I have been on a mission to reduce my energy consumption - questioning what I use and finding out where I waste. When I started, I found a bunch of tips on green sites. Some suggestions seemed big and some seemed so trivial as to be not worth the effort - with a lot in the middle.  I found myself wondering which ones I should start doing in my own life.

Any project management person, or self-help book would suggest making a list, then prioritizing it and starting on the most important one. In my quest, I found that a different approach worked for me: just pick something to do now. And, do it. Now.

I’ve had quite a few success stories.

For one, I learned about compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs a few years ago and decided to give them a try. The “daylight” variety sounded neat — what could be wrong with that? So I bought them, and tried them, and found that I had made a terrible choice. Daylight color looks bluish, and doesn’t flatter skin colors. Let’s just say my wife and I still preferred candles for mood lighting But, I learned from my mistake and the next time, I bought CFLs with a “warm” color, or 2700K color temperature. Much better (though, I still use the “daylight” bulbs for reading). Since then, I replaced all the lights I could with CFLs - one or two bulbs at a time. And, as a reward, our electricity bill kept going down with each conversion - nice.

Another time, I felt a draft coming from the window by my desk. I bought a tube of caulk the next time I was at the hardware store and took a look outside of our house. To my surprise, I found about a zillion little holes to fill with goop. I now keep a spare tube and caulking gun at the ready and plug up other cold-air leaks as I notice them. Our heating bill keeps going down too - nice.

In the same manner, I’ve weaned my lawn from its chemical dependence to be totally organic. For snow, I’ve been trying to use a shovel instead of the loud, smelly snow-blower. To save water, I’ve changed my shower head (three times!). I’ve turned down my water heater. I’ve installed a programmable thermostat. I’ve educated myself about food and now eat a lot less meat. None of these things have taken time, a lot of money, or a big plan. I just did the ones that seemed easy, and I did them over the course of several years.

So, what’s next? I don’t have a deadline. I just keep finding new ways to save a little here and there. Maybe that new tankless water heater. I’m also thinking of saving a lot of bottles from recycling by making my own beer - environmentally friendly and fun!

“Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.” - John Archibald Wheeler

Choosing Time Scales

One of the things we’re most proud of about WattzOn is that we allow our users to directly compare energy consumed on wildly different time scales.  Like, flying twice a year vs. owning a television for 10 years.  Simplifying the message of energy use to a single unit helps clarify the relative impact of each lifestyle choice. That’s why we measure energy impact in power (watts), which represents the rate at which you are using energy (just like speed is the rate at which you travel a distance).

To calculate watts, we are converting all profile answers into the amount of energy (in joules) you are using per time (in seconds).  Choosing the time scale, however, is not necessarily clear.  Are you driving 100 miles a week or 100 miles in 2 hours?  In presenting your energy data to you in power, we are often creating a constant rate out of something that is not constant — and, how we choose to do so has a significant impact on the watts we present.

There is no right answer for most of these calculations; tracking personal energy choices in watts is our unique concept.  So, we must make informed choices that seem to make the most scientific sense, while still maintaining the usability the website.

If I Could Save Time in a Paper Cup…

To demonstrate the time issue, let’s consider the energy use of a paper cup.  Based on estimates of the materials, manufacturing, transportation, and disposal, we have a reasonable assumption that a cup has an embodied energy of approximately 2.2 MJ (as is currently in the EED).  To convert that to watts, we have to divide by time.  But, what time scale best represents the duration of that cup’s “consumption”?  We’ve looked at 4 different options:

• Usage Time - The amount of time you actually spend using the cup for its intended purpose (i.e. drinking out of it).  This seems to most accurately capture the idea of using watts to track energy consumption.  But, under this model, the paper cup watts should only be added to your total watts for the time you are using the cup and then be deleted, making it difficult to track the impact of choices.
• Usage Rate - The rate at which you purchase a cup (in this case, once per day).  The time for this option is easily determined since it’s already in the number (1 day). But, asking people to estimate their usage rate of items, especially things they may use irregularly, adds to the difficulty of using the site.
• Existence Time - This method spreads out the embodied energy of the cup over its own lifetime - the amount of time between manufacturing and disposal.  However, it is difficult to know how long the cup has been around.  Also, this method would give a higher wattage to the first cup out of the bag than to the last one.
• Lifetime - This way would spread the amount of energy in the cup out over your entire life.  Perhaps the most accurate way to contemplate the energy impact our lifestyle choices, but I don’t have to tell you that it would be VERY difficult to ask people to accurately guess how many paper cups they’ve used since infancy.

