Embrace efficiency, renewables

Alliant Energy's announcement that it will help the Indian Creek Nature Center craft its new building to generate more energy than it consumes is good news for anyone who spends money on utilities.

Alliant, the Hall-Perrine Foundation, and the Nature Center cooperated in past years to make the existing building highly energy efficient and install Iowa's first net metered solar electric system. The new initiative greatly expands the concept and shows everyone how they can reduce utility consumption and bills.

Net metering simply means that solar collectors produce electricity that can run the meter backward or forward. The customer pays the 'net” at the end of the month. The small system on the Nature Center's existing building reduces consumption and cost by 41 percent. The new system will drop utility costs to zero while producing surplus electricity that will be exported for others to use.

It is not pie in the sky technology. Nearly every business and home can install readily available equipment and better manage energy use to reduce, or eliminate, cost. Alliant Energy is a progressive utility that provides rebates and assistance to financially assist. My family used their help to shrink our home's electric cost to a near trivial level, freeing money for other uses.

Technology offers immense opportunity to reduce energy consumption beyond buildings. Our Prius, for example, comfortably moves us along at 50 miles per gallon. It's closer to 60 when driving around town in summer. Every gallon we don't burn frees family cash for other things, while reducing emissions that cause climate change. We save money whether gas prices are high or low.

Business, industry, government, and homeowners can embrace efficiency and renewables to reap cost and climate benefits, or we can continue to extract, move, and burn fossil fuel.

Construction of the proposed Bakken and Keystone pipelines will require condemnation of private property, tear up land, and create potential for toxic spills to enable oil to reach a port for export. There is much oil deep in Canadian and Dakota rocks, but it remains a non-renewable resource As it becomes scarcer and harder to extract it will become more expensive. Eventually it will be gone.

If everyone embraced efficiency and renewables the need for petroleum and coal will diminish but still remain to produce power on cloudy, calm days when neither wind turbines nor solar collectors are effective. Minimizing consumption saves consumers money while extending oil and coal reserves for the manufacture of plastics, cosmetics, medications and thousands of other products made from them and for efficient transportation and electric generation.

I thank Alliant Energy and the Nature Center for their leadership and cooperation that shows us the opportunities we all have to reduce cost while making our world a safer and healthier place.

' A fishery biologist by academic training, Rich Patterson worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service in 1973 helping develop ways to protect fish from of the then-proposed Trans Alaska Oil Pipeline. The pipeline opened a few years later and is now delivering about half the oil it once did because of depletion. Comments: windingpathways@gmail.com