Saul Griffith has produced a Sankey diagram showing how energy is used in the United States - This Very, Very Detailed Chart Shows How All The Energy In The U.S. Is Used.

Cryptogon points to a new video on Google's Makani wind power kites (covered in one of the more popular posts here many years ago Alternative wind power experiments) - Makani: Google’s Energy Harvesting Kites.

Makani is working to accelerate the shift to clean, renewable energy by developing energy kites, a new type of wind turbine that uses lightweight electronics, advanced materials, and smart software to generate more energy with less materials—all at lower cost.

Kevin seems to have a love-hate relationship with Google, also pointing to this piece of investigative journalism on Medium - How the CIA made Google.

INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a new crowd-funded investigative journalism project, breaks the exclusive story of how the United States intelligence community funded, nurtured and incubated Google as part of a drive to dominate the world through control of information. Seed-funded by the NSA and CIA, Google was merely the first among a plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to retain ‘information superiority.’

The origins of this ingenious strategy trace back to a secret Pentagon-sponsored group, that for the last two decades has functioned as a bridge between the US government and elites across the business, industry, finance, corporate, and media sectors. The group has allowed some of the most powerful special interests in corporate America to systematically circumvent democratic accountability and the rule of law to influence government policies, as well as public opinion in the US and around the world. The results have been catastrophic: NSA mass surveillance, a permanent state of global war, and a new initiative to transform the US military into Skynet.

PCMag reports that Google has bought Saul Griffith's alternative wind power company Makani - Google Acquires Wind Power Firm Makani Power

Google is known for putting its resources into some novel technologies like self-driving cars and wearable computing devices. Now, the Web giant is moving into yet another field—wind power. After previously investing in the company, Google has agreed to acquire Alameda, Calif.-based green energy startup Makani Power. ...

Makani, which takes its name from the Hawaiian word for breeze, develops airborne wind turbines that are mounted on self-piloting flying wings tethered to the ground like a kite. Google will bring the Makani team into its secret "moonshot" research lab Google X, which produced Google Glass. "This formalizes a long and productive relationship between our two companies, and will provide Makani with the resources to accelerate our work to make wind energy cost competitive with fossil fuels.

In a statement to PCMag on Thursday, Google confirmed the acquisition and said it's eager to bring Makani on board. "Creating clean energy is one of the most pressing issues facing the world, and Google for years has been interested in helping to solve this problem," Google X Director Astro Teller, said in the statement. "Makani Power's technology has opened the door to a radical new approach to wind energy. They've turned a technology that today involves hundreds of tons of steel and precious open space into a problem that can be solved with really intelligent software. We're looking forward to bringing them into Google[x]."

Makani said the timing of the acquisition "couldn't be better" since its so-called Wing 7 kite-power prototype just completed its first ever fully autonomous flight. The startup has said its wing-shaped high-altitude kite design can produce 10 times more energy than conventional turbines.

The Climate Spectator has a brief interview with inventor Saul Griffith of Makani Power (amongst other things) following his weekend talk at TEDx Sydney - The future doesn't have to suck. Presumably there will be video up at YouTube at some point but it hasn't appeared yet.

Giles Parkinson: Saul, could you just explain how this high altitude kite works?

Saul Griffith: So, I think most people will have seen a wind turbine – a normal looking wind turbine, which is three blades on the end of a very big stick. So, 75-80 per cent of the energy that’s produced by that wind turbine is produced in the 25 per cent of the tips, so only the tiny little bit at the very wingtip of those huge machines is producing the majority of the energy. The insight that drove Makani [Power] was, well, let’s get rid of everything else except for that little tiny piece of the wingtip. And so we built, really, quite astounding wings – they’re autonomously controlled and they fly in circles. Ideally we’ll be flying them at 2,000-3,000 feet up in the atmosphere, eventually. And they’re tethered to the ground by a cable that brings the electricity back down to the ground and, as the wind makes them fly in circles, very small turbines on the wing actually bring the energy back down to the ground.

GP: That takes up a fair amount of air space, I’d imagine. How do you think that would work with flights, etc?

SG: So, we do have to deal with air space issues and we’re working with the FAA in the United States, and other organisations around the world, to get permissions. We can fly below 2000 feet right now. The reality is most aircraft fly in pretty much highways in the sky that are very well established and there are a lot of regions in the world where there’s very little air traffic. And so, you know, we’re not planning on putting this at Mascot, but this is the technology that could be fabulous for offshore wind and there are plenty of remote regions. So, I’m not terribly worried about this issue. We need to jump the bureaucratic hoops, but I’m pretty sure we’ll get that.

