why the government does not educate this country and the world on what we are fighting.
If you woke up one morning and you opened your blast doors and you looked outside and it was obvious an incredible Holocaust had occurred and there was nothing but ashes up there, what would you do?
unidentified
Oh, probably just shut the door and say the heck with it.
And my thinking was, I'm just guessing, but that the American people probably would be disinclined, you know, to change presidents right in the middle of a conflict.
unidentified
You hear that Mount Spur is starting to sparkle up a little bit.
Have you ever noticed when people call me, there must be something about the quality of a telephone line that simply will not allow them to believe that it is me.
On the other hand, along finally came that caller who said, you actually do sound like yourself.
From the high desert in the middle of the night, this is Coast to Coast AM.
How you doing?
unidentified
A Bumba, A Bumba, A Bumba, A Bumba.
Can you hear my heartbeat in the front?
Do you know that the heart of this was...
The End Be inside of the sound, the smell of a touch.
There's something inside that we need so much.
The side of the touch, or the scent of the sound, or the strength of a low root deep in the ground, the wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up through tarmac to the sun again, or to fly to the sun without burning a wing, To lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing, to have all these things in our memories all, and to use them to come to us to find blood.
Yeah!
Ride, ride as your soul, take this place, on this trip, just for me.
Ride, take a pillow, take my place, up my seat, it's for free.
Wanna take a ride?
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free 800-825-5033.
From west to the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach ARC by calling your in-country sprint access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
If you listen carefully tonight, you may well learn something.
You may save yourself some money, and who knows what you may do if you listen tonight.
And here's why I say that.
Quite a number of years ago, I began to have guests on the power question, on our grid, on being self-sufficient, on all kinds of things like that.
And I learned all kinds of interesting things.
Like, well, gee, like my appliances, for example, they were at the time about 13 years old.
You know, the washer, the dryer, the refrigerator, that sort of thing.
And I had a guest on who said, you know, new appliances take about a third or a fourth the amount of electricity that what you have right now does and then I learned about solar panels and wind power and then I learned about heat we live here in the desert where on average it's up to 105 or six degrees every day now during the two brutal months we have in the desert and so you have to build things not to emanate heat as much as
possible.
So I have revolutionized my household.
I am independent of the grid.
I have both wind and solar power in abundance, and I have all the equipment to generate it, and that's what I use in my home.
Then I changed all my appliances.
Then I went around and changed all my light bulbs.
Then I took these heat-prone monitors and got them out of here and put in LCD screens.
And, you know, slowly over the years, from listening to my own program, I've changed the way I live.
My wife and I have changed the way we live, and you too can do that or part of it if you listen carefully to tonight's guest, who is Richard Perez.
He is the publisher for Home Power Magazine.
Now, he facilitates the work of the magazine's editorial, art, advertising, production, sales, web, CD-ROM crews.
His primary job, he says, is digital janitor.
He maintains and upgrades Home Power's extensive computer systems and writes articles and editorials.
Richard has been living and working off-grid since way back in 1970, a long time before I thought about it, with a photovoltaic and wind electric system.
Richard's goal is to change the way people make electricity.
So if you listen tonight, you just may learn.
Ladies and gentlemen, Home Power Magazine's Richard Perez.
I cannot think of a more important subject than what we're about to talk about.
Now, everybody, I think, remembers California's not-too-distant problems with electricity, where they had brownouts and blackouts and all kinds of troubles with the grid in California, shortages, that kind of thing, and that was a little taste of the grid.
and just a little taste what kind of shape is the grid in the electric grid across the u.s well i'll tell you it's uh felt better it's uh it's getting old the power plants the transmission line infrastructure was by and large created 20 to 30 years ago 40 in some cases and and even longer the utilities have been running
and they haven't been investing the kind of money they should have been investing in upgrading the transmission lines and power plants.
So what we've got here is a basically aged infrastructure that is stretched very, very thin.
And it's not just a matter of, oh, things like natural disasters, accidents.
You know, now we have to deal with things like sabotage, fuel supply limitations, and an ever-increasing demand for electricity.
So what we've got is a situation where this whole structure is poised to fail, and it has failed for, well, things like the financial concerns that caused the California energy crisis.