Though there are merits to each, the option chosen has a tremendous impact on the wattage of items, as you can see in the following table:

Right now, we are tracking disposable goods (like our paper cup) with the “Usage Rate” model.   It gives us the greatest balance of ease of information entry for users and understandable calculations.  But, as noted above, this model does not work as well for items you may use irregularly (like, say, a notepad).  Since nothing on WattzOn is static, we are continually exploring this concept (along with many, many others) .  So, as we contemplate time, we welcome you to join us and give us your thoughts on how to improve our data!

My name is Tom and I have been a recovering consumer for five years.  Since I’m new here, I’d like to let you know a little bit about myself.

Not long ago, I was a Typical American Consumer. I bought what I wanted, and threw out what I didn’t. I rolled my eyes at people who disapproved. I consumed. I drove a V6 car that got 21 MPG. I got an automatic lawn sprinkler and a snow blower. My wife and I bought every plastic item required to raise a happy, well-adjusted child in America. I took long showers. I flew cross-country every few weeks for work. I threw my towels on hotel floors. And yes, I used incandescent light bulbs.

But, in 2004 I read Paul Roberts’ End of Oil. That was the beginning of my awakening from the affliction facing so many of us Typical American Consumers. I learned that our American ways are not sustainable. I also saw why gas was going to become so expensive and bought a Toyota Prius. The Prius enlightened me, but, not because of the hybrid engine — it has a real-time MPG monitor, right there, in your face. The monitor has greatly improved my mileage. At better than 50 MPG, the Prius uses less than half the gasoline of the car it replaced. Could it be that I could make similar changes to the way I lived?

End of Oil says just five percent less could make a difference. Five percent seemed entirely reasonable and plausible. In 2005, I started a green blog named FivePercent, recording the changes I made. The blog’s name sucks, but the results are good.

As it turns out, conservation doesn’t require huge sacrifice, or cost, or effort. I turned out lights and switched to CFLs where they worked well. I figured out how to keep our lawn green without the sprinkler (and I mow less, too). I wash clothes with cold water. I have a great low-flow shower head. I think about my food choices. Simple stuff. Most of my changes have come from becoming aware of when I am wasting. I consume a lot better now: much less of what we don’t need, but also needing and wanting less. My household now uses 50% less electricity than before (yes, half as much!). It’s truly amazing how much you can waste without realizing it.

I am still a recovering consumer. My life isn’t sustainable by any measure (yet), but I’m moving in the right direction. And with the money I have saved, I can buy that 60,000 BTU Weber Grill. Or maybe a tankless hot water heater (how cool is that?)

On January 16, 2009, I gave a talk at the Long Now Foundation — hosted by Stewart Brand, this was a long discussion that placed our personal lifestyles in the context of climate change and global energy production.  A lot of people have requested the slides, here are the latest.

The discussion after the talk was great.  As usual, people are really, really hoping for some fantastic technology fix.  While we may all hope for an incredible new technology to come along, we need to plan with the technologies we know exist today (and their predictable/foreseeable iterations).  I think this is important; so we don’t use the hope of a new technology as an excuse for delay.  We know pretty well what massive solar and wind installations would look like — let’s focus on bringing them up to the scale of terawatts of power rather than waiting for a magically better solution.

January is in full swing and millions of people are piling into gyms and counting calories to meet their new year’s resolution of losing weight.  Now, we all know that losing excess weight brings with it better health and a snazzier swimsuit body, but what does it mean for energy use?

Hannon and Lohman explored just that question in their 1978 study The Energy Cost of Overweight in the United States.  They calculated how much energy would be saved if every overweight and obese adult in America dieted to get down to an optimum body weight; since eating fewer calories means less energy needed to “plant, cultivate, harvest, feed, process, transport, wholesale, retail, acquire, store, and cook” the food.  The detailed analysis found that such a diet would save the country the equivalent of 1.3 billion gallons of gasoline - not to mention significant annual savings thereafter to account for metabolism reduction.

But, of course, the country didn’t lose all of its excess weight in 1978.  In fact, in the 30 years since this study came out, the number of Americans falling into the overweight or obese categories increased nearly 40% to over two-thirds of the population.  We now collectively need to lose about 6 billion pounds!  With a quick estimate to update the numbers that Hannon and Lohman used, putting the United States on a diet today would probably save closer to the equivalent of 3.4 billion gallons of gasoline.  Enough to take you the distance to the sun and back about, oh, 500 times in the average car.

So, put down those french fries and pick up some carrot sticks - your heart and the planet will thank you!

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle! You’ve surely heard it before.  The “three Rs” of waste reduction, often represented by the triple arrow triangle printed on recycling bins and plastic bottles everywhere.  These three words are simple steps that everyone can take to prevent waste from reaching the landfill.