GP: And so each of these turbines, machines – what do you call them? – can generate about 3MW, you say?

SG: Airborne wind energy machines… these magic things from the future! Well , we could build them at any sized scale from tens of kilowatts through to tens of megawatts or hundreds of megawatts, but you then have to say well, at which one of those sized scales is the one that’s going to give you the cheapest electricity? And you do all the math and it’s pretty complicated because you have to look at the statistics of the wind speed at all the different heights, etc, etc, etc, and you have to look at the materials that you can use and the math that we look at and the physics that we look at at the moment suggest that the optimum is going to be sort of 1MW to 5MW machines flying at 2000-4000 feet up.

GP: And you think it could be as cheap as coal?

SG: Yeah. It will take a while to get there. We think that it can be cheaper than coal. As with any new technology, you don’t really know until you’ve got it to full scale, but as long as the maintenance – and that’s the challenge for all the renewable energy technologies is not the cost of the input, it’s maintenance – so, as long as the maintenance isn’t too bad, I think we’re going to kick coal’s arse and that’ll be great.

GP: You talked [in the presentation to TEDx] about the role that solar and wind will play to power the world to give energy to the world, but you also talked about the need to think beyond the technology that we are contemplating now. Can you expand on that?

SG: We aren’t thinking big enough, not even close. One thing is that we presume that solar is going to get ten times better. It’s not. The best solar cells are already 40 per cent efficient and we’re not going to get much better than that ever, so they might get better in cost, lower in cost, but there’s nothing in what we’re doing today that’s going to make them more efficient really. And, you know, we still think of solar as this distributed energy thing and you put it on your roof and da, da, da, da.

The reality is, Australia is one of the lucky countries where you could almost generate all of your energy on your roof, but nowhere else on earth is like that, so we’ve really got to think a lot bigger about enormous solar farms outside of metropolitan centres that are producing the energy to bring it into those centres and we’ve got to look at large-scale solar thermal for generating electricity. And by large-scale, I mean hundreds of square kilometres of these things.

History judges heroes and audacious people really well and what is astounding to me is that we don’t have any audacious or heroic vision right now. We’re failing for lack of audacity and I think that’s a terrible reflection on humanity. Like, let’s do it. What an awesome project to be involved in. Like, terawatt-scale solar farms. What an awesome project to be involved in – high-altitude wind power. I think it would be a great time to be an 18-year-old engineer because these projects are fantastic and, to young people going into renewable energy engineering, this century is your century, and go out there and kick arse!

GP: What’s holding us back with the vision thing, because we’ve got all these challenges in front of us, we sort of know what confronts us – what’s holding us back, do you think?

SG: Politics on every side of the fence.

GP: And Vested interest?

SG: You know, I don’t really subscribe to the who-killed-the-electric-car-kind-of-paranoia; that there’s someone out there trying to stop us. I’m confident that wind and solar will get to costs below coal. The problem is that coal is there and you’ve got to get your technology to scale while competing against this thing that is 100 years old. 100-year-old machines have kind of figured it out, right? So, you’re competing in a pretty difficult marketplace because they’ve had 100 years to learn and you’ve had a few years. So, you know, that’s the problem in the industry.

And then, there’s politics, on both sides. Both sides of the house in every country in the world don’t really understand what this is all about. And we don’t have young people as politicians. You know, what I would like to do is; you should not be allowed to be older than 25 and be a politician. You should only have 18-25 year-olds, because they’re the kids that are going to be living in the future that our current batch of politicians are fucking up and I choose that word really specifically. I mean, it’s terrible, the lack of political vision.

GP: What are some of the other technologies that, at the moment, interest you; some of the new things coming on the horizon?

SG: Myself, I’m working on a lot of solar projects at the moment. Working on trying to lower the cost of heliostats for solar tracking, that could be useful for lowering the cost of PV and solar thermal. You get about 30 per cent more energy if you can track. That’s very useful in solar thermal technologies.

Earth2Tech has some video of Saul Griffith's new Onya Cycles project - Green Overdrive: Saul Griffith’s Onya Cycles.

