What Is A Renewable energy consultant?
Global climate change and environmental issues dominate the headlines these days. Everyone wants to do their part to conserve energy and help the environment, but it's hard to know where to start. That's where a renewable energy consultant can make a difference.
What Renewable Energy Consultants Do
A renewable energy consultant promotes the use of energy generated from renewable sources, like sun, wind, and geothermal power. Renewable energy consultants also advise residential and commercial power customers how they can conserve energy and how they can get the energy they must use from green souces.
Conservation Consulting
One valuable service of a renewable energy consultant is to conduct a home energy audit of your home. The consultant will check for air gaps that let cold air into your house during the winter. Such gaps are usually found around windows, doors, and electrical outlets. Renewable energy consultants suggest low-cost ways to seal these gaps, using inexpensive weather stripping, caulk, and other forms of insulation.
A home energy audit will also evaluate your lighting, replacing electricity-hogging incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs. Compact fluorescent lighting may seem expensive based on the price of a single light bulb, but these bulbs can reduce your electricity bill by up to 10%, paying for themselves in a relatively short period of time. As an added bonus, the bulbs last for years, so you will spend less time replacing light bulbs. Today's compact fluorescent bulbs come in a variety of colors, to emulate natural daylight or incandescent lighting.
A renewable energy consultant will also assess the energy efficiency of your appliances. Replacing your washer, dryer, refrigerator, stove, dishwasher, and furnace with more efficient models is, of course, much more expensive than replacing light bulbs. The renewable energy consultant will help you plan these replacements over the years and demonstrate the payback you will receive from each replacement.
Green Energy Consulting
Even after you maximize you energy efficiency, you will still need to consume some electric power. A renewable energy consultant will evaluate your home and advise you whether you are a candidate for solar energy, wind energy, and geothermal energy. If your house is sited so it does not receive much sunlight, or if you live in an area where the skies are mostly cloudy most of the time, the renewable energy consultant may recommend a combination of solar and wind energies, with the wind providing power when the solar power is too weak.
Renewable energy consultants can help you bring green energy into your home.
