Our own Onya Cycles is teaming up with Betabrand to put together the world’s first 100% sustainable stunt: Eco-Knievel will perform a death-defying jump of an electric bicycle over a bio-diesel monster truck this May at Maker Faire.  Get excited!

This was a great illustration (thanks XKCD) / graphic to put radiation doses in perspective.

Here’s a couple of experiments in doing something similar for energy:
xkcd-energy-1pc-blocks

and
xkcd-energy-100W-blocks

Spoke this morning at the Green:net conference (GigaOm) in San Francisco.  Experimented with some new visuals on how to present the comprehensive view of energy consumption for an individual and data on city (San Francisco) energy use.  Tried to give a different talk about what Energy Literacy would actually mean for various people.

http://event.gigaom.com/greennet/schedule/

Slides are here (thanks slideshare):

We found this humorous and original way to look at the U.S. energy diet through a friend of EnergyLiteracy.com, Henry Reich.  Nice work, Henry!

Earlier this week, we wrote about embodied energy of buildings, and the concerns it poses when we think about legislating building efficiency measures.  Today we take a broader view, examining economic limitations of any technology replacement effort, from rebuilding houses to replacing lightbulbs.

Suppose that high-efficiency washing machines are a necessary part of a low-carbon economy (as we believe they must be).  Government tax write-offs are an effective way to encourage consumers to spend the extra money on these energy-saving machines.  If the U.S. started an incentive program so effective that every consumer chose a high-efficiency machine over a conventional one, however, it would still take quite some time to replace all the energy-hogging washers in the country.  Because they are such a large purchase, the vast majority of consumers replace their washing machine only when forced to do so by problems with the old machine’s operation.  If you assume the average washing machine has a lifetime of around 10 years, it will take roughly that long (10 years) until every consumer has had an opportunity to buy a high-efficiency machine.

In the graph below, we show the diffusion curves for technologies of varying lifetimes.  If we assume the government incentive is so strong that every consumer chooses the efficient version when they buy a replacement — We say the adoption rate is 100%.  We can see the curve for washing machines (and other goods with a 10 year lifetime) above the tan strip.   Starting from 0% of the technology stock, high-efficiency machines take roughly 10 years to replace conventional ones.  So even with the ideal incentive program, there is still a considerable lag time during which inefficient washers are wasting energy and water.

In this simple model, there are two technologies with the same given lifespan, and each consumer has a chance to upgrade from the inefficient version to efficient only when their existing unit stops working.  Once a consumer buys the efficient version, he or she never goes back (For those interested, the math is a simple Monte Carlo model).  As we can see below, no matter at what percentage we start when the incentive is implemented, the time until every old unit has been replaced is bounded by the lifespan of the good.  Think about the consumer who bought an inefficient machine the day before the incentive started:  They won’t have a chance to take advantage of it for another 10 years!

In reality, no incentive will bring the adoption rate to 100%.  In the graphs below, we show the 100% adoption rate scenario alongside three others which assume 50%, 25%, and 12.5% adoption rates, respectively.  A 50% adoption rate means that 50% of consumers make the `efficient’ choice at their next opportunity, and 50% buy something similar to what they currently have.  We can see that replacement actually happens more slowly than the upper bound dictated by technology lifespan.  With washing machines, for example, a 50% adoption rate means that the stock of high-efficiency machines only reaches 90% of the total after roughly 30 years.

Let’s explore what these graphs say about power consumption of washing machines.  Assuming a 10 year lifetime, we can do a very rough calculation of the average power consumed by washing machines in the U.S.  A conventional washing machine uses roughly .35 kWh per day if we assume one load every three days.  There are roughly 100,000,000 households in the U.S., so let’s assume there is one washing machine per household.  Thus, if every washing machine in the U.S were conventional, the power consumed by them would be roughly:

$$\frac{ .35 \text{ kWh per day per machine} \times 100,000,000 \text{ households in U.S.} }{ 24 \text{ hours per day} \times 1,000 \text{ kW per MW}}= 1458 \text{ MW}. $$

This is on the order of the total electricity consumption of a major city!  Energy Star washing machines are advertised to cut energy costs by roughly one third.  Using these estimates, we can make a simple estimation of power consumed by washing machines in the U.S. for various constant adoption rates, shown in the graph below:

While these models are extremely simple, almost any technology, not just washing machines, will follow this rough characterization.  In any case, consumers, utilities, governments, and other players in the climate game are likely to require extreme motivation before they would discard their appliances, facilities, and infrastructure while they could still extract earnings from their up-front investment.  For technologies with longer lifespans like power-plants and houses, this restriction seriously slows the effectiveness of a policy to cut energy use.  This is why in-the-know climate leaders like James Hanson of NASA say we should build zero new coal-fired power plants.  Today’s decisions will likely dictate the electricity grid makeup for the next 50 or 60 years!

The take-away message from this entry is that no matter how aggressively we push policy incentives to replace infrastructure, the effect will likely be delayed by the constraints of economics.  The policies with greatest effect are those that take this into account in one of two ways.  First, our graphs show that targeting technologies with short lifetimes is inherently a better way to quickly replace technology stock.  For two technologies with similar energy use profiles, the better incentive is the one supporting that with the shorter lifetime.  Unfortunately, the majority of our energy use is accounted for by long-term infrastructure: our houses, cars, electricity grid, transportation needs, etc.  For these items, however, we can try to sidestep the bounds on diffusion curves through targeting parts of the infrastructure that can be replaced without significant loss of investment.  Very few people will rebuild their entire house while it still functions, but many could be convinced to invest in additional insulation for it.

Second, since the barrier to these diffusion curves is economic, the most effective policies will target the technologies where significant monetary gains are possible by replacing old infrastructure.  If the payback periods for new technologies are favorable and publicized, policies might just motivate consumers to make purchasing decisions which exceed the diffusion curves.  We should approach this with caution, however, as there are energy trade-offs that come with replacing useful infrastructure.  If you read our entry on Embodied Energy of Buildings, you know that construction and manufacturing takes energy which for some technologies is comparable to the savings from high-efficiency replacements.  Just another reason why vigilant accounting is essential to making good decisions!

It’s been a while since you’ve heard anything from us at Energy Literacy, but rest assured, our minds are still on energy issues.  Lately, we’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about methodologies for doing reasonably accurate whole-picture energy audits using limited data (Think Saul’s energy project, but for any scale).  Working with something as complex as the total set of energy flows through the city of San Francisco, for example, we’re bound to rack up all kinds of uncertainty in our estimates.  We’re convinced, however, that these calculations are still helpful, even if only to determine the relative orders of magnitude of sources of energy consumption.  Just these ballpark estimates can have a remarkable effect on policy conversations, directing focus towards the lowest-hanging fruit and dispelling arguments that have little long-term relevancy.

In that vein, today we talk about the embodied energy of buildings, a topic which is understood hazily at best in most green circles.  Whenever there is discussion about enforcing high-efficiency standards for commercial or residential buildings, we have to keep in mind the energy we’ve invested in the infrastructure that already exists.  The materials that make up a building as well as the act of constructing it both required energy.  Retrofitting or reconstructing a building replaces some or all of the existing structure, and so it’s like we’re paying the energy bill twice for the same building.  This additional cost could potentially offset the savings in operating energy coming from the higher efficiency standards.  Preservationists rally around this argument, saying that “the greenest building is the one already built.” In reality, calculating the energy embodied by buildings and infrastructure is difficult, and the data to do so accurately doesn’t exist.  Because of this, most people punt on the issue, taking a blanket stance in favor of some mixture of preservation and renovation.  To determine the most effective policy choices, though, we can’t rely on canned responses.  Instead, we need to work towards a system for balancing the energy ledger when it comes to buildings.

Due to the complexity and variability of building construction, accurate accounting is extremely difficult.  For a great example of an energy audit of single building, see Catherine Mohr’s TED talk about the construction of her house and her analysis of the trade-offs between operating and embodied energy.  Her calculations show that a conventional house takes almost 400 MWh in materials and construction energy costs, but by being mindful of embodied energy, she and her husband cut that figure to 150 MWh.  Her accounting uses figures from the house’s architectural plans to determine the material inputs for the construction process.  Using published figures (such as those available through the DOE) for the embodied energy of these materials, Mohr totals the material energy in her new house and adds it to her estimates for the energy involved the demolition and construction processes.