Saul Griffith, inventor, multiple entrepreneur and MacArthur fellow, is knee-deep in a new electric bicycle project: Onya Cycles! Griffith and his team, through their incubator Other Lab, have built a series of innovative, and heavy-lifting, electric bikes that are meant to replace local car trips to the store, including the tilting electric tricycle called the Front-End Loader, the Mule cargo bike, and the super-cute ET. For this week’s episode of GigaOM TV’s Green Overdrive video show we hung out with Griffith and took the Front-End Loader for a ride. Who needs a car when you can turn to pedals and batteries.

TED has a talk from Saul Griffith on his company Makani and their plans to generate large scale wind power using airborne wind turbines - Saul Griffith: Inventing a super-kite to tap the energy of high-altitude wind.

Scientific American has a post on Saul Griffith's speech at the "Greener Gadgets" conference, where he introduced the phrase "heirloom economy" for one that isn't based on planned (rapid) obsolescence - Are greener gadgets even possible ?.

The urge to buy the latest gadget and to reform environmental misbehavior may be the twin pillars of 21st century American youth culture, but can the two ever be reconciled? Apple, Dell, Intel, Nokia and others—companies with an array of "green" initiatives and (more) environmentally friendly products—sure hope so. But wind power kite scientist and serial inventor Saul Griffith is skeptical, according to his keynote address at the Greener Gadgets conference in New York City this past Friday.

Griffith, the intellectual force behind wattzon.com ( where you can calculate the energy use of your lifestyle), has another term for the gadget-obsessed, himself included: "planet f&*kers." A detailed analysis of the energy required to produce everything from his daily glass of wine to his iPhone revealed that Griffiths requires some 25,000 watts of energy every day, or nearly twice that of the average American (who is already consuming at least six times as much as the average person in China and more than 20 times as much as the average Indian citizen).

A big part of that is all that time spent on the computer. As Stephen Harper, Intel's global director of environment and energy policy, put it: "As the chips get smaller and denser, we end up with a laptop with the heat output of a nuclear power plant." The chipmaker hopes to get around that by emphasizing energy efficiency over speed. But the fact remains that computers are becoming ever more energy hungry.

Software is at least partially to blame. Instead of relying on "good enough" principles, as designer Gadi Amit of NewDealDesign, a San Francisco product design firm, noted at the confab, software makers have allowed their programs to expand to employ every bit of available computing power—and helped drive a race to bigger, faster, more powerful chips.

At the same time, computer and other gadget makers have been reforming their ways, buying oodles (not googles, mind you) of electricity from renewable sources like the wind and sun and spending billions of dollars to find replacements for lead (linked to brain damage, stunted growth and learning disabilities in exposed children and developing fetuses) in their products. The problem is that the lead substitutes, such as cadmium, that they've come up with so far can be just as bad. "The industry spent two-plus billion dollars to get rid of lead," Harper said, "and it's not clear the environment is better off."

Still, more sustainable materials—from plastic polymers made from potato starch to paper made of sheep poo—can only help. And employing even seemingly problematic materials, such as plastics derived from petroleum, can have transformative social impacts. Among them: rolling Hippo water transporters in Africa or durable light-emitting diode (LED) lights that can replace some of the kerosene lanterns still employed by at least two billion people in the developing world.

Safely recycling electronic products at the end of their useful life—to prevent exposure to e-waste potentially containing lead and mercury (known to cause brain, kidney and lung damage)—is key, and has spawned take-back programs from all the major electronics producers, as noted by Carl Smith, president and CEO of Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corp., an industry-led effort to promote recycling of nickel-cadmium batteries.

Ultimately, however, it will take a new way of doing business that is not predicated on continuous consumption and planned obsolescence. "You don't make a lot of money selling batteries every 5,000 hours," said Mark Bent, president and CEO of SunNight Solar, a Houston, Tex. company that produces durable flashlights powered by the sun. "You do selling them every 15 hours."

Griffith called this new business plan the "heirloom" economy: one based on service and repair and a cell phone made to last 25 years or more. That's the only way to cut his own daily energy use from 25,000 watts to just 2,500 watts—the amount he figures is necessary to ensure that greenhouse gas concentrations don't rise above 450 parts-per-million in the atmosphere and forestall catastrophic climate change. That also entails leaving room for others—think China and India—to swell their energy use and will require terawatts of clean wind and solar power.

