I remember 20 years ago learning that styrofoam is one of the most recyclable materials (very little energy to recycle, can be recycled many times), and the waxed paper we make paper cups out of is one of the least. Yet the world switched to paper cups because styrofoam caused unsightly litter.
I remember 10 years ago having a friend tell me about a conversation he overheard between two co-workers. The upshot was that a woman was criticizing a man for driving a gas guzzling pickup truck. As the argument progressed it turned out that his 2 mile commute to his apartment in his pickup truck used much less gas than her 15 mile commute to her colonial in an efficient car. And she was so fixed in her view of the world that she couldn't accept that her desire to have a large house was less environmentally friendly than his desire to have a vehicle that he could use to carry a dead deer.
I can't count how many times I've heard environmentally active people talk about how the forests are the lungs of the world. Yet they are wrong. True, cutting down forests inevitably releases a lot of carbon. But mature forests are at equilibrium. They both absorb and release large amounts of carbon with little net effect. (This is especially true of jungles, slightly less true of deciduous forests whose leaves tend to become part of the soil.) The real "lungs of the world" that act as a carbon sink are the algae in the ocean.
I could multiply examples, but the trend is clear. When I hear someone start a lecture on what is good for the environment I first try to verify how much that person knows. Most of the time I'm able to ignore that person in good conscience.
Yet the world switched to paper cups because styrofoam caused unsightly litter.
I thought the real issue here was biodegradability. Since most disposable cups are not recycled, the ease with which they could be recycled matters a lot less than the fact that styrofoam is forever. Then again, in the absence of oxygen and light, I'm not sure that paper cups will ever degrade much in a modern landfill....
The upshot was that a woman was criticizing a man for driving a gas guzzling pickup truck.
I'm a pretty environmental fellow. But I cannot understand the psychology of someone who would harass a stranger about their choices. I mean, what business of it is mine how some random person decides to carry out their life. Even if I'm right (which this woman clearly was not), it is not going to make a difference -- it will just make people miserable.
When I hear someone start a lecture on what is good for the environment I first try to verify how much that person knows.
My personal favorite is that we must prevent any new construction in the city because we should be building parks and green space there because green space is more green and trees are vital for dealing with climate change. That's why we should ensure that there is no high density housing near public transportation infrastructure.
Also who cares if the hybrid is more fuel efficient? If we all drove hybrids we'd pump the last liter of oil out of the ground 20 years later? Whippie!
If these people actually cared about the environment they'd buy a used car, or bike to work.
As the argument progressed it turned out that his 2 mile commute
The counter-counter argument at that point should have been that if it's only 2 miles you should walk or ride a bike, and leave the pickup at home.
edit: Just to be clear, I agree with your argument and find it strange that so many "eco" people insist on living in houses far off in the country side where they have to drive everywhere.
A complaint I hear quite a lot is that people in the west are so decadent, they throw away a perfectly good mobile phone every two years and buy a new one. But, I mean, mobile phones are tiny. They don't use up that much material. Sometimes it seems the activities targeted by environmentalists has more to do with how much people like them rather than how much energy they consume. Killjoyism.
This article buries an important story beneath bombast. A much better read is David MacKay's (free) book "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air": http://www.withouthotair.com/ As the book itself says, it's an analysis of sustainable energy based on "numbers not adjectives".
That's an excellent book. I have a paper copy of it. While the article
is right about cellphone chargers things like this lack some context:
Glass requires so much energy to make - or recycle - that it is
always more eco-friendly to use aluminium cans
Firstly, that depends on how you recycle things. Perhaps in the UK
they melt down their glass and make it anew, but in some other
countries such as Denmark they'll actually use the same bottle again
after cleaning it out.
If you buy a soft drink in a class bottle in Denmark you'll get a
container that looks like it's seen war.
Secondly, it's presuming that pounds sterling is the best way to
measure sustainability, and that just because something costs more now
it's less sustainable in the long run.
Which is just patently silly. We basically have infinite energy on
this planet as long as the sun keeps shining, but we don't have
infinite easily accessible aluminum.
In the future access to basic material resources is going to be a
lot more important than whether someone expended a few extra joules
back in 2010.
The "easy" solution is for society to imposes higher taxes on energy, particularly those forms of energy which we wish to discourage our reliance on.
This would particularly useful in the realm of consumer purchasing decisions.
