Sustainability – Are We Going At It Backwards?

Alternative and renewable sources of energy such as solar, wind and biofuels are all the rage. Everyone wants to kick the fossil fuel habit, at least until they learn how expensive it can be. Yet clean energy sources are stealing the spotlight from the cleanest and most affordable energy source of all: energy efficiency. It is widely understood within the energy community that the least expensive watt is the one you don’t have to produce. We can reliably achieve those reductions by encouraging people to consume less and by making fundamental improvements to homes and office buildings. Efficiency truly is the lowest cost energy resource, so why doesn’t it get the play it deserves?

In part it’s about “sex appeal.” Solar panels are sexy. Wall insulation isn’t. A solar panel on your roof or wind turbine in your back yard is highly visible and quite compelling. But what’s between the siding in your house and your sheet rock? Solar panels are only as good as the efficiency of your home. Generating electricity cleanly and then promptly wasting it doesn’t make much sense.

We should work to first make homes and businesses as efficient as possible by tightening up leaks in walls, doors and windows, installing the most efficient heating and cooling equipment, and making sure that everything that is plugged in is the right size, efficient when operating, and fully off when not in use. That’s the main course of the clean energy meal; renewables are the dessert you buy at the end.

But we also must take a good hard look at how we consume.

The environmental challenges we face are just as much about sufficiency as they are about efficiency. We must take a careful look at what we REALLY need to survive and truly only consume what we need. Sufficiency argues for absolute upper bounds on consumption and efficiency specifications that plateau, no matter how much larger or more powerful products become. Yes, big TVs draw more power than smaller ones, but at some point, if we’re going to label a TV as “energy efficient,” it should use less energy than the one it replaces, no matter how big it is.

Game consoles are another example of the same phenomenon. When we tracked down samples of the latest consoles and games in our lab, we were amazed to discover that the newest consoles were smarter than their predecessors in terms of graphics and sound and features, but much dumber in the way they use energy. Most of them don’t shut off after long periods of inactivity and aren’t even very good at shutting down the parts of the console that aren’t in use. They can draw 2 to 3 times as much power as a computer to play the same game or browse the Internet and about 5 to 10 times as much power as a dedicated Blu-Ray or DVD player to play a movie. Left running continuously, they can consume as much electricity each year as two refrigerators. Wouldn’t it be sufficient to have one small computer that can browse the Internet, stream music, play movies, play games, and automatically go to sleep when not in use instead of all of us buying multiple devices?

It’s no different than the consumer who upgrades his old refrigerator to something shiny and new with an ENERGY STAR logo on the front. Yes, it’s more efficient than other refrigerators of its size, but if it’s bigger than the old one, how much is really saved? If he puts the old one out in the garage to cool spare drinks and buys an additional wine chiller or mini fridge for the bar, is it any wonder his energy bills and greenhouse gas emissions keep rising in spite of his energy-efficient purchase? Sufficiency means buying the food you need when you need it and owning one energy-efficient fridge large enough to hold it all.

As our nation migrates first from an age of conservation through the current age of efficiency and into an age of sufficiency, we might all think of ways that the money we spend gets us more but doesn’t get us better. The huge house full of clutter and empty, air conditioned rooms is a good example. “More” will not get us where we need to go. At a time of more people, more cars, more highways, more houses, more gadgets, and more fossil fuels to power them all, we as a people should explore the power of less. That doesn’t mean deprivation – it means sufficiency. Buy what we need and save a little for tomorrow. We might find we’re working less too, to pay for all that stuff, and end up with a little more time to enjoy it all. That’s a “more” we can all live with…