But until the need for the latest and greatest gadget is curbed, truly green consumer electronics will remain more a slogan than a reality. "This conference should be obsolete in 15 years," said Rahul Sharma of Freeplay Energy, a U.K. company that makes self-powered devices such as radios, "because this becomes so embedded in the culture."

The Long Now blog has a post from Stewart Brand on a talk by Saul Griffith (who I've mentioned before when talking about alternative wind power company Makani) and his vision of "renewistan" - the area of the world's surface that we need to use to convert our energy systems to clean energy sources - Saul Griffith, “Climate Change Recalculated”. It also talks about the changes Saul has made to his own lifestyle to reduce his energy consumption, and notes the many side-benefits that have been accrued as a result.

Engineer Griffith said he was going to make the connection between personal actions and global climate change. To do that he’s been analyzing his own life in extreme detail to figure out exactly how much energy he uses and what changes might reduce the load. In 2007, when he started, he was consuming about 18,000 watts, like most Americans.

The energy budget of the average person in the world is about 2,200 watts. Some 90 percent of the carbon dioxide overload in the atmosphere was put there by the US, USSR (of old), China, Germany, Japan, and Britain. The rich countries have the most work to do.

What would it take to level off the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at 450 parts per million (ppm)? That level supposedly would keep global warming just barely manageable at an increase of 2 degrees Celsius. There still would be massive loss of species, 100 million climate refugees, and other major stresses. The carbon dioxide level right now is 385 ppm, rising fast. Before industrialization it was 296 ppm. America’s leading climatologist, James Hanson, says we must lower the carbon dioxide level to 350 ppm if we want to keep the world we evolved in.

The world currently runs on about 16 terawatts (trillion watts) of energy, most of it burning fossil fuels. To level off at 450 ppm of carbon dioxide, we will have to reduce the fossil fuel burning to 3 terawatts and produce all the rest with renewable energy, and we have to do it in 25 years or it’s too late. Currently about half a terrawatt comes from clean hydropower and one terrawatt from clean nuclear. That leaves 11.5 terawatts to generate from new clean sources.

That would mean the following. (Here I’m drawing on notes and extrapolations I’ve written up previously from discussion with Griffith):

“Two terawatts of photovoltaic would require installing 100 square meters of 15-percent-efficient solar cells every second, second after second, for the next 25 years. (That’s about 1,200 square miles of solar cells a year, times 25 equals 30,000 square miles of photovoltaic cells.) Two terawatts of solar thermal? If it’s 30 percent efficient all told, we’ll need 50 square meters of highly reflective mirrors every second. (Some 600 square miles a year, times 25.) Half a terawatt of biofuels? Something like one Olympic swimming pools of genetically engineered algae, installed every second. (About 15,250 square miles a year, times 25.) Two terawatts of wind? That’s a 300-foot-diameter wind turbine every 5 minutes. (Install 105,000 turbines a year in good wind locations, times 25.) Two terawatts of geothermal? Build 3 100-megawatt steam turbines every day-1,095 a year, times 25. Three terawatts of new nuclear? That’s a 3-reactor, 3-gigawatt plant every week-52 a year, times 25.”

In other words, the land area dedicated to renewable energy (”Renewistan”) would occupy a space about the size of Australia to keep the carbon dioxide level at 450 ppm. To get to Hanson’s goal of 350 ppm of carbon dioxide, fossil fuel burning would have to be cut to ZERO, which means another 3 terawatts would have to come from renewables, expanding the size of Renewistan further by 26 percent.

Meanwhile for individuals, to stay at the world’s energy budget at 16 terawatts, while many of the poorest in the world might raise their standard of living to 2,200 watts, everyone now above that level would have to drop down to it. Griffith determined that most of his energy use was coming from air travel, car travel, and the embodied energy of his stuff, along with his diet. Now he drives the speed limit (and he has passed no one in six months), seldom flies, eats meat only once a week, bikes a lot, and buys almost nothing. He’s healthier, eats better, has more time with his family, and the stuff he has he cherishes.

Can the world actually build Renewistan? Griffeth said it’s not like the Manhattan Project, it’s like the whole of World War II, only with all the antagonists on the same side this time. It’s damn near impossible, but it is necessary. And the world has to decide to do it.

WattzOn presentation at Long Now

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: energy long-now)

WorldChanging had a guest post by Saul last year, talking about how to measure your own energy consumption (and the associated "carbon calculator" concept for measuring your carbon emissions) and then how to reduce them - How to Become Energy Literate and Battle Climate Change.

