Note – As this is a blog about energy, I am only discussing the energy-implications of green living.

From the outside, the Silver Gardens Apartments in downtown Albuquerque look like any other apartment building in New Mexico – brown and unexciting. The only reason I noticed the building while waiting for my bus was because of the two vertical axis wind turbines sitting on top of the roof (see pictures below, including the local senator visiting the newly finished apartments). For the next few months I would sometimes glance at the turbines as I waited for my bus, mostly because there was nothing else to look at. Over time I began to notice an interesting trend – I had never actually seen these wind turbines moving. By the end of the summer, I had never seen the turbines move an inch.

 

Here is the honest truth – installing wind turbines in Albuquerque is not a good idea. Using a scale from 2 – 7, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory has ranked Albuquerque’s wind potential as a one, indicating that wind turbines aren’t worth the investment [1]. So, why would Silver Garden’s apartments even bother to install them? A quick visit to their website will answer that question with one word – Green. These apartments have energy star appliances, stand close to lots of public transportation options and feature high performance windows. As such, they have been given a Platinum ranking by the United States Green Building Council’s LEED program [3]. With this ranking, these apartments are the place to live for anyone who wants to live a green lifestyle (and is willing to pay the price). But how do you show off just how green your building is? Well, with the best green poster child we have found yet – a wind turbine. Whether or not the wind turbine actually generates power is apparently a completely different issue.

I’m writing this post because the United States has developed a severe case of color blindness. We perceive as “green” things that aren’t actually very green and have failed to identify the truly “green” things around us. Put a different way, in our efforts to reduce energy consumption, we have innovated and marketed new, must-have energy-efficient technology, but somewhere along the way we forgot that reducing consumption was our entire goal. The root cause of this problem is two fold: 1) The people we have trusted to identify what is green have become a little confused 2) We have neglected our own personal responsibility.

Lets start by talking about appliances, being anything in your home that consumes electricity. The Energy Star program, managed by the EPA and Department of Energy, is the entity responsible for indicating which appliances are energy efficient, indicated by the Energy Star sticker shown below [5], but sometimes their selections don’t make a lot of sense. Consider, for example, this discontinued LG smart TV with the Energy Star sticker of approval on the back [6]. This LG television uses those newfangled LED’s, the most efficient way of generating light with electricity. But, don’t forget that the TV is also 86″ (or 7 feet 2 inches!) from corner to corner and has UHD 4K resolution, meaning that you need a whole lot of those efficient, very small LED’s to project your very large, high resolution image. In the end, this TV uses 127 Watts when turned on [7], which really isn’t that far from the 167 Watts consumed by a big, old CRT TV [9]. Or, lets look at this highly-efficient, Energy Star rated [8] Samsung refrigerator, complete with sparkling water dispenser and 34 cubic feet of refrigerated space, enough room to fit 34 bags of groceries. This very large, highly-efficient refrigerated space costs around 855 kWh of electricity per year, which would be like leaving the 86″ TV described above turned on for 280.5 straight days. The best part is that I could claim tax credits by owning either one of these devices because I have made an “energy-saving improvement.”

Next, we move on to buildings. The LEED program, already mentioned, is one of several entities that registers houses as “green” [8]. Like the Energy Star program, the LEED program also emphasizes optimizing the energy efficiency of the home over considering the actual overall energy consumption. Without a doubt, my favorite example of a house missing the point entirely is Al Gore’s home (pictured below). Soon after the release of “An Inconvenient Truth” a chain email (the early 2000’s equivalent of social media) began to circulate, accusing Al Gore of having a giant, energy-hogging mansion that consumed anywhere from 12 – 20 times more energy than the average home in Tennessee, probably because it has 20 bedrooms and 8 bathrooms [9]. This fact has been verified by Snopes [10]. In response, Al Gore did what any reasonable politician would do – he installed LED light bulbs, solar panels and a geothermal heat pump, garnering him a LEED gold certification [11] and earning him the praise of many an admirer [12]. The result was a reduction of his utility bill by a whopping 11%, meaning his house now uses only 10 – 18 times more energy than the average American home. Of course, I’m sure the heated pool doesn’t help with that number.

Let me be clear: LEED, Energy Star and energy efficiency in general are very important and we need them. Whatever you do, you should do it as efficiently as possible. However, by emphasizing efficiency over consumption, I fear that we have put the cart before the horse. 25 years ago, my mother-in-law tied a piece of rope between two trees and has used that line (and the sun) exclusively to dry the clothes of herself, her husband and her six children. Where is the Energy Star sticker for that? Somebody should slap that thing right on her forehead because she has earned it. Better yet, where is the tax credit for a laundry line? No dryer, however efficient, will ever match the efficiency of a single clothes line. For a few years I probably owned the “greenest” car on my street – a 1997 Honda Passport with an astounding 18 MPG on the highway [13]. How is that green you say? Well, I hardly ever drove it. Instead, I used my bike or walked to get back and forth between work . No Prius can beat my two legs.

See, here is the problem – by emphasizing and offering incentives for expensive energy-efficient devices and only giving lip service to conservation we have basically shut out the people who can’t afford to “live green.” When my washer broke, I had two choices: I could buy a new energy-efficient model for upwards of $400 or I could buy a used, older model for $50. Even with the 25% energy savings, the more efficient model would take a very, very long time to pay for itself. For most of us, that is where our dream of saving energy ends. But, what if we conserved energy and water a different way? What if you ran your washer less? This sounds like a completely heretical idea, but I don’t doubt that you are currently washing clothes that really don’t need to be washed. What if you didn’t turn your lights on as much, or didn’t watch your TV as often?

This brings us right to our second point – we have forgotten our own personal responsibility to reduce our own consumption. Sometime in the 1980’s mankind began to realize that we can’t just do whatever we want and expect the environment to be cool with it (that was as global warming joke) [14]. After realizing this, the first thing we did was frantically turn to the engineers and say “How can we do all of this more efficiently?” As a result, basically everything has become more efficient since 1980, but we consume more than ever. For example, since 1980 the square footage of the average American home has increased by at least 27% [15] despite a decrease in the number of people per household [16]. The amount of electricity used for appliances and electronics has doubled in size [17]. Percentage of households with air conditioners exploded from 23% to 61% and dishwashers went from 35% of homes to 59% of homes [17]. We now have 2.3 TV’s per house [18]. In the end, the total amount of energy consumed in all American households has stayed almost exactly the same since 1980 [19]. It’s okay though because all of these devices are efficient.

The problem is we asked the wrong question. The first thing we should have done was turn to the mirror and ask ourselves “How much energy do I actually need to consume?” and then have the engineers work on making that consumption as efficient as possible. Innovation and technology can only get us so far. An article I’ve cited above had the following to say regarding Al Gore’s changes to his home, and I couldn’t disagree more (emphasis my own) [20].

Individual action has never been the focus of his (Al Gore’s) message … climate change advocates who don’t live a carbon-neutral lifestyle aren’t hypocrites because, for the most part, they’re not asking you to live a carbon-neutral lifestyle. They’re asking governments, utilities, energy companies, and large corporations to increase their use of renewable energy so that you can continue to live your life as you please, without contributing to global warming

By completely eliminating the individual from the picture, we are ignoring the fact that the individual is the one consuming the energy. We might argue that governments and corporations have the power, but nothing can exist without a product and it is individuals who ultimately consume that product.

So, yes, please purchase green, energy-efficient technology as often as you can, but don’t forget that buying things is only half the battle (and most of the problem). You always have the power to go without, and there is nothing more green than that. Of course, you have to be brave enough to hang your underwear out where all the neighbors can see.