Which apples required less energy, the ones shipped in from Chile, or the ones trucked over from California? There's no way as a consumer I can know that, but if taxes on certain energy forms (e.g. carbon-based) are high enough, then price becomes 1) a signal of how much energy was consumed in production and delivery, 2) a factor which discourages consumers from purchasing products which require more energy, 3) an incentive for firms to minimize their energy usage to keep costs down.
Will such taxes ever be effectively implemented? Almost certainly not. For such taxes to work they would need to be high enough that consumers and firms "felt the pinch." This desired effect, however, is exactly what makes these kinds of taxes politically unfeasible, at least in America.
Apples being apples, all that matters to a consumer is the retail price. If Chilean apples cost more because of an energy tax, demand will increase for California apples, raising the prices, until the two equalize.
This desired effect, however, is exactly what makes these kinds of taxes politically unfeasible, at least in America.
Sadly true. The other factor is that conservatives won't like them because they're taxes, and liberals won't like them because they're market-based. ("Rich people shouldn't be able to pay to pollute").
As usual, unmentioned is an individual's biggest single energy impact: dietary choices. Just a single semester's worth of thermodynamics study (the 2nd Law in particular) would make that clear. Some background includes:
No one who claims to be worried about energy consumption and climate change should be taken seriously, unless they cut down on their meat consumption first. Al Gore and "An Inconvenient Truth" was a case in point, but Gore finally started changing his tune on his diet, to his partial credit:
It is not that long ago that if you wouldn't use animal products or labour in most of Europe you would starve and/or freeze. Veganism as a lifestyle is utterly dependent on huge energy subsidies.
They love to play tricks with statistics too, comparing the calories in an acre of simple carbs in crops to the calories in the complex proteins in a cow. That's where the energy has "gone"...
I personally think we should have consumption guages on our major energy users. Getting a hybrid woke me up to this and I have since added one to the house electrical system and built one for our heat. The cool thing is that it gave an intuitive sense of different energy draws.
In general it is true. Our intuition is wrong in many cases. For example, I found unhooking our doorbells was more significant than not using the clothes drier. Today our house uses 20% of the energy it did before having the gauge. We don't even try to conserve because the effort to reduce the baseline made such a difference.
Why don't they require this sort of device in all new cars? One study indicated that it would add $12.50 per car. Adding the ones to the house was about $200.
Heard an episode of CBC Radio's Ideas show on Hydrogen that had this fascinating aside (I'm paraphrasing):
During the 1970's oil shock buildings in Toronto turned out their lights to save energy, however many buildings had electricity from Hydro-electric resources and were heated via oil-fired generators. The net result was that turning off the lights made the buildings colder and it took more oil energy to heat them up again than if the lights were left on.
> Glass requires so much energy to make - or recycle - that it is always more eco-friendly to use aluminium cans, even if one is talking about virgin cans compared to recycled bottles.
Since when?!? Growing up, in a part of the country that was once known for glass making (but had stopped by the time I was a kid), we were taught in school that glass was cheaper to make resource and energy wise than aluminum, due to the lower technology overhead and ready access to the sand used to make it. Since then, based on my own reading, I understood that aluminum was really expensive to make due to the high electrical requirements for the process of cracking ores to get the pure aluminum out (a substance that is hard to find in nature in pure form, since it’s readily makes compounds and ores due to its reactivity.) It was this basis that politicians and activists gave to push the first recycling programs here in the States. (Which always, without exception AFAIK, started with aluminum.)
My understanding is that glass was phased out in favor of aluminum not due to container creation costs, but storage reasons, since cans take up less room and shelf space than glass and were easier for stock boys and shoppers to carry. (The only eco-reason I came across was increased fuel use to ship glass bottles for the old returnable bottle programs. But this reasoning didn’t make sense to me since I thought shipping a pre-existing container was much cheaper than destroying and making new ones.)
Did some technology in recent years dramatically reduce the energy cost of making aluminum? Or has the modern requirements of glass making added too much overhead to what was once a cheap process?
No, aluminum production still costs the same as it has for more than a century. The cost of the Hall-Héroult electrolytic process dwarfs the cost of mining bauxite, so the easy access to the sand is irrelevant.
Perhaps the distinction between what you were taught and what the article says amounts to a distinction of denominators. Glass is much cheaper per kilogram (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Embodied_ener... says glass is 18–35MJ/kg, while aluminum is 227–342) but aluminum is cheaper per container, because the weight of the container is smaller by more than a factor of 10.
