So said design engineer and energy consultant Douglas Livingston during a three-day visit to the country.
Mr. Livingston was here to conduct educational workshops on alternative sources of energy and methods for promoting more efficient consumption of current energy sources.
The workshops were co-sponsored by the College of The Bahamas and the United States Embassy.
Noting the frequency with which consumers pay excessive electricity bills due to energy wastage, Mr. Livingston highlighted some of the less obvious areas that are often responsible for the significant loss of energy.
“Most of the investments in efficiency pay twice,” he said. “In a climate like this where you’re running air conditioning, by definition, all of the inefficient energy that’s being consumed by appliances is showing up inside your house as heat and then you have to pay for an air conditioner to remove even more heat from the inside of the house.”
He also pointed out the impact that a simple bulb could have on electricity bills.
“That little 50 cent light bulb is causing a lot more trouble than you realise,” Mr. Livingston said. “When you buy it, it looks like a good deal, but when you look at the long-term cost of incandescent versus fluorescent lighting, for example, you are probably paying four or five times as much overall for the incandescent than you would for the fluorescent.”
Mr. Livingston’s work has taken him to areas as diverse as the United States, Costa Rica, the Ecuadorian Amazon Basin and parts of Africa where he installed refrigeration systems for remote and powerless hospitals, village water pumping systems and remote communications equipment.
He pointed out that an archipelagic nation like The Bahamas could benefit from using alternative sources of energy in conjunction with or in lieu of traditional grid systems, which use fuel-burning generators to provide electricity.
Mr. Livingston said that additional costs could be reduced by using alternative energy sources such as solar thermal heating. He cited research performed by Oral LaFleur, director of the Living Systems organisation.
Mr. LaFleur also participated in the education workshops.
“Mr. LaFleur said the solar thermal systems installed here cost about $2,000 more than it would have to install just the traditional electric water heater and that system included electric water heater backup so that the majority of the heat would come from the sun when it is available and the electric heater would automatically kick in if the solar system wasn’t heating fast enough,” Mr. Livingston said.
“He was estimating that consumers would save between $50 and $100 a month depending on the family’s usage.”
Mr. Livingston also provided insight on liquefied natural gas plants, like those currently being considered for The Bahamas.
“The one curiosity I have is why wouldn’t this be done in the United States,” Mr. Livingston said. “If it’s the United States who wants it and there’s some reason why the US won’t unload compressed natural gas and deal with it there then I would find out what that reason is before I would move forward here.
“The risk of an explosion would be the biggest concern with LNG,” he said. “I would not be concerned about direct damage to eco-systems or human health unless there was so big a spill that it pushed the oxygen out of the local atmosphere. The bigger problem that I would be concerned about with a natural gas spill would be the global warming consequences.”
He said that methane molecules, which are the primary constituents in LNG, are “something on the order of “2,000 times stronger as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, which is also associated with the global warming phenomenon.”
Mr. Livingston said, “In fact, in the United States with oil refineries and other
By Darrin Culmer, The Bahama Journal