Al Gore's documentary "An inconvenient truth" reached many people but his is just the most recent telling of a story that has been told many times before. At the peak of the energy crisis in the 1970’s, Amory Lovins wrote a book called Energy Strategies that largely outlined the problem we have today. In the 1950s Buckminster Fuller wrote many similar treatises on the dangers of over-consumption of energy and materials and its effects on the earth’s ecosystems. At the turn of last century, Henry Thoreau wrote a beautiful book about simple living in the woods of Massachusetts as an antidote to the destructive lifestyle of modern living he perceived at that time. Walden has sold many copies and inspired the modern conservation movements. Muir and Carson should be attributed for their contributions also. 2 millenia ago, in his book "Critias", Plato wrote about the demise of the forests:

“What now remains compared with what then existed is like the skeleton of a sick man, all fat and soft earth having wasted away, and only the bare framework of the land being left...there are some mountains which have nothing but food for bees, but they had trees not very long ago, and the rafters from those felled there to roof the largest buildings are still sound.

There are many more books and speeches and documents beside these that are available today to further discuss humanity's influence on the environment. Except for the fact that we now have better information thanks to the concerted efforts of modern science and the many tireless individuals that study the effects of humans on the environment, I'm not telling you a story much different than these.

The principal difference here is that I've approached telling this story as an engineer would approach a challenge. "Tell me what I have to do and I'll make it work" might well be the call cry of engineers. This document is thus set out as a resource and an open document for other people to critique and improve until we can specify the task for engineers. Once we know what we have to do, we will certainly do it.

This document started out as a very cold and impersonal look at the physics, and the thermodynamics of Earth's energy systems. It was clearly apparent that while audiences enjoyed that conversation and it provided valuable perspective, the numbers were too large, and the issues so impersonal, that it was difficult to understand the implications.

In an effort to remedy that this document now has two stories intertwined: The larger, global energy picture, and the more personal energy accounting for all of earth's individuals. The larger story is about very big numbers and very big implications. The personal story is about each of us living and working in this shared planet, and the cumulative effects that each of our lives make.

I remember first watching Al Gore give a tremendous, and important, presentation at a conference with his climate change talk. The immediate questions from that audience were "How does this effect me?" and "What can I do to make a difference?". A few years later the answers to these questions ended up in the credits of his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth". Because the answers to those questions are the only way we as individuals can understand our global challenge, we have tried to bring them into the center of this conversation rather than the appendix. This isn't meant as a gross criticism of Gore, just that I personally want a deeper understanding of the consequences, and to know what to do.

Without doubt, the only way to move forward is to know what the target is, know how to measure progress towards that target, and have the data and information to make good personal decisions as well as good global decisions. ...

Saul is an Australian who now lives in San Francisco, after doing his Masters thesis on personal fabricators at MIT - Tim O'Reilly did a good profile of him a while back - Radar Profile: Saul Griffith, Maker Extraordinaire.

Saul's Masters thesis at MIT was entitled Towards Personal Fabricators: Tabletop tools for micron and sub-micron scale functional rapid prototyping. [pdf] It took a "traditional" tools-based approach to the construction of new materials. But by four years later, he'd taken a different turn. His PhD work at MIT was on self-assembling systems and the design of programmable materials. As described in the abstract of his paper that appeared in Nature:

Autonomously self-replicating machines have long caught the imagination, but have yet to acquire the sophistication of biological systems, which assemble structures from disordered building blocks. Here we describe the autonomous self-replication of a reconfigurable string of parts from randomly positioned input components. Such components, if suitably miniaturized and mass-produced, could constitute self-fabricating systems whose assembly is brought about by the parts themselves.

The full article can be found here [pdf]. If you want to go deeper, take a look at Saul's PhD thesis, Growing Machines. Saul also described some of his work in a talk he gave at the TED conference in 2005:

The key idea that Saul began exploring was one of changing the relationship between tools and materials. We tend to think of materials as shaped by tools, but that isn't the only way to build things. Living things grow organically, with the instructions for their own construction somehow embedded in the materials themselves. What Saul showed was that even today we can construct primitive mechanical systems with the same characteristics. A set of parts with matching physical characteristics might randomly self-assemble into repeating strings, much like DNA, or fold into complex, predefined shapes, like proteins. Effectively, Saul was doing some of the groundbreaking work on programmable materials.

