Cool Planet

 By Ben Lake,
Climate Fellow
Clean Air-Cool Planet

Ben Lake,  a recent graduate of Bowdoin College and a resident of Portland, Maine, is a Clean Air-Cool Planet Climate Fellow this summer.  He is working on Municipal Energy Efficiency and Cooperative Purchasing Planning with municipalities in the Greater Portland Council of Governments to help them identify and reduce their energy use and emissions.  A biology major at Bowdoin, involved in campus energy and sustainability issues, he is interested in addressing climate change and environmental sustainability by conserving resources through waste reduction and energy efficiency improvements.

I learned a new word today: negawatt.  Like spork or brunch, it’s a clever little portmanteau, a word formed by the combination of two others: negate and megawatt.   It hasn’t made it into Merriam-Webster yet, but the Sustainability Dictionary defines it as, “the saving of a megawatt of power by reducing consumption or increasing efficiency.”  The term was coined some time ago by Amory Lovins, the co-founder and chief scientist at the Rocky Mountain Institute, an energy–efficiency think-tank in Colorado. 

What grabbed me about this term is its ability to put a specific name to energy savings, and attract attention to the value (both environmental and financial) of reducing the amount of energy used in the first place.  Developing low-carbon, renewable energy like wind, solar and geothermal is great, but it still takes a fair amount of fossil fuels and other raw materials to construct, connect and maintain those facilities. 

Up until the last few years, whenever I heard estimates about how many more cars or houses or computers were going to be in use in the US over the next twenty/fifty/hundred years, my next thought was usually, “Geeze, we’re going to need to build a lot more power plants to make the electricity to run all those things.” 

Energy efficiency programs and improvements, on the other hand, have the potential to reduce the amount of energy we use in our buildings nationally by 23% in 2020, while saving us over half a trillion dollars in energy costs – that’s the equivalent of increasing the amount of power we generate by 30 percent, all without building a single new power plant.

I also like the term because it might make folks think more about energy savings in consumer choices, like recycling.  For example, I’m usually one of those folks who will pull an aluminum can out of the garbage and carry it around with me until I can find a recycling bin.  It’s certainly a great way to attract some strange looks from people, but to me the energy savings are worth it: recycling an aluminum can into a new one saves about 96% of the energy required to produce one from virgin aluminum. That works out to an energy savings of two kilowatt-hours for every can recycled.” And when you consider that American’s recycled 52 billion aluminum cans in 2006 – well, that’s a lot of negawatts! 

This entry was posted on June 11, 2010 at 10:34 am and is filed under Carbon Management, Energy Efficiency, local energy, Recycling. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: aluminum, fossil fuels, Lovins, low-carbon, negawatt, power plants, Recycling, renewable energy, sustainability, Watts