These are things I call energy sharking, Enron-like activities.
also well we're not sure what caused the East Coast Midwest blackout they never didn't they nail that down I thought they did to some small power plant somewhere yes and and I've heard everything from that to it was a tree branch across some high voltage lines I don't think they're ever going to to definitively pin down exactly what caused that.
But the point is, it is a house of cards, And it is a house of cards that is stressed heavily.
And any small failure anywhere in this massive grid can bring down whole sections of it.
I understand that putting in new electric lines where there had not previously been lines would be a challenge in today's world because we have environmentalists and people who don't want you crossing properties and they don't want electric lines near and all the rest.
But why have they not upgraded the current infrastructure that we have?
Not including the legal work that goes upfront into obtaining a right-of-way for this.
And the utilities spend roughly half of the money that they take in on their expenses.
They're spending half of it on the maintenance, upgrading, and establishment of new power lines.
Currently, we've got about 160,000 miles of high-voltage lines in the USA, and we could use additionally, it depends on which expert you talk to, but somewhere between 25 and 45,000 additional miles.
And every time I see a notice where a utility wants to put up a line or whatever, the people in the path of the line are going, no, no, no, not in my backyard.
And believe me, I can see their point.
You know, I live way off grid, six miles from the nearest place where you could plug in a light off the grid.
Oh, about six or seven years into the process, I decided that, hey, it was time to join the 20th century because 1880s life is just too damn tough.
Hauling water gets very, very old.
But even though I'm six miles from the end of the nearest 120-volt light socket, I have a high-voltage line running three-quarters of a mile from my house.
And during the fall, but during the winters here in Oregon, I'll run it on average maybe once or twice a week, you know, when extended cloudy periods hang on.
So in these days, then, you can have the solar panels out there, folks.
They can be feeding a battery bank, and that battery bank then goes to what's called an inverter, and that changes it into 120 or 240 volts as you would normally have in your home.
You run it into your house, and then what, Richard?
People who walk in there are amazed that we're not on grid.
We have every particular gigawatt that we want.
And it's just that whatever we do, we do the research and we spend that additional amount of money, and it's generally not much, probably another 5 to maybe even 15% on some cases, to get the most efficient appliance possible to do that job.
And we have two refrigerator freezers.
We have a home theater system.
We have five computer systems with a network.
We have satellite internet, compact fluorescent and LED lighting.
Well, when we're getting the sun and we don't really particularly have to pay attention to how much we're using, we can cycle 12 to 17 kilowatt hours of renewable energy every day, which is enough to power a downtown home, you know, with the possible exception of things like an electric stove.
Our stove is run by propane, our cook stove.
For heat, we use solar heat in the winter, and we use passive solar cooling in the summer.
Well, there are times when we'll get two-week and three-week cloudy periods here in Oregon.
It doesn't happen very often.
Last winter was a good example.
In November and December, we had one.
So we'll light the stove up and burn it for a few hours.
And because the house is so well insulated, it traps that heat, and then we can cruise for a couple, three days before we have to do it again if the sun doesn't come back.
Well, you're a pretty good example because I live, for example, in a solar paradise where clouds are the rare exception.
We have almost all sunny, windy days.
So it's ideal for this kind of thing.
But you're a better example because you live in Oregon where, well, frankly, there's a lot of rain and a lot of cloudy days, and yet you're doing it anyway.
So people can't really say, ah, you know, I live in Oregon.
Oh, people just don't live where there isn't enough sunshine to run solar heating for their home and their hot water and also solar power for their appliances, solar electricity.
Home Power has many readers in the western Washington area around Seattle.
And, you know, I'm in southern Oregon, where it's pretty much kind of like northern California.
We get quite a bit of sun.
But if you can run it in western Washington around the Seattle area, you can run it just about anywhere.
The next question most people would ask is, all right, look, I don't live in a house that was originally designed with the kind of insulation Richard probably has and all the rest of that.
Suppose I wanted to begin now, and I wanted to begin to change my life, and I own a home, and I've got a backyard, a little backyard, a little front yard.
What can I do, and how much is it going to cost me?