This is exactly the kind of analysis we would like to do for larger political units, but there is no feasible way to assess the architectural plans for each building in our area of consideration.  To eliminate this need, we would like to know the embodied energy per square foot of many different building types.  There have been attempts at this, with somewhat inconsistent results (Dixit, et. al. surveys the literature).  The problem is finding a categorization scheme which accurately addresses embodied energy characteristics (i.e., buildings in the same category actually do have similar embodied energy per square foot), but which also is compatible with the data collected by government agencies.

The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, for example, uses a scheme based on building use (residences, warehouses, hospitals, etc.).  Mohr found her micro-scale estimate to be only about two-thirds of that predicted by this study.  This might be explained by the fact that this study is based on the manufacturing processes from the time of its publication in the 1970s.  Gumaste puts forth another scheme based on the number of stories in a building, arguing that due to structural considerations, this makes a significant difference in the energy per square foot.  Ideally, we would like to see benchmarking services like Lawrence Berkeley Lab’s EnergyIQ tool which tracks operational energy costs.  Users could do analysis like Mohr’s on the scale of single building and together form a larger picture of the embodied energy of buildings.

Most of these details actually aren’t too important for our purposes — We’d just like to make a rough estimate to guide policy decisions based on government data.  To this end, we can try to use the ACHP data referenced above to estimate the embodied energy of buildings in San Francisco.  From the city government, we know the total square square footage of buildings broken into categories of use.  These don’t correspond exactly to those used by ACHP, but we can make reasonable guesses to form the following table.  These estimates account for the energy used in construction, demolition, and the materials themselves.

This isn’t very exact, but it’s a starting point.  All the details are contained in the spreadsheet.  From this we can see that residential buildings account for roughly half of the embodied energy in buildings.  Extrapolating from Mohr’s experience, we might guess that these numbers are overestimates, but at least we have an upper bound.

Ideally, we’d like to derive estimates for the embodied energy per square foot of the construction types specified by the International Building Code.  These types are used to determine fire codes by rating the combustibility of buildings.  Type I is a concrete and steel structure, while Type V has a wood frame.  For each, there are subtypes specifying interior characteristics.  In this way, we can make an approximation to the material make-up, construction/demolition energy, and average lifetime of a building from this data.  These types are tracked by government agencies and are available for almost every existing structure.  Bringing the level of analysis to the individual building in this way, we can track additional variables (such as building age, number of stories, number of bedrooms, and number of bathrooms, all of which are recorded by city government).  By referencing this data, we can start to talk quantitatively at the policy-making level about which structures should be retrofitted, renovated, or rebuilt.

Hopefully we’ll have an update for you soon towards this end, but in the meantime feel free to offer comments or links to further studies.

http://www.nationmaster.com/cat/ene-energy

This site seems to have good statistics, good basic graphing functionality, and listed sources, quite comprehensive.

I was surprised that China produced almost 1/2 of the world’s coal in 2005:

http://www.nationmaster.com/red/pie-T/ene_coa_pro-energy-coal-production

The Energy Statistics Database contains comprehensive energy statistics on the production, trade, conversion and final consumption of primary and secondary; conventional and non-conventional; and new and renewable sources of energy. The Energy Statistics dataset, covering the period from 1990 on, is available at UNdata. For data prior to 1990, please refer to http://unstats.un.org/unsd/energy/edbase.htm.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/garden/30guilt.html?pagewanted=4&_r=1&hp

I used cloth (with diaper service) for 6 months with my kid.  We switched to compostable.  Diaper’s are still a tough question…

This is the link to the presentation at the Global Gridwise Forum in Washington DC, 9/23/2010  -  GRIDwise.pdf

I was asked to discuss where we need to go in terms of a real smart grid by 2030 to hit the types of energy security and environmental goals one could imagine wanting to hit.