Also, recycling aluminum costs less than a tenth as much energy as smelting it afresh. This reduces the "embodied energy" of a kilogram of aluminum destined for recycling to the same ballpark as the "embodied energy" of a kilogram of glass.
However, washing out bottles and reusing them is cheaper still.
About unplugging adapters: It is worth noting that the EU mandated more efficient wall warts and as a result all new stuff uses negligible power when idle. But a few years ago when DC conversion was done at 50/60Hz with great masses of copper and iron, it wasn't unusual to have a wart burning 8 watts day in and day out. 70kWhr/year.
As a good rule of thumb for warts: If it is warm to the touch, it is drawing 4 watts or more. If it isn't warm, don't unplug it.
I have a Ryobi drill charger, that if I left it plugged in when idle would use as much power as my high efficiency refrigerator. (A normal refrigerator is about 1800whr/day, so that is quite a bit more than my 200whr/day, but I'm living remotely with an astronomical energy cost.)
Transport and heating/air-conditioning presumably are by far the biggest energy hogs of the private individual.
So if you want to use less energy: don't drive and fly gratuitously, and live in a property which already by its construction and location keeps the heat in (if you live in a cold climate), or keeps the heat out (if you live in hot climate).
Re heating/air-conditioning: get a passive house [+], but those work probably best in relatively moderate climate and you will have to sacrifice some comfort.
I would love to get some DigitalStrom[1] in my house in order to get some hard data on my personal energy consumption. But you simply can't buy these systems yet. And I doubt I can get the same amount of data and control (over the data and my appliances) from the smart meters my power company is trying to sell me.
I assume they mean washing the clothes in cold water instead of hot. changing the washer’s settings does cunningly mask that the wash will also be less effective.
Numbers: A top loading machine[3] uses about 150 liters (40 gallons) of water to fill. If you fill that with hot water that is water that has had 30°C (50°F)[1] added to it. That is about 20 megajoules (5kWhr). Heating a liter of water from room temperature to vaporization[2] takes 2.5 megajoules (700 watt hours). So… in very rough numbers you can vaporize 8 liters of room temperature water for the same energy it takes to fill a top loading washer once with hot water. I'd say my load of wash doesn't lose 16kg being dried, so I presume less than 8 liters are being vaporized.
[1] I'm pulling numbers out of google here, you didn't expect more than one significant digit, did you?
[2] Vaporization is more than 5 times the energy from 1°C to 99°C.
[3] Terribly inefficient way to wash clothes, but if an article is going to make dramatic statements, you have to figure they will pick the most extreme numbers.
Changing from washing in hot to washing in cold? That's all I can figure. If that is indeed the case one should wash in cold AND line dry their clothes.
"We recruited 505 participants through Craigslist in seven US metropolitan areas: New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Houston, Dallas, Denver, and Los Angeles."
Is it about saving "energy" or reducing carbon emissions?
If it's about reducing carbon emissions, simply follow France's lead and move 80% of the world's electricity generation to nuclear and get a 95-97% emission reduction over coal fired plants.
Presumably, yes. Although there are formulae to convert water use to an amount of energy consumption (which takes into account processing, pumps, etc), they are probably referring to the energy to heat water. 1 watt for 1 year is (1W * 24h * (365d/year)) * (1Wh/1000kWh) = 8.76 kWh, or ( * 3412 BTU/kWh) about 30k BTU. The average bath is about 50 gallons, or ( * 8.35 lb/gallon) 417.5 lb. 30k BTU is enough energy to raise that much water by about 70°F (30k BTU / 417.5 lb). By that measurement, the Guardian takes baths 46.6°F hotter than their tap water. If that is too cool for you, you can take a smaller bath.
It's worth noting that the conversions here assume you can transfer the kWh with perfect efficiency to heating water, while in actuality, all heating systems will be somewhat inefficient. It will actually take more energy to heat the water, regardless of the energy source used by the water heater.
Edit: whoops, I originally misread and used 1.5 years and 1.5 baths. Calculations changed.
what if you have cold water baths? The comparisons are really unclear - really poor use of language. And they assume too many things. What if you don't take any warm/hot baths AND turn off lights? Would that save energy?
"In fact lighting accounts for a relatively small proportion of the average person's energy use"
That I do not share this view. The residential household typically uses 11% of energy on light and commercial up to 20%. It might not be much as a single individual if you consistently flip the switch when not needed, but overall as a society it does safe MW of energy.