Richard Perez from Home Power Magazine is my guest.
And if you would like to live independent of the grid, independent, and I might add, in the long run, a lot more cheaply, then you're going to want to listen very closely this morning.
Richard Perez from Home Power Magazine on Coast to Coast AM, roaring at you in the darkness from the high desert.
As I said, Richard, contractors and people who sell homes are always throwing around R ratings.
It's got R so-and-so.
Is there some way that you can translate in a way that we'll all understand what these R ratings mean in terms of, I don't know, how much electricity you might save or how much heating bill you might save?
And that doesn't mean that's all the insulation that you can have there, but that's what they specify on new construction.
Old construction can have anything from no insulation at all, just, you know, walls with a dead airspace in there.
And, you know, that's going to be like R2 or so, up to modern construction R19.
But this doesn't mean you have to stop there.
For example, if you've got an older home and say it was built in the 50s or 40s and it doesn't have 2x6 studs and the walls has 2x4 studs and the insulation is barely there when it was installed and now it's barely there at all.
When it's time to paint it or reside it and you strip the old siding off, you've got an excellent opportunity there to lay foam.
This is basically a foam-based insulative material, 4x8 sheets, aluminum foil on both sides.
Lay up one inch, two inches of foam, and then put on the new siding.
Not only does it save you heat in the winter, but it reduces your summer cooling load, which is critical in areas like where you live, Art, and in the South.
So insulation is not just for people who live in the freezing north, it's for people who also live where it gets hotter in hell in the summer.
Now, any, I mean, obviously, you know, each situation is going to vary, but is there a way to understand the expense involved in doing this if you were, say, replacing your siding?
Oh, well, just replacing the siding, you'll probably add 20% or 25% to the bill by putting this insulation underneath it.
If you're building a house from scratch and you want to do this energy-efficient insulative number on it and use good windows to boot, 5% to 7% of the cost of the house would be put into this.
You're going to get it back in the first five cooling and heating seasons versus burning, well, whatever you're burning for heat and whatever you're using, usually electricity for cooling.
So, you know, the first step towards any kind of energy self-sufficiency and any kind of sane energy picture is reducing the load.
But at some point in the past, somebody like you or you made the statement that my appliances, which were, I don't know, 13, 14 years old, compared to new ones, washers, dryers, refrigerators, that sort of thing, compared to the new ones, would save some incredible amount of energy.
I just could not believe it.
And I checked on it, and sure as hell, you or whoever said it was exactly right.
I think it was you.
And I went out and bought new appliances, and oh my goodness, what a difference.
All right, let's just look at a light bulb, for example.
Fairly common item.
Folks have them all over the place.
They leave them on.
A light bulb is 94% of the electricity you stick into it comes off as heat, not light.
So it's actually a better electric heater than it is a light.
And if you're in a summer cooling area where you're running air conditioning and you have incandescent lights in your house, you're really nuts.
You're working against yourself here.
You go to a compact fluorescent light, which is delivering as much light for anywhere From a half to a third the amount of energy in, and it's producing very little heat.
Yes, and I think we should catch people up on something, Richard.
Some time ago, gee, just a few years ago, incidescent, or rather, the newer lighting, was very, it was kind of rare, and they were oddly shaped, weird bulbs.
Well, people should go back to the stores in their area and look, because now they're producing these incredible new bulbs.
Well, they just screw in like any other bulb.
They're made more conventionally looking now than they used to be.
They're shorter, stubbier, easier to put in all over the place.
And they're amazing because, oh, say, what, a 60-watt bulb might burn 18 watts in electricity instead of 60.
We could eliminate somewhere between five to seven major coal-fired power plants if America's residences would get rid of the light bulb and adopt compact fluorescence.
And guess what?
There's something else coming online that's even better than compact fluorescent.
I'm betting you somewhere around a third of the folks have compact fluorescents in their house, and more and more are using them daily.
LED is just a tiny fraction of the population.
So we still got a lot of work to do here.
And this is just the light bulb.
The house is full of other appliances, washing machines, refrigerators.
Refrigerators are a prime example.
A modern Energy Star refrigerator is going to consume somewhere between a half and a third of the amount of energy as one that was made, oh, say, 10 years ago, and a quarter of the energy of one that was made 20 years ago.