Someone pointed me at this end of year article at get realist.  Quite sobering.  The general conclusion is that government, or cap-and-trade, or international agreements are not on track to succeed in the face of climate change, and that individuals need to take more personal responsibility in making change.  I agree.  As a friend of mine said “we are all trying to learn how to live the life we need everyone else to live”.  We need many innovations, some technical, most social.  We need to expand the people working on solving these problems to a group that includes everyone.  Every small business owner, every individual.

http://www.getreallist.com/investing-in-an-empire-of-illusion.html

Good magazine asked me to write something about Heirloom Products.  I must have said the words too many times publicly.  If you want to read the article at a fancy website with nice pictures and good design layout go here:

http://www.good.is/post/built-to-last/

Or, here are the words:

As an inventor, Saul Griffith has spent a lot of time thinking about how to make useful things. Griffith developed innovative designs for low-cost prescription glasses and energy-producing kites, founded the DIY website Instructables, and created a comprehensive carbon calculator called WattzOn. He was also awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2007. Recently, onstage at high-profile conferences such as TED and PopTech, Griffith has been arguing that we need to stop buying things and then throwing them away so quickly. In short, we need more “heirloom design.”

GOOD: What do you mean by “heirloom design?”

SAUL GRIFFITH: An object with “heirloom design” is something that will not only last through your lifetime and into the next generation, but that you also desire to keep that long because it’s beautiful, functional, and timeless.

G: Why is it important that we design stuff to last longer?

SG: An enormous amount of the energy we use [industrially] is locked up in “embodied energy.” It’s trapped, or embodied, in the materials our stuff is made of. It’s the energy that we use to mine materials and process them into products. While we can choose materials that have less embodied energy for any given product, it’s much better to choose objects that last two or three, or preferably 10 times, longer.

As I see the climate change and carbon dioxide problem, it is one way of figuring out how to live the best quality of life while using much less energy. Heirloom products are one way to make a significant contribution. It probably means you will end up owning less junk, your life will be less cluttered, and your stuff will be more beautiful and serve you with more joy.

G: How do you design an heirloom product? Do you have to think about function, materials, and aesthetics differently?

SG: The principal and only way to make an heirloom product is to design something that people will need not just this year, but for the next 50 or 100 years. Choose good materials that will last that long; but in essence, don’t even bother making fad products. If you have to design something, choose things that we need as opposed to frivolous things that we might just want for a month or two for bragging rights. In many respects, designing heirloom products means saying no to designing consumer crap that you know will not last very long.

The hardest challenge is in electronic goods or mechanical goods. With electronics, think long and hard about how to make the firmware upgradable, or perhaps even how to have the same functionality without any electronics (electronics are notoriously short-lived and toxic). With mechanical products, think about supplying repair manuals and designing the product to be repairable or customizable from the start, such that in 13 years, when a bearing fails, it will be easy for the customer to find and replace that bearing with a similar one. Choose the timeless and standardized over the faddish and esoteric.

G: What makes an object something a consumer actually wants to hold on to for generations? Its cost? Its craftsmanship?

SG: Probably both. I don’t think this is an easy question to answer, and the answer is different for different people. I would, however, posit that a key ingredient is functionality. If an object performs its function beautifully, efficiently, and intuitively, it is likely an heirloom product. If not, you shouldn’t
make it.

Think about the beautiful timeless objects: Le Creuset pots and pans, Bialetti or Bodum coffee makers, Iittala glassware, Vespa motor scooters, the Citroën 2CV, the Volkswagen Beetle, Lego toys, Zippo cigarette lighters, Montblanc pens, the Land Rover (the old aluminum ones before the queen bought one), the older KitchenAid products…

I don’t want to be called elitist. These typically sound like high-end products. But the reality is we need to figure out how to help people pay for higher-quality things up front, and have them last longer. This is a solvable problem with new business models.

G: There’s the design challenge, but isn’t there also a psychological challenge? Don’t we have to disabuse people of the attitude that most things can be instantly discarded?

SG: Absolutely. It’s either that or accept a very ugly climate future for your children. Or perhaps you should look at it this way: If you are 30 now, you either make these changes to how you shop, or you should expect your children to not pay for your health insurance
when you are 80 because you screwed them over so badly on climate change.

G: What about the dictates of fashion? I have some old clothes I still like, but styles change. Isn’t there an aesthetic imperative to update what you own?

