My wife and I just bought a new home. Needless to say, because of the way I earn my living, the energy use of perspective places was at the top of my list of priorities. If a home didn't have double-paned windows, an efficient heating system and good insulation, I didn't even want to look at it. (Our new home doesn't look like the one pictured here which I found on Flickr iand was taken by johnrawlinson. But man is that place energy efficient. Check out more about it.)

If only one of those items needed to be upgraded though, I decided it might still be ok for us to look at the place more closely because investments in energy efficiency has been shown to increase property values by 2 to 40 times the initial investment cost according to this post at worldchanging.org.

During my research, I discovered another reason to feel good about buying a slightly less energy efficient home.

As a part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, people who make their homes more energy efficient can get a credit for up to 10 percent of the cost, up to $500 per household over the two years of the credit. A number of home improvement purchases can be claimed under this credit including exterior windows and skylights, metal roofs, insulation, HVAC systems and water heaters.

Although the amount of the credit isn't substantial (especially if we're talking about the outlay for new windows on an entire house), over time, these purchases pay for themselves in the form of lower heating and cooling bills and help the planet. And of course, the real reason we do things like this is to use less energy and help the planet, right?

Seriously, whatever your reason for improving the energy efficiency of your home, try to do it soon so you can take advantage of this credit. Congress didn't extend it so it expires Dec. 31.

Before you make your purchases, remember to check with your local utilities to see if they offer incentives for those upgrades. The Energy Star program has a great tool http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=rebate.rebate_locator for looking up local rebates on all sorts of products.

To find out more about what is eligible for the federal tax credit and what you need to claim it go to Energy Star's tax credit information page. More...

Google is investing in clean energy again. This time, instead of buying solar panels to power their operations, or working to make their data centers more energy efficient, they're plowing millions of dollars into the development of clean energy. The goal is to create 1 gigawatt (GW) of electricity for less than it would cost to get the same amount of electricity from coal.

The initiative is called Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal (which is a terrible name but is shortened to the txt-friendly RE<C by Google). According to the company, they expect to spend tens of millions of dollars in 2008 "on research and development and related investments in renewable energy." undefined

This is good news, right?

Inasmuch as I appreciate any company willing to spend money to advance almost any non-fossil-fuel source, it is great news. Google has a ton of cash and is a very influential company in the marketplace. When they say they’re going to do something, people listen. So if Google is spending a lot of money on sustainable and renewable energy, it's a good thing.

But that influence also makes me worry because instead of making grants to achieve this goal, Google is hiring its own team of engineers to tackle the problem.

Is it really wise to count on a company like Google which, as great as it is at online tools has no background in energy, to direct our energy future?

For example, Larry Page, one of the company's co-founders, said on the Google blog today, "I believe that solar thermal technology provides a very plausible path to generating cheaper electricity."

I write about energy every day as a reporter for utility-industry trade magazines. We cover energy news in the western US which is arguably the region of the country at the forefront of using sustainable and renewable energy. In the last 15 years, one utility-scale solar thermal installation has been built in the West. That 64-megawatt plant, called Nevada Solar One, covers 350-square acres and cost in the neighborhood of $250 million to construct.

There might be a lot of solar power out there in the Desert Southwest, but how many of these massive plants will get built, really? Consider the land-use issues, environmental issues and the need to run very expensive transmission lines from remote areas to urban centers.

Like I said, I am not against Google spending its money on sustainable and renewable energy, but I would like to see them tackle the energy problem using methods similar to those the Gates Foundation uses to address medical issues around the world: They give lots of money to the people who have the know how do the work.

Unfortunately, Google wants to make a buck and so invests money instead of grants it (to be fair, the Google Foundation is making some grants toward this goal as well). While this course may pan out, it could also fall prey to the Google corporate culture that rewards abject failure as a worthwhile outcome as long as the idea was unique.

Our energy future is too important to count on that kind of system. More...

Ever wondered where your power company gets its power? Or maybe you've driven past a large industrial "park" on your way to work every day for years and wondered what exactly it's been spewing in those great globs of smoke and steam. I've just found a terrific tool that can help you discover all sorts of useful facts and information about what's being produced in your backyard and across the world so you can keep the lights on. More...

I love to eat out and trying new foods is so exciting for me that I often end up with leftovers because I order so much. But this leaves me with a pretty big energy-use dilemma. I can't waste the food, but I also don't want to contribute to the waste stream if I can help it. After all, recycling uses plenty of energy and so many restaurants still use Stryofoam (amazingly) that taking home the leftovers seems almost as bad as leaving food behind sometimes.

So what do I do with that left-over food?

One night, shortly after moving into my present apartment, a trick for finding answers I learned in Peru helped answer that question. While staying in Ollantaytambo, I repeated the town's name over and over in my head, like a mantra. I liked the sound of it and it's rhythm just matched the pace of life in that small, dirt poor town perched at the base of a magnificent Incan temple. It also brought me some clarity and let me find some answers I'd been needing. More...

I was planning a post today about testimony given by the director of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office on methods of reducing carbon emissions. I was struggling though with how to tie it to local issues. After all, a discussion on federal legislation doesn't feel like something you can easily take part in, does it? Nonetheless, when a cap-and-trade program or a carbon tax are finally passed (and they will be, soon) it's going to hit our wallets. More...