Yeah, so Aunt Millie's, when she died and left you her old Kelvinator, well, God bless her, and it was nice that she left it to you, but believe me, you don't want to plug it in.
And folks, you know, they take the old refrigerator and they do things like stick it out in the garage where it's hotter than hell all day and let it run out there.
These refrigerators are consuming an incredible amount of energy.
For example, my wife Karen decided she wanted another refrigerator.
And for years, we had this 12-volt alternative energy refrigerator that cost a lot of money.
And it worked great, but it was too small.
So we went energy shopping for a refrigerator on the internet.
And we paid very close attention to the Energy Star labels and the tests on these refrigerators.
We wound up with a 27 cubic foot refrigerator that in our application uses 1.5 to 1.6 kilowatt hours of electricity a day.
And this is a, you know, in terms of solar electricity, it's about four modules worth of electricity.
And, you know, see, the grid and America's energy infrastructure has lulled us into thinking, well, you know, a kilowatt hour of energy, national average is about 7.5 or so cents per kilowatt hour.
So, you know, to run that refrigerator, our new energy efficient model is about a dime a day on grid.
Okay, and say to run Aunt Millie's old Kelvinator, well, you know, it's 40 cents a day.
I wouldn't go looking for any electric appliance without consulting the little sticker that's right there in the showroom on the wall, and it'll tell you how much this thing is going to consume.
And our research here at Home Power, you know, we not only buy these things, but we also install them, and then we put instruments on them and run them and see if it actually does what they say it's going to do.
And, you know, you can do other things to your refrigerator, too.
For example, we have a pantry that is adjacent to our kitchen that is insulated out of the house, so it gets cold in the winter.
And we, instead of putting the new refrigerator in the kitchen, we put it in the pantry where it is, you know, in the 50s during the winter or even sometimes lower than that.
And this resulted in even more savings on the refrigerator because it's operating in a cool location.
So, you know, it's not only the appliance, but it's how you use it, where you locate it, and just obvious things like, you know, don't leave the TV on if nobody's in the room watching it.
Don't leave lights burning in rooms where nobody is present.
And what we found is that we can walk into the average grid household by changing a few light bulbs, maybe even changing a few major appliances, and paying a little common sense to electrical use.
We can cut the electricity bill by at least 25% in a month.
And with a little more care and spending a bit more money, we can cut it in half.
Well, if you did your homework up front and you've done an efficiency job on the house, it is dumb to go solar without doing the efficiency job and do the efficiency job first.
If you do that, you're going to spend less money on a solar electric system than you would on a good used car.
Net metering laws say that if you put up a solar electric or a wind electric system and you maintain your connection to the grid, that you can sell the grid electricity at the same price that they charge you for electricity.
So if they're charging you a dime a kilowatt hour, you can sell it to them for a dime a kilowatt hour.
Maybe we need Carrie Kiliwatt or something, you know, a guy with a beard, maybe, and hair standing, of course, straight up, you know, like he'd been just hit by 5,000 volts, and he could say the grid needs you.
Anyway, we're going to find out about that right now.
Richard, what did you mean?
Were you being facetious when you said the grid needs you?
Oh, you can be energy self-sufficient and still be on-grid.
See, a fact of life is that every renewable energy system has periods during most days when it's producing more than the people are able to store in their batteries if they were off-grid, or more than they can consume.
Well, like I said, there are 38 states with these net metering laws.
Just before Clinton left the White House, we had a national net metering law in committee where it died.
And of course, under the president administration, it's not even there anymore.
But the point is, soon this will be a national law.
But currently, it is a law state by state.
And the fine print is different in every state.
In some states, you can actually get a check from the utility.
In other states, the best you can do is break even.
But you can break even.
And, you know, say you have a solar electric system, and the kids are at school, and you're off at work, and during the day, it's spinning your electric meter backwards.
You're pumping that energy onto the grid, and you're doing it at the grid's peak demand time.
And so this is helping out the grid.
And, you know, I've had many meetings with utility people, and it's been a real uphill battle in every state.
We worked for four years to get the law passed in Oregon, Oregon's net metering law.