SG: Suck it up. We have to change. That’s the gig with climate change. We have to do things in new ways and think differently. That’s an opportunity for people with their eyes open. Planned obsolescence and fashion seasons are new and constructed problems. There is no reason why we can’t do things differently. In fact, if you care about the environment and climate change, we sort of have no choice. You can ride this wave to success, or you can stick with your current mental model of the world and fail.

G: But don’t companies make more money if their products need to be replaced frequently?

SG: Maybe, in the short term, but the companies that last a century typically make things that last a century. Think about that for a minute.

G: Some businesses would have to make big changes to incorporate heirloom design. How do they do that?

SG: You figure out business models that are profitable when you also supply the repair service. You have more sustainable business models that mean you’ll be around for a while.

Perhaps we should think about heirloom companies too. Companies that you can give to your children because you make something beautiful and well designed that the next generation will want. I used to love the brass plaques on 100-year-old machines made by “Schmitt and Sons.” I’d like to have a company that makes the perfect heirloom coffee grinder. I’d call it “Griffith and Daughters,” maybe (though I don’t have any daughters yet—just a son).

G: Do you think major companies like Nokia and Nike will get onboard?

SG: They will either get this in the next 10 years or go out of business. I don’t mind if they go out of business. It’s their choice.

G: Are any companies bringing heirloom design to new products—items other than pens and watches? Who’s putting this idea into action?

SG: Sadly, very few. That’s why I talk about this stuff. You can’t make a solution for climate change add up unless you address this issue. If you are a young designer today, it might be hard; it might go against the grain. But the only way you will win in the long run, the only way you will design for the world we all want, is if you design heirloom products. Thumb your nose at the establishment.

Lego blocks, which last for generations and have infinite permutations for continued use, are an excellent example of heirloom design. The images in this post are designs that were submitted with the Lego patent application.

Inhabitat asked me to give my design predictions for 2010.

Here’s the link:

http://www.inhabitat.com/2010/01/04/green-design-predictions-for-2010/3/

Here’s my words, and yes, I was fairly depressed by Copenhagen result, and it might have tainted my writings:

Green Design 2010:

Given that no binding agreement was reached in Copenhagen, there will likely be no national or international pressure to do real green-house reductions, and hence it is very likely that 2010 green design will be an undertaking of those trying to greenwash their companies. Very likely we’ll see many people misusuing terminology and physical units to overmarket products that aren’t really going to cut the mustard. Remember that a climate friendly world means a reduction in carbon of 80%, that means 5 X less carbon that we produce today, by 2050 or probably even earlier. Given that, we’ll see lots of designs begging you to buy this or that thing because it’s twice as good, or 25% better than some consumer thingy that it replaces. Well, that’s not good enough. It has to be 5 or 10 times better, or 500-1000% better, to really be a good green thing. If we are lucky a few companies will start to realize that the only way to make truly green consumer products will be by making them heirloom products, things that will last for multiple generations, be repairable without a magnifying glass or a PhD, and made from lasting materials like wood, stainless steel, copper, & aluminum. I predict a huge number of car companies will claim 100mpg plug-in hybrids, and all of them will be lying, because they are only counting the energy in the gasoline, not the energy required to produce the electricity that charges the batteries that most likely came from a coal fired power plant. Yes, 2010 will be like 2009, only probably worse, with a whole lot of very ordinary design sold to us as green. We still don’t have a generation of designers who are literate in climate and energy issues, so they’ll spend their time writing marketing spin instead.

So, what might be the best of green design for 2010 are the things that don’t get designed. Don’t design me a new iPhone, figure out how to make my old one last. Don’t design me a new “green house”, figure out how to make the one I have more efficient. Don’t sell me physical objects, help me re-purpose the ones I have or otherwise give me digital tools for a higher quality of life that don’t require Chinese injection moldings.

Peak Cars, or Just a Car Sales Trough? New vehicles vs. scrappage 1991-2009 http://bit.ly/6YKD79

Although with BYD and TATA doing their thing, this is probably only a local, (US) effect.

This Onion article wonderfully represents the sociological challenge to an heirloom product culture where we make things that last longer, such that we don’t use the extra energy every time we re-make them (or their replacements).