But, in the interest of catchy alliteration, has this phrase misstated the importance of each action?  The U.S. Pollution Prevention Act of 1990, which serves as the source of the “three Rs” (called R3), intended the following:

“The Pollution Prevention Act of 1990 sets up the R3 hierarchy of preferred approaches to protecting the environment. First and foremost, pollution should be prevented at the source whenever feasible (Reduce). If waste streams cannot be prevented, they should be Reused, Recycled, or treated. Disposal should be the last resort.”

In representing R3, Sandia National Laboratories uses instead a trapezoidal hierarchy with “Reduce” shown at the top as the largest shape, and “Reuse” “Recycle” “Treatment” and “Disposal” each whittling down in successively smaller shapes.  This graphic clearly conveys that reduction should be the top priority.

Then, why does it seem that recycling is the most touted and famous of the “R”s?  Why is the triangular arrow symbol equally representative of both R3 and recycling?

For one, recycling is an easier sell than asking people to stop buying the newest gadget or to carry reusable mugs everywhere they go.  With a toss of yesterday’s newspaper into the appropriate bin, anyone can be an environmentalist.  The responsibility is off your shoulders as soon as the paper leaves your curb and starts its journey of transformation into tomorrow’s newspaper.

But, what happens when this system breaks down?  The New York Times had an article last month about how the market for recyclable materials has slumped dramatically in the struggling economy.  Instead of being recycled, your newspaper is likely languishing in a warehouse, perhaps fated to the landfill after all.  The economic incentives that have buoyed the recycling market have disappeared.

So, what to do?  Certainly, don’t stop recycling – the market will hopefully rebound and sending waste directly to the landfill is still a far worse choice.  But, perhaps give a harder look to reduction, for both waste and energy.  Recycling (like buying carbon credits) can make you feel better about your consumption, but cannot be counted on to ease the impact that the initial action made on the world.

There are a lot of numbers thrown around in the conversation about energy efficiency and climate change. I thought it would be worthwhile for us to break down and play with two sets of numbers that people are frequently confronted with — temperature and miles per gallon.  The math to tweak the presentation is simple and obvious, but the message / the understandability / the impact of these changes can be great.

Celsius vs. Fahrenheit

The scale chosen to present temperature data matters more than you would probably think. Most accepted sources on global warming put the potential worldwide temperature rise at 2 to 3 degrees Celsius. The problem is that for people who do not use the Celsius on a day-to-day basis (its not what your weather man reports to you) — that number is almost meaningless. The danger is that it begins to psychologically seem like quite a small number. 2 to 3 degrees Celsius is 3.6 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit. Those numbers are significantly larger, and would have more of an emotional impact to us Americans.

To continue to humanize these numbers, let’s imagine the 3.6 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit in other terms: instead of having an average July temperature of 75 degrees Fahrenheit, New York City would instead experience Atlanta’s average July temperature of 80 degrees Fahrenheit. That would be like the entire city of New York moving 480 miles to the south. Or, like getting in a car and driving due south on a highway for 8 hours to feel the warmth.

MPG vs. GPM

In the US, we measure our automobile’s efficiency in miles per gallon (MPG) — that is, given one gallon of gasoline, how far can I drive this car? Our European friends, however, measure the efficiency of their cars in the number of liters it takes to drive 100 kilometers (in the units Americans use: how many gallons does it take to drive 100 miles) — they’re looking at gallons per mile (GPM).

Why is this inversion important? Doesn’t it measure the same thing? Let’s look at a few examples:

Take a close look at that table — the MPG goes “up” by 10 miles per gallon for each type of car, but the amount of fuel used drops down a lot as we go from 15 MPG to 25 MPG, then by a smaller amount as we go from 25 MPG to 35 MPG, and again by a smaller amount from 35 MPG to 45 MPG.

What the MPG scale fails to show is that for every single mile per gallon improvement from the lower end of the scale means pretty large fuel savings when you actually have to drive that car. Just moving from a 15 MPG S.U.V. to a 25 MPG mid-sized car has a profound effect in the amount of fuel used over 10,000 miles — 266 fewer gallons, in fact!  (And, arguably where it matters the most as the biggest “bang for the buck” is getting S.U.V.s off the road)

For both of these — looking at temperature numbers and fuel efficiency numbers — the way that we choose to present them to people can make the impact feel incredibly real. Next time you hear people talk about how much hotter the planet will get, feel free to refer to the thermometers we put together. And, the next time you are deciding between two cars, think about comparing their fuel efficiency on GPM instead of MPG.

But, most importantly, when talking about energy and climate change, remember that numbers can be confusing, or may not be taken seriously.  Take care when choosing exactly how to present it.

Update 5 January 2009 — Rick Larrick and Jack Soll from Duke University got in touch with us! If you’re interested in learning more about the implications of GPM vs MPG, then read their work which was also recognized by the New York Time’s "Year in Ideas".