Five Percent: Conserve a Little Energy

Here in the Northeast, the nights are colder and the heat is coming on.

A couple years ago, we got a simple programmable thermostat. (more…)

October’s electric bill came. Our regional utility, NStar prints Kilowatt hours (KwH) for the previous 12 months, giving a simple year-over-year comparison of use.

In 2004 between 9/20 and 10/20 we used 829 KwH of juice; this year we used 760 KwH, or about 8% less. (more…)

Joan and Jonathan, our next door neighbors, are great people. They are flower children of the 60’s. They are really into all sorts of natural stuff into some, what’s the word … odd stuff. We live in Newton, Mass — one of the original suburbs, so lots are small. Our house is on a whopping 0.16 acres and is nearly covered the house and the driveway and perhaps a detached garage. No “back 40’s” here in Newton.

But Joan and Jonathan use their “front 40″ to grow corn, squash, tomatoes and all sorts of other veggies. They grow sunflowers. They have rabbits. They keep bees. There’s not much room left for lawn (which is good). And they … compost. (more…)

Here’s a decent page from the EPA talking about what happens to our garbage. Read it with an eye to how much it takes to produce, transport and even recycle all of that waste. Wow.

My wife found a cool site called Ideal Bite whose authors are doing great things to “entertain and educate you on easy ways to be greener”. One of the things you can do is sign up for daily email tips. We have found some simple things on the site that we have adopted as part of our life. For example:

• When making tea, heat up only as much water as you need
• Turn out the lights when you’re not using them
• Replace your light bulbs with Compact Fluorescent Lights
• Wash your hands with cold water

and so on.

These things sound so … silly, I guess, and we have heard them all before. But what I have found most interesting is (more…)

Check out this statistic: 164 million tons of trash are thrown away each year the US. OK, well, hard to deal with out of context, but consider this: about 15% of our garbage (nearly 27 million tons) is food. Compare this to about 8 million tons of junk mail, newspapers, magazines and books (the share that is not recycled), and food is 3 times as much.

So considering the amount of energy used to produce food, this number seems staggering. (more…)

This summer, my family and I went to California for our summer vacation to see some natural beauty along the Pacific Coast Highway north of LA. We were there during the week of the natural disaster of hurricane Katerina. But we left California feeling as though we had seen a glimpse of the future. What we saw was not pretty.

First let me say that this is not a California-bashing polemic. The state has many great qualities and has taken a leadership role by using its size to force auto-makers and other industries to reduce emissions. But there’s a reason for that. (more…)

Paul Roberts’ book, The End of Oil was the first of several significant motivations for me to understand and take seriously the problem of our energy use, and also my source of data for the notion that a 5% reduction in consumption is part of the solution. Here’s a link to a conversation with the author by the book’s publisher, which I think does a pretty good job of synopsizing the thesis of the book.

This US Government Fuel Economy site offers some interesting information about fuel economy, as well as overall emissions, which are not the same thing. While less fuel means less emissions, different engines burn more or less cleanly. Check it out.

I am trying to focus on a single mission: reduce my energy consumption by 5%. A lot of the facts out there are stark, depressing and out and out frightening. I believe a lot of it is true. I am also concerned with radicalizing the position: the people who understand tend to present information in a way that is alarming, because they are rightly alarmed themselves. But this may be counterproductive: I don’t think most people will respond to these alarms with action. In addition to the alarms, we need ways to help people take specific, measurable action.

So, reducing consumption by 5% is not going to solve any problems really. It only defers the inevitable a little. But I think that has value in two ways. (more…)

We have a Toyota Prius. It is an incredible car and really does get great gas mileage (50+ MPG). So we have ordered another to replace my Toyota Camry, which is a V6 model, and gets maybe 25 MPG. So, from an energy standpoint it’s an obvious win, right?

Not so fast.

Sadly, my Camry will not disappear — I will sell it to someone who will continue to use it. And since my commute is so short I am putting less than 8,000 miles per year on the car now. So I’ll be driving my new Prius 8,000 miles per year at 50MPG, but will my Camry buyer be a more typical driver, driving 14,000 mile per year? (more…)

The government’s Energy Star program has a good breakdown of what the average household spends on energy. Here’s a link to What Does My Enegy Bill Pay For.

When I added up the direct cost of my family’s annual energy expenditures I found that only a small percentage of our total annual expenditure goes to things we think of as using energy: heat, hot water, lighting, gasoline and so on (around $4,600, least year). But when I added up things we eat, the number was greater than four times more (About $20,000, last year). This is well correlated with my increasing waistline.

Where does all that food come from — how did it get made? I don’t have a plot out back; much of it came from America’s incredible farming and food production businesses. And guess what, that business uses a lot of energy to get me that food. There’s a great article to read called Eating Fossil Fuels (more…)

Well, I’m surprised. I added up the numbers for the three main components of our energy use for the previous 12 months. Here they are:

• Gasoline: $850 (19%)
• Natural Gas: $1,950 (42%)
• Electricity: $1,800 (39%)

We spent $4,600 last year in direct consumption of energy. (more…)

I am a software manager and developer for my work. When you need software to do something new, most developers will start thinking “how am I going to do this”. I think the first question to ask should be “does this need to be done at all”, and if so then “has anyone else done it already”. I have found that the fastest, most reliable delivery, fewest risks and the fewest bugs are those projects that you figure out how not to do.

Likewise when it comes to conserving energy, by far the biggest percentage win is in finding ways not to do something (more…)