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/new_device_desirable_old_device

While some people claim victory in Copenhagen with an “accord” (as far as i can tell an agreement to agree about something we might agree upon at some time in the future) I’m pretty saddened by the Copenhagen result.  At times like these I turn to comfort foods.  In this case a beautiful photo series on a chinese bicycle factory.  Bicycles are still the highest technology in low emission vehicles.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cargocycling/911579868/in/set-72157601030739985/

http://openpv.nrel.gov/

They are seeking more data on PV solar installations for this map.  It’s fascinating to see the progression over time of installations, and I was startled at just how active California is compared to the rest of the nation.

578.5 MW to date !  only another 500GW to do !

I love this, and couldn’t resist posting it.  The future could be beautiful.

http://www.pinktentacle.com/2009/10/tezuka-wind-turbine/

This is really quite lovely.  Congratulations to Raymond T. Pierrehumbert for using reason, good logic, and real numbers to refute some of the insanity around regarding climate issues.  A lovely example of numbers in defense of sanity.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/an-open-letter-to-steve-levitt/

I think the solar power area numbers he uses might be a little optimistic, but only by a factor of 2 or so, and not that it would drastically change the conclusion of the article.

We fill our cars with gas regularly, but don’t even see the liquid go into the tank.  If we were to imagine that we had to fill a backpack with the fuels required for a day of our lives, what would we be filling our energy back-pack with each day?

Each day the average american sets out with:

OIL = 10.81    L/Person/day
COAL = 9.54    kg/person/day
NATURAL GAS = 5.88    m^3/person/day

Which roughly converted to those other units is around 22 Pints of oil per day (one per hour!), 22 pounds of coal (another per hour) and 180 cubic feet of natural gas.

I used the annual consumption of coal and natural gas, and the daily consumption of oil, and converted it to the daily average by dividing it out by the population of the US.

The data is here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tEXpAv8VzEvgO5lNqze0JNw&output=html

The president’s speech:

http://amps-web.mit.edu/public/amps/webcast/2009/obama-2009oct23/ondemand.html

And even better, my friend Alex Slocum’s post visit interview:

http://cleanskies.com/videos/mit-demonstrates-offshore-renewable-energy-systems

In the summer of 2001, The National Environmental Education Foundation conducted a survey of 1,503 American adults about energy. Although 75% of those surveyed said they knew “A Fair Amount” or “A Lot” about energy, only 12% could correctly answer 7 or more questions on a 10 question energy quiz. The quiz is on pages 4 and 5 of the report (pages 15 and 16 of the PDF). So what’s your “energy IQ”?

The discussions about a carbon tax, or a cap-and-trade system, tend to revolve around “putting a price on carbon,” which is to say, charging polluters money for dumping carbon into the atmosphere. But how should that money be used? Here’s a graph from Vattenfall, the Swedish power company, showing which solutions become cost-effective at a price of €40 per ton of carbon dioxide.

The yellow section has improvements that pay for themselves, since they’re generally based around not burning fuel to begin with. The green section has the improvements that will be cost-effective at the €40 price, and the blue section has the more expensive solutions.

I haven’t verified any data that went into this graph, which is based on McKinsey’s greenhouse gas abatement cost curves, so I can’t comment on how realistic the numbers are. But from an energy literacy point of view, it gives a nice graphical depiction of how a price on carbon would make certain options more economically feasible.

This list of action items for individual energy savings is the most focused and quantitative I’ve seen. It comes from an October 2008 article in Environment Magazine by Gerald Gardner, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, and Paul Stern from the National Research Council.

The actions in the list are grouped by whether they’re for transportation or inside the home, immediate or longer-term, and no-cost/low-cost or higher-cost. Each item also includes an estimated percentage savings of total energy use. Here’s an example of an immediate, no-cost action for everyone:

Space conditioning:

Heat: Turn down thermostat from 72°F to 68°F during the day and to 65°F at night

A/C: Turn up thermostat from 73°F to 78°F

Energy saved: 3.4 percent

Compare that to the language from the Department of Energy’s “Tips to Save Energy Today: Easy low-cost and no-cost ways to save energy,” from their Energy Saver’s Booklet (full PDF):

Install a programmable thermostat to keep your house comfortably warm in the winter and comfortably cool in the summer.