Well, what changed is the advantages of solar electricity.
Number one, here is a power generating source that the utility gets to use the energy from, and it did not invest one red cent of its operating capital in this.
If they're forced to buy at the same rate that you pay, in other words, retail they're actually I mean, that's got to be a losing proposition for them because, like every other business, they buy electricity at a certain rate and then resell it at an inflated rate, hence that's how they make their money, their profit.
That's where their profit comes from.
So I just can't see how you would convince them that for them it would be a good deal.
Well, the argument I used on a major utility in Oregon was, do you want to keep these people as customers?
All right?
I can throw an additional 20% on the system in terms of money.
I can install batteries, and I can tell you to take your electric meter and shove it.
So do you want to keep these people as customers?
And the advantage is you get this clean electricity, and I'm talking clean.
No carbon dioxide, no carbon monoxide, no nuclear waste, no acid rain.
I'm talking clean.
You're getting it on peak.
You're not paying a cent for the generating capability of this.
There's lots of advantages for it.
So much so that in countries that are a bit more advanced than we are, notably Japan and Germany, in Japan, if you put up a utility intertide photovoltaic system, the government will pay for half of it right out of the box.
In Germany, similar type incentives are available, so much so that photovoltaic modules that are being made in the States here or are being made by multinational corporations here in the States are getting hard to get a hold of because they're going to Japan and Germany because these people are paying more for them than we will.
I think we all know who President Bush is by now and what direction he's taken the country.
And we don't know as much about Kerry, do we?
Or do we?
How much difference is there going to be in the next four years of energy policy compared to, you know, bearing in mind that one or the other would be elected or re-elected?
Well, as far as the energy policy of George Bush, it was a total disaster.
I mean, Dick Cheney won't even tell us what went on on the secret backroom meetings with Ken Lay of Enron fame that structured his entire energy program.
So we don't even know what went on there.
What we do know is that oil has hit $44 a barrel, highest ever, and it isn't likely to come down.
They talk a little vaguely about maybe energy prices coming down, perhaps after the summer, but by and large, you don't think that's going to happen, do you?
You believe that the energy prices have gone up and they're going to keep going up and they're not going down again.
I saw a network piece on the cars that you're talking about, and it's interesting.
They kind of took the other side of it, Richard, and they said, look, these hybrid cars are very interesting.
And sure enough, it's fewer miles, or more miles per gallon, I guess I ought to say, you know, substantially more.
But they said, at the end of the day, with the maintenance and the whatever all the hybrid takes that other cars don't, you're not going to pay for it in the lifetime of the car.
Because when you stomp on this thing to get onto the freeway, the engine goes to the max and you still have this incredible 60-horsepower electric motor, which also has got infinite torque at low RPM, and it just goes right onto the freeway.
Passes at freeway speeds.
The thing is so darn quiet that you've got to be careful not to get speeding tickets in it.
And it's a $20,000 brand new car.
I had to stand in line for six months to get this thing.
And it's telling you when the electric motor is working, when the gas motor is working, when the gas motor is charging the batteries, when regenerative braking, when you stop.
If you hit the brakes a little bit, then the electric motor that's in there recharges the battery.
In other words, you recoup some of the energy you expended on accelerating the vehicle when you decelerate.
And it's really, this really is fascinating stuff.
Just in case you didn't know, and I certainly didn't, about these new cars, we're kind of into that.
Another way is that you can save power.
Or maybe you'd rather think of it this way.
Save money.
The End You know how I see it?
I see it this way.
People don't have to go out and convert their house immediately to, you know, be off the grid or sharing with the grid or whatever.
And they don't have to buy a new car right away or appliances or light bulbs or anything else.
But it seems to me, Richard, that as life goes along, why, the next time you buy a light bulb, you buy one of these instead of rushing out and replacing everything.
The next time an appliance goes out, you go and you look for the energy star.
The next time you go to buy a car, you take a good hard look at the kind of car you just talked about.
In other words, you do these things as the time for the decision about these things comes to pass naturally, huh?
You know, I've been working on this for, gee, over 30 years now.
And there are still, you know, things I'm replacing, things I'm changing.
