It’s partly the warm winter, partly the fact that our second kid is now at college and partly (I hope) our new pellet stove, which causes the electricity-sucking fan on our oil burner to turn on far less often - but for whatever reason, my household electricity usage has fallen mightily this winter compared to last. The 12-month running average through March is 18.65 kwh/day, a whopping 15 percent drop from the 22 kwh/day at this point last year - and only about 60 percent of the 32 kwh/day I was using three years ago.

The above chart shows my PSNH bill’s 12-month running average, calculated monthly; you can see how it has consistently fallen. Part of that is cheating - two kids no longer live here full-time - but part of it is 2 1/2 years of effort and expenditure, including a new fridge, solar water heater on the roof, CF bulbs, extra insulation galore, and the pellet stove. Short of setting up PV panels (which ain’t gonna happen while the kids are in college) I’m not sure there’s much more we can do.

As a side note, our heating-oil usage has fallen this winter by at least one-half and probably more. Again, weather and kids are a chunk of that, but the pellet stove contributes.

I can’t beat the lede on the AP story: ” A small robot looking for the source of a radioactive leak at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant is stuck in the mud.”
When it rains, it pours - especially when it rains tritium!
Here’s the story, hosted by the Free-Press.

This is mostly lifted from a NH Department of Health and Human Service press release:
The  New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services says initial samples taken of water  in the Connecticut River near the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant in  Vernon,  Vt.,  showed  tritium  levels  below  500  pCi/L,  which  is  the  lower limit of [...]

Slate has an ongoing project in which one of its writers is trying to live “the efficient life”. Today’s installment (read it here) raises an interesting point:
As I’ve started paying attention to my household energy use, I have noticed something strange. It is incredibly easy for me to monitor my electricity usage and nearly impossible [...]

Slate has a good piece about efforts by Vail, the monstrous ski area in Colorado, to cut its energy use by 10 percent. New England ski areas like to be seen as “green,” but are facing the same difficult issue of meeting the energy-sucking demands of their fickle clientele:
Vail was clear: no turning off the [...]

The Vermont Senate has voted not to extend Vermont Yankee’s license beyond 2012, when it runs out. Free-Press story here. Two months ago, I would have bet a bazillion bucks against this happening!
Here’s the whole gallery of Free-Press coverage, if you need background.
Here’s the next-day NY Times story, which notes “Unless the chamber reverses itself, [...]

The Vermont Senate is slated to vote today (Wednesday) whether to extend the license of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant past 2012. Here’s a Free-Press story. All the recent bad news, especially the fact that the company didn’t admit to past leaks of radioactive tritirum, seem to have tilted the odds (which were once well [...]

The utility National Grid is finding that giving people energy-usage scorecards comparing them to their neighbors is a great way to get them to reduce how much they use. NY Times tory here.  Boston Globe story from last October here. It’s the “guilt-trip” method of getting other people to do things you want them to [...]

There are plenty of reasons to be interested in and/or worried about the situation at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, where walls collapse and tritium escapes into groundwater, but the Burlington Free-Press offers a new one today: It might be harming the Vermont brand!
Cheddar cheese, maple syrup and craft beer are just a few of [...]

The  New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services’ Emergency  Services  Unit said Friday it will begin weekly tests of water samples along the Connecticut River, in response to the tritium leak at the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, which is adjacent to the river. Some samples have already been collected since the plant admitted [...]

NH Public Radio has a nice piece - although their transcribing system is a little clunky, so it’s hard to read in print - on a proposal to extend “net metering” from individuals and small systems (up to 100 kilowatts) so that it’s available to cities and big systems (as much as 1 megawatt, which [...]

UPDATE: The Free-Press has a follow-up in Sunday’s paper (read it here) that tritium leaks are not uncommon: “At least 20 nuclear power plants around the country have reported tritium soil or water contamination, based on a Free Press examination of Nuclear Regulatory Commission documents and information gleaned from interviews with advocates and critics of [...]

Sports fandom is geographically based (live in New Hampshire but cheer for the Phoenix Suns or Miami Dolphins? I don’t think so) - so why not do the same in geek contests? Alas for the highest-profile of those contests, the Automotive X-Prize (build an 100 mpg vehicle that meets various criteria by August, win $10 [...]

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, our 10-state carbon cap-and-trade system, has wound up its first full year. The system has worked fine - the auctions went smoothly and all the allowances (each lets a utility emit one ton of carbon pollution) were sold for almost half a billion dollars, spread among various Northeastern states. Another [...]

The Boston Globe reports that the Interior Secretary has summoned a meeting of interesting parties with an eye toward making a decision on the Cape Wind offshore wind farm, which has been in the works for an incredible 9 years. Nine years - holy cow. That makes the decade-long construction period for a nuclear plant [...]