An even better way is to safe energy is the use of CFL (4 times energy savings compared to incandescent light) or the new LED lighting solutions (4-6 times energy savings compared to incandescent light).
Australia and some places in Europe by law banned already some incandescent bulbs, because the savings is enormous.
The EIA Annual Energy Review 2008 http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/ estimates that 1340 trillion Btu was used in the US in commercial buildings for lighting during 2003 (p.65), out of a total of 99.30 quadrillion Btu total US consumption in 2008 (p.3), of 18.54 quadrillion Btu total commercial use (of which 1.34 quadrillion Btu is 7.2%, which is, as you say, less than 20%). US residential usage amounted to 21.64 quadrillion Btu in 2008 (p.3).
Suppose you're right and 11% of typical residential usage is lighting (what's your source for that, please? The AER doesn't seem to hazard a guess there), and that the US isn't too atypical (admittedly, a very dubious assumption). Then that would amount to 2.4 quadrillion BTU spent on residential lighting in the US.
The total, then, would be 1.3 + 2.4 = 3.7 quadrillion Btu per year used on residential and commercial lighting, or 3.7% of the total.
Industrial facility lighting adds another 0.2 quadrillion Btu (p.48), which would bring it up to 3.9%.
It would immediately follow that 3.7% of the average person's energy use is residential and commercial lighting, and 3.9% is residential, commercial, and industrial lighting, which is indeed a relatively small proportion. If every person in the US went entirely without artificial lighting but otherwise somehow continued their lives as before (except in cars, which are not included in the above statistics), total US marketed energy consumption would drop by 3.9%.
I am in favor of compact fluorescent lights, ordinary fluorescent lights, halogen lights, and new high-efficiency LEDs. But the savings are not enormous when considered overall as a society, particularly considering that most industrial commercial lighting is already using more efficient machinery than incandescent bulbs. They are, rather, relatively small.
3.9% of US marketed energy consumption is 130 gigawatts. 3.9% of world marketed energy consumption (about 500 quadrillion Btu/year, according to IEO2010 Highlights, p.1) would be about 700 gigawatts.
Laws are not admissible as evidence about energy usage. Laws provide evidence about political reality, not objective reality.
Do you not "share the view" that 3.9% is a relatively small proportion of 100%? I think that would merely mark you as a Humpty-Dumpty. (There's glory for you!) Or do you think that the US is deeply atypical, and that the average numbers are much higher than the US numbers?
"Zeal to promote the common good, whether it be by devising anything ourselves, or revising that which hath been laboured by others, deserveth certainly much respect and esteem, but yet findeth but cold entertainment in the world. It is welcomed with suspicion instead of love, and with emulation instead of thanks: and if there be any hole left for cavil to enter, (and cavil, if it do not find a hole, will make one) it is sure to be misconstrued, and in danger to be condemned."
If interested check http://www.energytransitionmodel.com/ there you can build future energy scenarios. For instance see that you're far better off when you invest money in a better (house) insulation then in efficient light bulbs. Or how much total CO2 emissions are reduced if everybody switched to electric cars.
My laundry washing machine has a dial on the front for the water temperature, which goes up to 90° (C, obviously). It heats the water electrically as it comes in. All but the cheapest washers sold here in Argentina have such a facility, because hot water is not normally provided to the laundry room. In the US, washers usually have an option to choose hot or cold water. Using cold water instead of hot will use less energy.
Also, "plenty of energy" is not a quantity of energy that can be usefully compared with other quantities of energy. See jws's comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1614745 for more calculations.
Yes, recycling glass needs more energy that aluminum. That's why reusing glass is better. That's how many bottles (including beer) are handled in Germany.
would this be a good place for me to complain that San Francisco, home to Gavin Newsom's green initiative, just charged me over $150 for a permit to replace my old windows with energy efficient windows?
sorry for the diversion, just needed to let that out.
[+] [-] btilly|15 years ago|reply
I remember 20 years ago learning that styrofoam is one of the most recyclable materials (very little energy to recycle, can be recycled many times), and the waxed paper we make paper cups out of is one of the least. Yet the world switched to paper cups because styrofoam caused unsightly litter.
I remember 10 years ago having a friend tell me about a conversation he overheard between two co-workers. The upshot was that a woman was criticizing a man for driving a gas guzzling pickup truck. As the argument progressed it turned out that his 2 mile commute to his apartment in his pickup truck used much less gas than her 15 mile commute to her colonial in an efficient car. And she was so fixed in her view of the world that she couldn't accept that her desire to have a large house was less environmentally friendly than his desire to have a vehicle that he could use to carry a dead deer.