And no, you don't have to change your life overnight.
But there are things that you can do overnight, like turn off those light bulbs in rooms where nobody's at.
And, you know, there are mindful things that you can do.
And the big ticket items, you know, converting to solar power, buying a new energy-efficient vehicle.
When the time comes to get a new car or to buy a used one or the time comes to reside your house or re-roop it, that's the time to put some insulation in.
Well, I think for the average person, Richard, that the car you talked about, for example, now today, in today's world, 60 miles per gallon, man, that means a lot to people, Richard.
That means a whole lot.
60 miles a gallon for a lot of people who commute even an hour a day.
These days it's getting hard to find because more and more folks are doing it.
But basically, it is a vegetable oil.
And plants such as canola or rapeseed can be grown specifically as a fuel crop.
And, you know, we grow it this summer and fix the carbon as the plants grow, and then we release the carbon throughout the year and do it again next year.
This is a one-year carbon cycle instead of a 200,000-year carbon cycle.
Much better for the environment.
Also, we don't have to go to places like Iraq to get this oil.
Well, Richard, since we're such gigantic consumers of energy compared to the entire rest of the world, then why do you imagine, Richard, that other countries are so much greener than we are?
Why is Japan and Germany and all these other countries so you would think we'd be leading the charge in the world toward a greener, cheaper, more energy-efficient atmosphere, but we're not at all.
Richard, for a second, let's talk about, let's go back to oil itself.
We've got an oil president.
I think most people agree with that.
Yeah, oil.
We're getting a lot of it from the Middle East.
There's been an argument about Alaska, and I, for one, would like to understand, if you can fairly relate to us, what Alaskan oil means or might mean, and if they go ahead with this big fight.
You know, they're having this big fight over Anwar.
If they were to get to Anwar, how much oil might be at Anwar?
And, you know, and particularly in the case of oil and hybrid vehicles, I mean, currently about 65% of the world's oil reserves are in the Persian Gulf states.
And that's a good reason why we're there right now.
And about 3% of the oil reserves in the world are in the American states, in the 50 American states.
So, I mean, even if oil were to go on and on, which it's not, we don't have it anymore.
They have it, which means we're going to have to import it, which means we're over a barrel here.
We're going to be having wars.
We're going to be having economic problems based on energy, on fuel.
And the thing that really frosts me to the max on this is that, you know, there's more energy delivered by the sun in a few hours than this whole entire planet uses in an entire year.
So, I mean, we've got a solar surplus here.
All we have to figure is how to get a finger in it, how to use it.
And the beginning of this is the photovoltaics and the solar hot water and the solar heating.
Well, with the existing infrastructure and the way we have it right now, Richard, people like you can talk until you're blue in the face, but the only thing in the end that's going to move people is going to be money.
Now, that's what moves people.
And as the price of oil goes up, if your statement about peak oil is correct, then that'll move people.
You won't have to say anything to them.
They'll start desperately looking for something that'll get the job done, get them to work and back, whatever, get out for vacation, whatever it takes.
But after that, if something blew up in the Middle East and we were cut off from Mideast oil, if the U.S. was cut off from Mideast oil, what timeline do we have before America begins grounding to a halt?
And what I mean grounding to a halt, I mean the 18-wheelers that haul stuff from point A to point B get to the point where there's no more diesel for them, or diesel is at such price that it's not worth it.
Well, even that group, though, Richard, would have to foresee peak oil and then a declining availability and a sharply rising price and what that would do.
Even the people you just talked about have got to see that, and it would affect their pocketbooks as well.
So there's going to come a time when they have to make the moves, don't they?
And by they, I mean our government, our leadership.
From the high desert in the middle of the night, indeed, that would be us, Richard Perez from Home Power Magazine, as my guest.
We're going to tell you, by the way, how to get Home Power Magazine.
That's only fair, coming up in a little bit.
And that could save you an awful lot of money.
Richard Perez coming right up.
The End I understand that I'm asking the impossible, and it is the impossible, but, you know, somehow or another, what we're talking about is so important, the conservation of energy, the correct use of energy, and the harvesting of the natural energy that we're not harvesting is so damned important that I wish it could be separated from politics.