The DoE’s language sets up two barriers:

1. getting and installing the programmable thermostat (which might be fairly low-cost, but probably won’t happen “today)”, and
2. learning how to use the thermostat in an effective way (even later in the booklet recommended temperatures settings are not given).

Perhaps more important, the DoE’s list doesn’t give any sense of how effective one action is compared to another, and scatters the “Long-Term Savings Tips throughout this booklet” — another barrier for readers.

Gardner & Stern’s list emphasizes relative impact of a mix of action types. People need to feel empowered to make big improvements quickly and easily, and The Short List of Effective Actions is a step towards that goal.

In earlier years of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s spaghetti diagrams, such as the above example from 1976, the ends of the swaths were more like the simpler energy flow diagrams. On the above diagram it’s easier to see that the height of the lines on one side would end up around the height of the lines on the other side than it is on some of the newer versions with oversized boxes that serve as labels. But the boxes are a useful tool, and can let us think about embedding another diagram form — box diagrams — into the spaghetti diagram.

Box diagrams are used for teaching electricity, and were developed by Peter Cheng and David Shipstone in the UK. The picture below is from part 1 (Word doc) of their introductory paper (here’s the Word doc part 2). Since power is the voltage across a bulb multiplied by the current through it, for a simple circuit like that shown in figure a, two boxes of equal size as shown in figure b can represent the power from the battery (the left box) and the power used by the bulb (right box).

Below is a figure from a 1981 article by Howard Hayden (pay article) in The Physics Teacher. If you tilt your head to the right, you can imagine this diagram integrated with the spaghetti diagram. You can also think of is as a box diagram, where the energy sources on the “left” (top) are matched up with the end use loads on the “right” (bottom). This figure includes the electric utilities, just like the spaghetti diagram. And while it doesn’t graphically allocate that 21% “low grade heat” from electricity generation, it does say that industry would go from 27% to 37% of total energy use if “corrected by utilites’ waste heat,” and residential/commercial would go from 25 to 37%. (Those numbers are for 1978). Transportation is unassigned, and not grouped by vehicle.

If we “zoom in” on the Residential & Commercial box we can break it down further into how energy is used in each place. These figures are from the 2008 American Physical Society report Energy = Future: Think Efficiency.

Residential Energy End Usage

Commercial Energy End Use

If we show the lost heat and CO2 for each of these individual pieces, perhaps we can motivate people to think about their actions more as part of a much larger whole. We can also show the benefits of taking Effective Actions for saving energy.

The interesting thing about stacked bar charts versus pie charts is that the bar charts have an added layer of quantification — we can compare bars to one another by making them quantitative. Here’s a graphic from the National Academy of Science’s What you need to Know about Energy booklet that gives a feel for the difference between the two types. The pie chart is for fractions of 100%, while the bar chart can be scaled as needed.

Once we quantify that bar chart, we can start to compare it to other bar charts. In fact, we could localize American data to compare with the diagrams in David MacKay’s great book, Sustainable Energy — without the hot air. MacKay methodically stacks up all of the UK’s potential renewable energy sources (right green stack in diagram below), and compares it to all of the UK’s energy use (left red box), looking at both on a per capita basis.

To really drive the comparison home, we can look at the energy budgets of the developing world versus the developed world, as done in the image below. The question is: How much energy for how many people? It’s a nice presentation of world poverty and wealth scenarios. (This image, and the spaghetti diagram at the top of this post, are from a 1985 paper by Robert Socolow.)

If we mix spaghetti diagrams with box diagrams, we might call them “spaghetti box” (or “Sankey box”) diagrams. It gives us a chance to see the big picture in a visual, semi-quantitative way for a conceptual overview, and become quantitative, especially when zooming in on personal energy use (the idea behind wattzon.com). The spaghetti follows where energy’s coming from, how it’s being used, and areas where we might “reject” less energy. This is a refinement of Saul’s electricity grid stacked bar diagram that could help demystify circuits and make power a much more central quantity in electricity education.