I can't count how many times I've heard environmentally active people talk about how the forests are the lungs of the world. Yet they are wrong. True, cutting down forests inevitably releases a lot of carbon. But mature forests are at equilibrium. They both absorb and release large amounts of carbon with little net effect. (This is especially true of jungles, slightly less true of deciduous forests whose leaves tend to become part of the soil.) The real "lungs of the world" that act as a carbon sink are the algae in the ocean.
I could multiply examples, but the trend is clear. When I hear someone start a lecture on what is good for the environment I first try to verify how much that person knows. Most of the time I'm able to ignore that person in good conscience.
[+] [-] MichaelSalib|15 years ago|reply
I thought the real issue here was biodegradability. Since most disposable cups are not recycled, the ease with which they could be recycled matters a lot less than the fact that styrofoam is forever. Then again, in the absence of oxygen and light, I'm not sure that paper cups will ever degrade much in a modern landfill....
The upshot was that a woman was criticizing a man for driving a gas guzzling pickup truck.
I'm a pretty environmental fellow. But I cannot understand the psychology of someone who would harass a stranger about their choices. I mean, what business of it is mine how some random person decides to carry out their life. Even if I'm right (which this woman clearly was not), it is not going to make a difference -- it will just make people miserable.
When I hear someone start a lecture on what is good for the environment I first try to verify how much that person knows.
My personal favorite is that we must prevent any new construction in the city because we should be building parks and green space there because green space is more green and trees are vital for dealing with climate change. That's why we should ensure that there is no high density housing near public transportation infrastructure.
[+] [-] avar|15 years ago|reply
If these people actually cared about the environment they'd buy a used car, or bike to work.
[+] [-] kscaldef|15 years ago|reply
Citation? I don't think I've ever lived somewhere that accepted styrofoam in curbside recycling, so I'm a bit skeptical.
[+] [-] dagw|15 years ago|reply
The counter-counter argument at that point should have been that if it's only 2 miles you should walk or ride a bike, and leave the pickup at home.
edit: Just to be clear, I agree with your argument and find it strange that so many "eco" people insist on living in houses far off in the country side where they have to drive everywhere.
[+] [-] Tycho|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michael_nielsen|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avar|15 years ago|reply
If you buy a soft drink in a class bottle in Denmark you'll get a container that looks like it's seen war.
Secondly, it's presuming that pounds sterling is the best way to measure sustainability, and that just because something costs more now it's less sustainable in the long run.
Which is just patently silly. We basically have infinite energy on this planet as long as the sun keeps shining, but we don't have infinite easily accessible aluminum.
In the future access to basic material resources is going to be a lot more important than whether someone expended a few extra joules back in 2010.
[+] [-] jsdalton|15 years ago|reply
This would particularly useful in the realm of consumer purchasing decisions.
Which apples required less energy, the ones shipped in from Chile, or the ones trucked over from California? There's no way as a consumer I can know that, but if taxes on certain energy forms (e.g. carbon-based) are high enough, then price becomes 1) a signal of how much energy was consumed in production and delivery, 2) a factor which discourages consumers from purchasing products which require more energy, 3) an incentive for firms to minimize their energy usage to keep costs down.
Will such taxes ever be effectively implemented? Almost certainly not. For such taxes to work they would need to be high enough that consumers and firms "felt the pinch." This desired effect, however, is exactly what makes these kinds of taxes politically unfeasible, at least in America.
[+] [-] ams6110|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orangecat|15 years ago|reply
Sadly true. The other factor is that conservatives won't like them because they're taxes, and liberals won't like them because they're market-based. ("Rich people shouldn't be able to pay to pollute").
[+] [-] ars|15 years ago|reply
Since pretty much all our energy comes from hydrocarbons it doesn't much matter. All you need is to check the price.
Energy costs money, use more energy, pay more money. Your market signaling method is already there.
[+] [-] limist|15 years ago|reply
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/02/un-report-...
http://www.fao.org/ag/magazine/0612sp1.htm
No one who claims to be worried about energy consumption and climate change should be taken seriously, unless they cut down on their meat consumption first. Al Gore and "An Inconvenient Truth" was a case in point, but Gore finally started changing his tune on his diet, to his partial credit:
http://www.ecorazzi.com/2009/11/04/al-gore-agrees-that-going...
