Energy
Have you ever wondered how much energy and resources you are using personally? I have been wanting to know this myself for a while and about five years ago set up a simple system for our household to find out.
My interest in doing this has several reasons. Among them:
- The way we generate, convert, distribute and use energy in its many different forms has a great impact on most any facet of our human civilization and, as we have been finding out, on the planet as a whole.
- From heating, to cooking, transportation, farming, manufacturing, entertainment to research, many of us use a lot of energy all the time. There are great differences in level of usage between the lowest to the highest level of energy usage per capita, with the US close to the top. This creates different priorities and concerns as well as conflict.
- At the same time the level of consumption is at the core of a lot of the social, ecological and economic challenges we are facing world wide.
- Additionally, if the energy infrastructure is disrupted, provision of some of our essential needs are threatened and can collapse quickly.
- Discovering the potential of how to reduce our energy resource usage, reducing or overall ecological footprint and specifically our energy footprint helps in creating a sustainable, green and thriving world
- Tackling the fascinating challenge to decrease using resources, including energy, and increasing quality of life.
In choosing to live a green live, it is essential to look at the embodied energy of products, services and activities. It is equally important to look at ones personal level of energy and resource use and consider what impact personal efforts have on consumption. If I am using less energy or other resources for example, in turn my family is using less and in turn my community is using less and so on. Combining using less energy, with greater and better quality, durability and comfort, lets say for example, of appliances, and at the same time reducing the overall costs, is a win-win situation for everyone. There is much more to say about this, but that is for another time.
Anyone with an interest to know how much energy and other resources they are using could find out by simply recording quantities of some of the major types. Over time this will document how ones personal energy and resource footprint develops and what effect personal lifestyle choices and behavior changes have on overall consumption. If you are interested in offsetting your carbon footprint, for example, this could provide a basis to make calculations on the amounts to offset and enter data into a carbon calculator. On a personal or household level it seems to make most sense to record the data in a form that can be easily maintained and graphed.
Worldwide we are using energy in many different forms, including fossil fuels, like coal, gas and oil, nuclear, hydro, biomass, solar heat, wind, geothermal, biofuels and solar photovoltaic. Many forms of energy are actually based on solar energy, including fossil fuels (as far as much of science tells us), solar thermal and photovoltaic, wind, hydro and biomass.
There are some forms of energy that are usually not mentioned. I wonder if they are actually left out in all the charts, statistics and calculations? For example gravity or physical labor. Physical labor, one could argue, is a form of solar energy via biomass, mainly our food, plus a few other things like water, air, etc. And then there are “mental” energy, electro-magnetic energy besides from the sun, and, let me venture out here a bit, emotional energy. Feelings of closeness or care as well as anger, distraught and many others. Maybe it seems some of these “energies or resources” do not do much. I am like to be cautious with that notion as I know someone being angry, might set a lot of things in motion – someone caring, even more.
Energy and other resources are a big topic and will be an ongoing subject on this site.