Now, you know, in the course of the interview, it's already very apparent Richard Perez is not a Bush guy at all, not even close.
But the problem, of course, with expressing publicly your political views is that, you know, about half the country goes, oh, He's a bush basher, click.
And, you know, the radio's offer, they've stopped listening the moment they detect their favorite guy getting, you know, or they think he's getting bashed.
If there was some way, Richard, to separate the politics from just the cold, hard facts of energy, diminishing energy availability and ultimately a crisis and what's coming.
I mean, all of that is just a fact that's ahead of us, Richard.
But you can't take it away from politics, can you?
Then let's take that huge thing and talk about it for a second.
I remember that there were mileage figures that were given to the major car companies in America, and they said, by such and such, you will achieve such and such.
Well, the automobile makers came back and said, we can't do it.
If I think it's during my lifetime, in fact, if I think it's in the next few years, I'm going to get off my butt and I'm going to start doing all kinds of things.
If I think, well, I'm being really honest here, and I think I'm representing a lot of American people.
If I think it's my children or my children's children, that's their damn problem.
Now, realistically speaking for myself and probably a few other people at this time and in the foreseeable future, I live in an apartment, so I've been thinking about this as I've been listening.
I remember some years ago, California got into a severe water crisis, or a part of California, and they urged the people, please save water, save water, and they actually outlined the steps for people to save water.
They saved so much water that guess how they got rewarded?
The price of water went up.
Well, couldn't that happen with electricity?
I mean, if people start saving, saving, saving, then the companies are making less money, and could the end result of their efforts be to Have their bills raised for that reason?
As more and more people get solar electric systems and as they become grid intertide, those without solar electric systems are going to see a raise in the price of power.
It's just inevitable because they're going to be making less of it and they're going to be brokering it.
The good news is that a lot of what the utilities are going to be brokering is your neighbor's solar.
So this is a transition phase.
I mean, you know, to look at this as if we're going to convert everything next year or even in the next decade is ridiculous.
This is going to be a gradual change that is going to happen over many decades.
And we basically don't have any choice.
We're going to have to do this one way or another.
Here's Garrett, and you can tell he's a member of the other crowd, Richard, from Paulup, Washington.
He says, these people, that would be you, Richard, these people don't seem to want to acknowledge the danger of six to ten-year lifespans of the batteries and the environmental impact of the disposal of those batteries.
I mean, what's up with that?
That's more harmful and dangerous to the environment than what we've got now.
There is no industry in America, to begin with, the lifetime isn't six to seven years.
It's more on the order of 15 to 20.
And there is no industry in America that has a better recycling history than the lead-acid battery industry.
Chances are the battery in your car has been in three or four other cars before you got it, the lead in that battery.
The lead-acid battery industry has a much better recycling history than aluminum, glass, or any other consumer-type product.
And if you go into a utility entertain situation where you're selling your solar back to the grid, gee, you know, you don't even have to have batteries.
You know, sometimes they have a generator in them.
Modern RVs and campers are coming with solar equipped right on the roof from the factory these days.
It's easy to retrofit one or two or three or four modules onto the roof, put them into the battery, put an inverter in there, kiss your generator goodbye.
Can you take one of these portable little clamp-on ammeters and go around to your various appliances in the house, have an electrician do it, and find out what each one is using?
there's only 14 of us working on the company, and everybody is paid enough to get by, and we're happy with that.
So we're giving it away on the web, and we've been doing this for the last six years.
So this is not a new thing.
Now, if you want it via paper, if you want a subscription or something, you can call our number on Monday, and that's 800-707-6585, 800-707-6585, and we can pick you up with a subscription via paper.
Talk about a program that's getting a lot of response from the audience.
We're getting a landslide here, and that's good.
I think that's good.
Both good and bad.
You know, people upset with Richard's politics, other people fascinated with the possibilities and all the rest of it.
But massive reaction both ways.
And I think the reason for that is because everybody is finally sinking in out there.
It's finally sinking in that we may really have an energy problem.
And so, you know, positively or negatively, the good thing is people now are beginning to pay attention.
The End you I think this might punctuate what I just said.
