Edison Exhibition Highlights Bright Ideas for Saving Energy

Cook seafood in eight minutes with no frying pans in an electric oven with recycled heat. Warm up a room with a flick of the wrist. Read by the light of a bulb that lasts 3,000 hours and go to sleep knowing your computer will turn itself down when you leave it unattended.

Such energy-saving techniques were showcased at Southern California Edison’s energy convention and trade show Tuesday at the Long Beach Arena. Some 180 exhibitors, including the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA and dozens of Los Angeles and Orange County companies displayed products and services designed to push Southern California’s industries into an energy-efficient future.

An estimated 5,000 visitors are expected to attend the two-day convention, concluding today, which features 31 conference sessions on topics ranging from supermarket refrigerators to hazardous waste.

As electric-powered carts glided around the building, scores of business people wandered through the exhibit hall looking for conservation ideas. Many said they were impressed by the examples of technology.

“I’m taken aback. It’s awesome,” said Kevin Deeley, building engineer for Matsushita Co. in Cypress. He had taken note of the air-conditioning systems offered by various companies, where many rooms can be controlled by one single AC-heating unit called a “ventostat.”

“The energy savings would be phenomenal,” he said, adding that he was considering implementing it for his 73-room building.

Jim Corbett, Cal State Fullerton’s central plant and utilities manager, discussed the campus’s recent $6-million lighting and temperature make-over as an example of what homes and businesses could do to save energy.

If homeowners did similar make-overs on their homes, they could apply for lending programs that allow the cost of such energy-efficiency devices to be added to the mortgage. Savings from lower energy use would go to pay back the loan, according to exhibitors of the California Home Energy Efficiency Rating System Inc., a nonprofit corporation of utility companies and consumer groups in Costa Mesa.

Spokeswoman Wendy Lloyd said the program, which was introduced to California last year, has given out 30 mortgages and 12,000 free ratings in Northern California, where the program began.

Most of the products offered, such as infrared cooking appliances, remote-controlled temperature gauges, computers and printers programmed to shut themselves down from 180 to five watts of power when unused, an electronic ballast that offer 10% brighter light than fluorescent lamps at half the wattage and refrigerators with less ozone-depleting fluorocarbons have been on the market for some time. But exhibits at this convention offered the latest and most sophisticated among those available, said Southern California Edison spokesman Bruce Mayo.

“It’s not so much about new technologies as about new applications of technologies,” he said.