saving electricity

Kilowatt Hours (kWh)

On your electricity bill you are billed for kWhs. Many people dont know what that means; they just pay the bill. A kWh (kilowatt hour) is 1,000 watts used for one hour. Its the amount of electrical energy youd use if you turned on 10 light bulbs that each used 100 watts and left the bulbs on for one hour.

tion like this increases the risk of heart disease, lung cancer and asthma attacks.

the fuel is lost before it ever reaches your home.

Electricity Production

Scale of the Problem

Its hard to comprehend the scale of our household carbon dioxide emissions. A pound of carbon, a thousand pounds, what does it all mean? An African bull elephant weighs around 10,000 pounds. Every year the average New England household emits roughly one African bull elephant in carbon through electricity use. Each household emits another elephant through heating use, and another elephant per car the household owns. The average American household owns two cars.

Here in Massachusetts, one-kilowatt hour currently costs us 14 cents (if you add in all the surcharges including for generation and transmission). It also emits an average of 1.28 pounds of carbon dioxide at the power plant where our electricity is made. That doesnt sound like so much, but each of us uses a lot of kilowatt hours. The average home in New England consumes 7,500 kWh per year, emitting 9,600 lbs. of carbon dioxide through our electricity use alone. This is almost as much as the average passenger car emits each year. Altogether this much electricity costs $1,125 per year per home. Thats a chunk of change, and if you picture all the homes in New England, you can imagine thats a lot of carbon being pumped into the sky. Along with the damages of climate change, pollu-

In New England, electricity is created primarily by natural gas (43%), oil (22%), nuclear (16%), and coal (8%). The techniques used to process those fuelsranging from hydraulic fracturing (a.k.a. fracking) to mountaintop removal to nuclear reactionshave problems associated with them. The less we can use of these problematic resources, the fewer problems we will cause. Also at every step in the process of delivering electricity from burning the fuels at the power plant to moving the power along transmission lines there are inefficiencies that cause some of the power to be lost. The result: 60% to 70% of the original energy of

Thats a total of four elephants of carbon emissions per home.

Imagine those four elephants in your backyard or in your driveway.

Now add on the elephants from last year. And the year before that and the year before that. Youve been producing that many elephants every year for decades. So has every one of your neighbors. This book will help you reduce your energy use by as many elephants as possible over the next decade.

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