How I Choose Less Electricity

It’s been awhile since I talked about electricity, so you can re-read my first post here for a refresher on reasons to choose less electricity.

In an ideal world, everyone’s appliances would be the newer energy efficient models. This is a good way of saving a lot of electricity, but it isn’t feasible in many situations (including mine), so I won’t discuss that here. It is worth mentioning, nonetheless.

One of the best ways to use less electricity if you are not already paying attention to your power usage is to turn things off when you aren’t using them. This seems obvious and I do not say this to be condescending—it involves a lot more than turning off lights when you leave a room. This was something I thought I did a good job at, but once I started paying attention to my electricity usage, I noticed a few things that I was pretty careless about.

Whenever I finished using my computer, I was careful to put it to sleep and (usually) turn off the monitors, but I never bothered turning it off. Sometimes I don’t use my desktop for several days or weeks, let alone overnight, so this was a huge waste of electricity. Worse, I noticed that I had the habit of watching Netflix on television and pausing it for long periods of time to make dinner, do homework, have a conversation, etc.

Better than turning things off when you aren’t using them, you can choose to not use them in the first place. This is a much more difficult habit, I think, especially if you are trying to wean yourself off of things like air conditioning.

If you really want to minimize your electricity usage, you can also unplug appliances that use electricity when they aren’t turned on. For instance, televisions, video games, computers, and routers. Anything that doesn’t need to be on (refrigerators) and can go into standby mode or always has a light on is a good candidate. There is some debate about whether this really saves much electricity, but I figured that it wasn’t that big of an inconvenience for me to do either way.

Using electricity these ways was not difficult at all, but I still made a lot of mistakes. I often forgot to unplug my router when I went to sleep, or walked away from my computer and got distracted for several hours before remembering it was still on. I still absentmindedly pause Netflix to cook lunch or read the newspaper. But, even with all of my mistakes, I still succeeded most of the time.

I have not gotten my electricity bill yet, so I have no idea how much less electricity I used, if any. Either way, I am planning on continuing to choose to use less electricity. Unlike trying to minimize my water usage, this didn’t interfere with my life at all, so I see no reason not to continue.

More information about using less electricity can be found here.

Choosing Less Electricity: First Reaction

So far, trying to use less electricity is so much easier than my attempt to use less water that I’m actually feeling more disappointed in myself for not doing this sooner than I am feeling good for doing well. Part of this is due to the ease of measurement. When I tried to use less water, I quantified my efforts by measuring my water as I used it. This was fairly inconvenient when I did certain things like wash dishes. Electricity, on the other hand, is handily measured for me by Westar when I am billed each month. So I will not only have an idea of how much electricity I use when I am trying to use less, I will also know how it compares to my previous month’s usage.

This activity is also something of a psychological experiment. It will be interesting to see if I am actually doing as well at using less electricity as I feel that I am. Because I measured my water as I used it, I knew the entire time what activities I needed to cut back on more. I can speculate about how well I’m doing, but I won’t know until the end. It’s possible that the act of measuring as I went helped me more than inconvenienced me.

Choose Less Electricity, Choose Less Energy

“Remember to take all things in moderation (even World of Warcraft!)”
World of Warcraft, In-Game Tip

There are many reasons to reduce your electricity consumption. Electricity may come from many sources, but most of these are fossil fuels. In 2014, 67% of the electricity generated in the United States was from fossil fuels^[1]. You can see a more detailed breakdown of the energy sources below.

As we know by now, burning fossil fuels releases gases into the atmosphere that contribute to climate change. So, use less electricity, burn fewer fossil fuels, release fewer gases, and contribute less to climate change. This is a very important reason to reduce your electricity usage, but in this post I am going to focus more heavily on another reasons to reduce electricity usage: supply and demand.

We consume a lot of energy here in America. And it’s not just that we consume a lot of energy, and a lot more than we used to, per person. Below, you will find a chart of the electricity usage in the United States, per capita, over several decades^[2]. Clearly we are using a lot more electricity than we used to. But why is this such a problem?

Recently in my environmental anthropology class, we have been talking about how politics, capitalism, and social factors have worked together to ensure the success of fossil fuel industries, and create a system dependent on this success.

From Timothy Mitchell’s “Carbon Democracy”^[3], we learn that this began with coal in the 1800’s. Coal was a promising opportunity for humanity. In Great Britain, for example, by the 1890’s, coal was providing so much energy that obtaining the same amount of energy from burning wood would have required forests eight times the country’s area. Coal brought people together in cities because they didn’t need to live next to a forest anymore for energy. As populations became more concentrated in cities, coal brought many new industrial and manufacturing opportunities, and the newly freed land provided opportunities to expand agriculture. Coal initiated our dependence on fossil fuels.

Society had become so dependent on fossil fuels, in fact, that coal miners were given a unique source of power. If coal miners (or rail workers, for that matter) went on strike for better working conditions, improved pay, or greater job security, they were likely quite effective because the demand for coal was so high, they would do just about anything for it. This demand was so great, strikes even turned violent, like in Ludlow, Colorado in 1914.

Mitchell goes on to explain how our desire for oil was even greater than for coal. The United State’s demand for oil was so great that it justified covert CIA operations involving assassinations and organized coups to secure our access to oil in the Middle East. To keep oil prices and demand high, manufacturers began shifting their attention to options requiring more energy, pushing our society to be even more dependent on fossil fuels.

This well-orchestrated series of events seems inescapable. As much as fossil fuels have benefited humanity, most of us would probably agree that it doesn’t justify assassinating people that threatened our control of the oil economy. But it is our choice to provide the demand for the fossil fuels.

No—an individual using less electricity at home will not sufficiently decrease the demand for fossil fuels to effect any change. But if enough of us consider at what our leaders have done for fossil fuels, the violence and the manipulation, against citizens of other countries and Americans alike, if enough of us decide that we will not continue contributing to that system and prioritize reducing our fossil fuel consumption, we may, eventually, sufficiently change our demand enough that it is not in their interest any longer to go to such extreme measures for these non-renewable energies.

There is one simple rule that will help us achieve this goal, a rule that our society is especially guilty of forgetting: “take all things in moderation”.

[1] Energy Information Administration – FAQ
[2] Google Public Data Explorer – Electricity Consumption Per Capita
[3] Timothy Mitchell – “Carbon Democracy”