Let me first take a moment to tell you about 4CORE. 4CORE is a 5 year old 501(c)3 not for profit organization, with the mission to serve Southwest Colorado as the leading resource for the effective and efficient use of energy to promote and sustain vibrant local communities.
What exactly does that mean? It means we are working to curb the dollars each of us spend to buy energy for transportation, our homes, as well as our work place in order to keep money from leaving our community (we are energy importers). Energy has been cheap for a long time, so conserving it and the dollars to buy it hasn't seemed to matter, but as energy costs increase, it does matter. It matters for your wallet and for our community.
The obvious extension is that energy matters for our country and for the whole world. I believe it also matters for the environment. A quick look at a few numbers is pretty staggering: Viewing the global population calculator, which, as I'm writing this blog, is reading 7.2 billion people. This is mind boggling, and leads me to invoke the word ‘sustainable’ (able to be used without being completely used up or destroyed, involving methods that do not completely use up or destroy).
If I were to ask you how your job or your marriage was, and you said, “it’s sustainable”, that doesn't sound very good. So let me ask you, rhetorically, to ponder if you think our current energy consumption levels are sustainable? This reminds me of the bumper sticker ‘Earth First- we’ll mine the other planets later’.
Where We Have Come From
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| A Watt Steam Engine, fueled by coal, propelled the Industrial Revolution |
The coal fired ‘Watt Steam Engines’ of the early industrial revolution are now around 250 years old, so aside from having fires in our caves for a long time, the machine age and now gadget age are relatively young. To bring this dialog home the Durango Discovery Museum/Power House, which was commissioned in 1893 is now 120 years old. This was the same year of the iconic Chicago Worlds Fair, where Alternating Current (AC) electricity lit the ‘White City’ and Pabst Beer won the ‘Blue Ribbon’ as a micro brewery).
Durango always seems to be on the cutting edge. Back then each small town had to have their own power generation as the ‘grid’ we appreciate today wasn't available. Each town also had their own diaries, saw mills… One might say that communities were more sustainable, or independent.
My, How We Have Grown
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| http://visual.ly/how-does-american-energy-consumption-measure-global-context |
The average home uses $84 worth of electricity/month equaling around $1000 per year, multiplied by 26,000 homes equals over $26,000,000 million/per year spent on residential electricity in La Plata County (this does not count industrial or commercial uses).
If you recall, my Favorite Appliance is the Refrigerator
You have to love the thermodynamic cycle of a heat pump working in reverse to keep food and beer cold and fresh! My grandmother Ethel had an old chest cooler on her back porch in Washington D.C. where I grew up. She had an electric fridge inside the house, but always kept the old cooler stocked full of Frostie Root Beer on ice. This was a pre-electric ice chest, and before electrification, ice was cut from the Potomac River in the winter, capped with saw dust and stored in buildings, then delivered to the neighborhoods throughout the year.
Nothing tastes as sweet as that root beer used to from that antique cooler, and she would let me have as many as I wanted. I remember the milk man delivering whole milk to our back porch in heavy glass bottles, then picking up the empties. We continue to innovate as a species and things are different today. Our modern grocers stock almost everything imaginable year round. I have heard that the average piece of fruit travels 1,600 miles. However, the home grown fruit, or tomato is always the sweetest.
Our Durango Power House has evolved from producing its own power in 1893, to shutting the power house down in the mid 1970’s, and is now an awesome interactive museum.
Enough about our community, what about me? And you?
In our evolution, let us remember how to innovate and evolve toward energy efficiency. The price of energy is increasing, as is the cost to our planet as we grow in population and use more. The first step starts, literally, at home. Find out how much energy you could be saving by getting a HomeRx assessment. Make the upgrades that will $ave you the most and make your home more comfortable.
Maybe you Buy Local, but take the next step... Put your money where your house is.
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