Carbon, as we all are now acutely aware, has become enemy number one in the fight against climate change. After all, CO2 is the main culprit when it comes to heating up the planet. While carbon reduction is a necessary part of the solution, it’s not entirely the whole solution. To be more specific; focusing the vast majority of resources, and attention, solely on the carbon equation is equivalent to the last remaining player during a game of dodgeball looking at only one of the twelve players on the opposite team.
The Bigger Problem
Solving, or lessening, the carbon dilemma still leaves humanity with the bigger question? Where are we going to get the clean carbon-free power we need to fulfill the current global need (roughly 10-12 terawatts)? The answer, according to Saul Griffith inventor and founder of WattzOn.com, is essentially, nowhere. The sheer scale of the global demand for energy is such that current means of producing carbon-free energy are just not productive enough. To put it into perspective; say you wanted to produce 10% of the world’s needed energy (2 terawatts) solely from solar energy. It would take 100 square yards of solar panels being produced every second over the next 25 years to achieve the necessary amount of equipment panels to make this possible. In a day and age where legislating an mpg requirement of 35mpg seems like an amputation, it’s fairly safe to assume that this would never happen.
The Bigger Solution
So what do we do? Well world, you’re just going to have to do with a little less…says Saul Griffith. Though an avid inventor and proponent of many clean renewable energy technologies (huge kite-surfing wind sails is one of his latest), Saul choruses what many scientist, and proponents of clean renewable energies, have been saying for years: people have to consume less. While this is most assuredly not going to be an easy task, given the fact the past 100 years of human civilization and development has essentially been built on fossil fuels, it is one that is going to have to take place in order to avoid even greater hardships should it not be done (i.e. wars over resources, displacement, starvation, etc.) One of the first stages in this process is individuals becoming aware of, and taking personal account of, their own energy usage.
WattzOn.com: Your Energy Guru
WattzOn.com is designed to be your own personal ‘energy trainer’ if you will. A means by which you, the individual, are able to gauge and assess your own personal energy consumption given your lifestyle and choices you make. Unlike a carbon calculator, which focuses solely, and often times crudely, on your individual contribution of carbon into the atmosphere, WattzOn.com calculates your annual power consumption measured in watts. Think of it as an ‘energy footprint’ rather than a carbon footprint. As the sites states:
“WattzOn is 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 with the goal of helping you find ways to reduce your personal power consumption.”
What Griffith and his team have done, is they have incorporated a multitude of data fields that are filled out by the individual. While many of these fields may look familiar to those who have done a carbon calculator, others may not such as “do you eat meat?” or “do you own an office desk”. While the answer to these questions may seem trivial, and even ridiculous, they are actually quite quantifiable and can have a much more significant bearing on one’s energy consumption than one might imagine.
The beauty of WattzOn.com lies in the way it stores and uses the data entered into the system. Think of it as the ultimate data integration, or an artificial intelligence. Not only does it pull data from answers to pre-determined questions, i.e. what is your monthly kwh usage? how many times a day do you shower?, but it utilizes quantifiable user entered energy data as well. For example, I know that me drinking a 4 beers every week uses 200 watts of power every year (I don’t know this, but for the sake of this example). I can enter that data into a user generated field and category. This information is then stored and compared to similar data entered by other people. Essentially, the system becomes more accurate and much more dynamic as the number of users, and user data, are added to the system. Think Skynet from Terminator…only nicer and more eco-friendly. After entering your data, the site processes it and compares it to similar data from other users and locations. It then will generate detailed breakdowns of where your energy usage is coming from, thereby showing you the areas you could work on.
Real actionable and tangible knowledge is what is needed to enable people to change their habits should they so desire. Individuals cannot make changes if they don’t know where to start. Knowledge is the critical key to shifting the energy use and production paradigm toward something more realistic and sustainable. In this case, knowing is more than half battle. So visit WattzOn.com right now, build your own profile, and start reducing your energy footprint!
The Good: An extremely well-designed site that is user-friendly, increasingly accurate with it’s calculations, and an invaluable tool for individuals looking to reduce their energy footprint.
The Bad: Many people still don’t know about this site.
The Bottom-line: WattzOn.com is a rare feat for the sustainability realm. Not only is it a necessary, valuable, and, most importantly, a functional tool in combating energy consumption, but the fundamental problems involving climate change and energy consumption have been well thought out and integrated into the goals and functionality of the site. Users gain a real tangible understanding of the energy they’re consuming when they make what appear to be inconsequential decisions during their daily lives.
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