[+] [-] gaius|15 years ago|reply
They love to play tricks with statistics too, comparing the calories in an acre of simple carbs in crops to the calories in the complex proteins in a cow. That's where the energy has "gone"...
[+] [-] RK|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] waivej|15 years ago|reply
In general it is true. Our intuition is wrong in many cases. For example, I found unhooking our doorbells was more significant than not using the clothes drier. Today our house uses 20% of the energy it did before having the gauge. We don't even try to conserve because the effort to reduce the baseline made such a difference.
Why don't they require this sort of device in all new cars? One study indicated that it would add $12.50 per car. Adding the ones to the house was about $200.
[+] [-] easyfrag|15 years ago|reply
During the 1970's oil shock buildings in Toronto turned out their lights to save energy, however many buildings had electricity from Hydro-electric resources and were heated via oil-fired generators. The net result was that turning off the lights made the buildings colder and it took more oil energy to heat them up again than if the lights were left on.
[+] [-] DLWormwood|15 years ago|reply
> Glass requires so much energy to make - or recycle - that it is always more eco-friendly to use aluminium cans, even if one is talking about virgin cans compared to recycled bottles.
Since when?!? Growing up, in a part of the country that was once known for glass making (but had stopped by the time I was a kid), we were taught in school that glass was cheaper to make resource and energy wise than aluminum, due to the lower technology overhead and ready access to the sand used to make it. Since then, based on my own reading, I understood that aluminum was really expensive to make due to the high electrical requirements for the process of cracking ores to get the pure aluminum out (a substance that is hard to find in nature in pure form, since it’s readily makes compounds and ores due to its reactivity.) It was this basis that politicians and activists gave to push the first recycling programs here in the States. (Which always, without exception AFAIK, started with aluminum.)
My understanding is that glass was phased out in favor of aluminum not due to container creation costs, but storage reasons, since cans take up less room and shelf space than glass and were easier for stock boys and shoppers to carry. (The only eco-reason I came across was increased fuel use to ship glass bottles for the old returnable bottle programs. But this reasoning didn’t make sense to me since I thought shipping a pre-existing container was much cheaper than destroying and making new ones.)
Did some technology in recent years dramatically reduce the energy cost of making aluminum? Or has the modern requirements of glass making added too much overhead to what was once a cheap process?
[+] [-] kragen|15 years ago|reply
Perhaps the distinction between what you were taught and what the article says amounts to a distinction of denominators. Glass is much cheaper per kilogram (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Embodied_ener... says glass is 18–35MJ/kg, while aluminum is 227–342) but aluminum is cheaper per container, because the weight of the container is smaller by more than a factor of 10.
Also, recycling aluminum costs less than a tenth as much energy as smelting it afresh. This reduces the "embodied energy" of a kilogram of aluminum destined for recycling to the same ballpark as the "embodied energy" of a kilogram of glass.
However, washing out bottles and reusing them is cheaper still.
[+] [-] jws|15 years ago|reply
As a good rule of thumb for warts: If it is warm to the touch, it is drawing 4 watts or more. If it isn't warm, don't unplug it.
I have a Ryobi drill charger, that if I left it plugged in when idle would use as much power as my high efficiency refrigerator. (A normal refrigerator is about 1800whr/day, so that is quite a bit more than my 200whr/day, but I'm living remotely with an astronomical energy cost.)
[+] [-] parenthesis|15 years ago|reply
So if you want to use less energy: don't drive and fly gratuitously, and live in a property which already by its construction and location keeps the heat in (if you live in a cold climate), or keeps the heat out (if you live in hot climate).
[+] [-] ugh|15 years ago|reply
[+] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house
[+] [-] Asa-Nisse|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cstuder|15 years ago|reply
I would love to get some DigitalStrom[1] in my house in order to get some hard data on my personal energy consumption. But you simply can't buy these systems yet. And I doubt I can get the same amount of data and control (over the data and my appliances) from the smart meters my power company is trying to sell me.
[1] = http://www.digitalstrom.org/index.php?id=115&L=2
[+] [-] dozba|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikaelgramont|15 years ago|reply
"For example, participants estimated that line-drying clothes saves more energy than changing the washer’s settings (the reverse is true)"
Makes no sense to me. "Changing" doesn't mean anything. I'm sure the article is on to something, but that quote here is just too unclear.
