I posted “Home Performance with ENERGY STAR” in August of 2011. For a variety of reasons, mostly financial, we did not immediately solve the various issues that were revealed by the audit. However, in early June of this year, we broke ground on a remodel that will address nearly all of these issues. We stripped the kitchen and all the living areas (except living quarters) down to bare floors, walls and roof. We are upgrading our roof insulation to an ENERGY STAR rated R30; we are replacing all ceiling fixtures with sealed LED units; and we are upgrading our refrigerator and HVAC units to ENERGY STAR...

In the summer of 1998, I was traveling home from a visit to my mother in New York. In those days, I traveled quite a bit for business and had reached a high status on America West Airways assuring me a first-class seat on most flights. On this particular flight, I found myself sitting next to Bill Post, the CEO of our local electric utility, Arizona Public Service. It was a fortuitous meeting. In our conversation near the end of our flight, we started talking about electric cars—about whether there would be a near future where the internal combustion engine (ICE) would become a thing of the past. Bill...