Mark, the webmaster, not of this website, he writes and says, hey, looks like your guest's website has crashed and burned.
Well, we do that to a lot of websites on this program, but that is an indicator of the kind of interest that there is right now in all of this, Richard.
And I'm getting a landslide of interest.
You know, people fast blasting in giant multitudes, people emailing me and all the rest of it.
In other words, the interest level is extremely high right now, both positive and negative, I have to say, but very high.
And so I don't remember that day.
We've done shows like this before, and people go, you know, they don't respond because what they pay at the pump is, well, you know, annoying, but okay.
What they pay for their electric bill, annoying, but, you know, okay.
And they were comfortably ready not to take any action.
But, you know, it seems like we've reached a kind of a, I don't know, we're at a certain point here.
I mean, all it takes is a tree limb or a power plant to go out and bang, we've got, you know, well, maybe you would like to address that, Richard, because, you know, the old story about the grid was that the grid is interconnected everywhere.
So, like the internet, why you can't take it out because if you take out one little part of the grid, the rest of it doesn't go down.
It's protected.
But, well, you know, it just doesn't seem in reality like it happens that way.
When we have the entire northeast part of the country or the American Southwest or the Western part of the country, it goes out.
And then eventually they trace it to, they always say, you know, something fell on a line over there in the deepest part of Michigan somewhere or some damn thing, and that caused it all.
How can that happen when the grid is supposed to prevent all that?
I have a question about pre-manufactured homes, Richard.
Mobile homes, whatever you want to call them.
You know, they have very nice double-even triple-wide ones now.
There's a story out there that's widely believed, and I want to know if it's true or not, and that's that pre-manufactured homes are, because of the nature of the way they're made, you know, they're made in mass, right?
And they're manufactured, so they actually have better tolerances in the home, and they actually have foot-for-foot better insulation as well.
Is that a true statement, or is that what you use, horse pucky?
Well, that's pretty much horsebucky because, you know, most modern construction is wrapped in Tyvek and vapor barriers, and homes are getting so tight these days, regardless of whether they're pre-manufactured or assembled by carpenters, that you're going to have air quality problems inside the house.
So, you know, that's a matter of air leakage.
When you're dealing with thermal characteristics, you're dealing strictly with insulation.
But about nine months after I installed the unit, I had a major meltdown, and I had to ship it back to the factory, and they had the thing for about seven months.
So consequently, it's been nine months, and I finally was able to put the thing back up last week, and it's really nice to see my meter spin backwards again.
But I want to ask Richard, I am a subscriber to Home Power Magazine, by the way, Richard, and I really like your magazine.
Thank you.
My question, though, for you is, what is your opinion of the small wind industry?
Well, I wish I could say these things were trouble-free.
They are not.
I've had three wind generators in the last 10 years.
They break.
It is a very difficult job to put something like that up on a tower and just say we're not going to deal with it.
There are maintenance issues.
Some are better than others.
You get what you pay for.
But, you know, wind is, in my opinion, for the folks who are into maintenance, who are into tinkering, who are into, let's climb up the tower and check it out.
Well, I thought he had different ways of having it go than I. Well, anyway, when you interview him next time, I'm looking forward to it to see what he's put it together.
And also Bob Lazar, maybe between the two of them.
Now, if we were to make this hydrogen from the electrolysis of water, from splitting water up into hydrogen and oxygen, and if we were to use the electricity that did that from solar, wind, then, hey, then we have a sustainable setup, and fuel cells are part of it but if we're using natural gas
And you run stories, do you not, about people who do exactly that, the story of how they do it, how the mechanism is put together and how they end up with the hydrogen and how they use it in the middle of the middle of the hydrogen, yes.
They use it not only through fuel cells, but they burn it in room heaters, they burn it in stoves, and hydrogen is a wonderful thing to burn because the only byproduct is water, no carbon involved.
But if you're putting natural gas into this, then you're adding another load to an already overstressed natural gas system.
I mean, we're running short of this stuff.
We don't need to be planning an economy based around it.
That's how we got started doing this, is we started doing it for ourselves, and we said, hey, you know, this is great, and we want to tell folks about it.
And that's how we got started doing this 16 years ago.