[+] [-] jws|15 years ago|reply
Numbers: A top loading machine[3] uses about 150 liters (40 gallons) of water to fill. If you fill that with hot water that is water that has had 30°C (50°F)[1] added to it. That is about 20 megajoules (5kWhr). Heating a liter of water from room temperature to vaporization[2] takes 2.5 megajoules (700 watt hours). So… in very rough numbers you can vaporize 8 liters of room temperature water for the same energy it takes to fill a top loading washer once with hot water. I'd say my load of wash doesn't lose 16kg being dried, so I presume less than 8 liters are being vaporized.
[1] I'm pulling numbers out of google here, you didn't expect more than one significant digit, did you?
[2] Vaporization is more than 5 times the energy from 1°C to 99°C.
[3] Terribly inefficient way to wash clothes, but if an article is going to make dramatic statements, you have to figure they will pick the most extreme numbers.
[+] [-] jonah|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MicahNance|15 years ago|reply
"We recruited 505 participants through Craigslist in seven US metropolitan areas: New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Houston, Dallas, Denver, and Los Angeles."
[+] [-] roboneal|15 years ago|reply
If it's about reducing carbon emissions, simply follow France's lead and move 80% of the world's electricity generation to nuclear and get a 95-97% emission reduction over coal fired plants.
[+] [-] jeebusroxors|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wuputah|15 years ago|reply
It's worth noting that the conversions here assume you can transfer the kWh with perfect efficiency to heating water, while in actuality, all heating systems will be somewhat inefficient. It will actually take more energy to heat the water, regardless of the energy source used by the water heater.
Edit: whoops, I originally misread and used 1.5 years and 1.5 baths. Calculations changed.
[+] [-] barkingcat|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eande|15 years ago|reply
That I do not share this view. The residential household typically uses 11% of energy on light and commercial up to 20%. It might not be much as a single individual if you consistently flip the switch when not needed, but overall as a society it does safe MW of energy. An even better way is to safe energy is the use of CFL (4 times energy savings compared to incandescent light) or the new LED lighting solutions (4-6 times energy savings compared to incandescent light). Australia and some places in Europe by law banned already some incandescent bulbs, because the savings is enormous.
[+] [-] kragen|15 years ago|reply
Suppose you're right and 11% of typical residential usage is lighting (what's your source for that, please? The AER doesn't seem to hazard a guess there), and that the US isn't too atypical (admittedly, a very dubious assumption). Then that would amount to 2.4 quadrillion BTU spent on residential lighting in the US.
The total, then, would be 1.3 + 2.4 = 3.7 quadrillion Btu per year used on residential and commercial lighting, or 3.7% of the total.
Industrial facility lighting adds another 0.2 quadrillion Btu (p.48), which would bring it up to 3.9%.
It would immediately follow that 3.7% of the average person's energy use is residential and commercial lighting, and 3.9% is residential, commercial, and industrial lighting, which is indeed a relatively small proportion. If every person in the US went entirely without artificial lighting but otherwise somehow continued their lives as before (except in cars, which are not included in the above statistics), total US marketed energy consumption would drop by 3.9%.
I am in favor of compact fluorescent lights, ordinary fluorescent lights, halogen lights, and new high-efficiency LEDs. But the savings are not enormous when considered overall as a society, particularly considering that most industrial commercial lighting is already using more efficient machinery than incandescent bulbs. They are, rather, relatively small.
3.9% of US marketed energy consumption is 130 gigawatts. 3.9% of world marketed energy consumption (about 500 quadrillion Btu/year, according to IEO2010 Highlights, p.1) would be about 700 gigawatts.
Laws are not admissible as evidence about energy usage. Laws provide evidence about political reality, not objective reality.
Do you not "share the view" that 3.9% is a relatively small proportion of 100%? I think that would merely mark you as a Humpty-Dumpty. (There's glory for you!) Or do you think that the US is deeply atypical, and that the average numbers are much higher than the US numbers?
[+] [-] blahblahblah|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkarl|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sebi|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sliverstorm|15 years ago|reply
Huh? Line drying saves plenty of energy, what settings are you proposing we change?
[+] [-] kragen|15 years ago|reply
Also, "plenty of energy" is not a quantity of energy that can be usefully compared with other quantities of energy. See jws's comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1614745 for more calculations.
[+] [-] maigret|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geebee|15 years ago|reply
sorry for the diversion, just needed to let that out.