However, Saul's insight about new ways to make things doesn't just rely on new materials yet to be designed. A lens formed by the same physical laws that shape a waterdrop, a kite as an optimal energy surface for capturing the wind -- these are objects and manufacturing processes that can be revisioned by a better understanding of the laws of physics. As Saul told Wired, Squid Labs, the company that Saul co-founded with some fellow MIT graduates, is "a design firm that does differential equations."

The carbon calculator concept mentioned earlier is one that has captured the attention of a few different people. Kiashu at GWAG, for example, has his Carbon account challenge.

Saul has started (yet another) company called Wattzon which is providing a "free online tool to quantify, track, compare and understand the total amount of energy needed to support all of the facets of your lifestyle". Wattzon and Saul were recently profiled by Fast Company - Powering Down: Q&A With Saul Griffith, Makani Power.

Forget about a new gym membership or diet. The most important New Year’s resolution for 2009 may be slimming down your energy footprint. Saul Griffith, a MacArthur genius grant winner and president of Makani Power, believes that a mass movement is necessary to avert catastrophic climate change. To that end, he and his colleagues created WattzOn, a personal calculator that allows users to track energy consumption down to the last apple they eat. In addition to calculating things like travel, WattzOn also factors in less obvious contributors to our energy footprint like our possessions, food consumption and government activities on our behalf. This can bring some surprises: Griffith, who bikes to work, assumed he had a small energy footprint until WattzOn showed him he was “a planet f***er.” In This Q&A, he explains why we should scrutinize our power consumption and how this can improve our health and quality of life—even without that gym membership or fad diet.

Speaking broadly, what do you hope to accomplish with WattzOn?

A personal responsibility around energy use. It would be great for people to truly understand, have a literacy, if you will, around how much power is required to run their life, and how they could change their lifestyles and behaviors to save money and lower their energy use. It seeks to answer the question that comes at the end of a movie like An Inconvenient Truth—"But what does this mean for me? What can I do?"

What do you mean by boosting energy literacy?

Energy is invisible. Apart from the heat of the flames in an open fire that you can feel and see, there are not many cases where you see the massive flows of energy. You never actually see the gas in your gas tank; I bet few people even know how big their car's gas tank is. You never see the electrons that pass from your wall plug, but the lights magically continue to go on. What I mean by energy literacy is making energy visible to people, allowing us to see all the ways we use energy and help us reduce it sensibly, in ways that improve our life and our environment. Energy literacy means you can see the waste in disposing of a plastic bottle after you've drunk water from some place on the other side of the world.

Did you have any surprises when you conducted an audit of your personal energy use?

I was shocked at how much crap goes through my life and the embodied energy in it. I am repulsed now every time I see packaging, or some small item that serves no real purpose other than to mildly entertain me for the few moments before I throw it out.

I was also shocked to realize how much energy goes into our military and transport infrastructure. Broadly speaking, the percentage of your income that you pay in taxes is the percentage of your own personal energy use (and consequently carbon emissions) that the government decides on your behalf. For most Americans, this means 20 to 40 percent of their carbon output is done on their behalf by the government. A surprisingly large amount of this is in military infrastructure. In a truly carbon constrained world, can we really afford to fight the wars that we do and keep the level of military infrastructure that we have? It makes you look very differently at big government. I certainly don't want my carbon spent fighting wars in Iraq or building infrastructure that will only contribute to making the climate problem harder to solve.

I was also surprised by the amount of energy used in flying. It has made me drastically change my travel habits and fly much, much less.

Are there many little things that we do with an energy cost we take for granted?

Everything you do uses energy in some way. I was surprised, for example, by how much energy it takes to deliver one can or bottle of soda or energy drink to me. If you drink one or two every day, it is the equivalent of constantly burning a 60-100Watt light bulb. Similarly, having a newspaper home delivered every day uses about the same amount of energy as a four-minute hot shower each morning.

Being able to compare all of these things is quite liberating. It lets you think about which things you do that you really enjoy, versus those things you do purely because they are habit. In an odd way my life is improving right now because of my effort to reduce my energy use. I have been eliminating habits that use energy for no good reason, and focusing on using my power budget on those things that really make me happy. For example, rather than eat low quality meat at every meal, I only eat beautiful, quality meat once a week or every two weeks. I'm also walking and riding my bicycle more and am healthier as well. ...

@ Yahoo! Video