Power of Energy Conservation

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The communities with good leaders are recognizing their exposure to higher energy costs and a very difficult task of tackling pressures to stop increases in taxes by the residents, while the cost of maintaining community infrastructure keeps going up.
The options must include everything we can do to switch to alternative fuels and promote conservation to reduce the need for power. The current programs do not take advantage of the leverage affect when you consider the inefficiency of power generation and its application to provide lighting in buildings.

Few people recognize that over 90 units is energy is lost as waste heat at point of generation, transmission losses and the heat created by our lighting fixtures. So less than 10 units gets converted to lighting. In reverse order every unit of energy saved generates 10 units in savings. This is like investing one dollar in some investment and immediately getting nine dollars in return. 900% instant return is real as we replace old style incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent (CFL) lamps or better yet use the Light emitting Diodes ( LED) light that is now the most efficient lighting fixture. Each home consumes typically 500 to 1000 watts of lighting energy which could be reduced to 50 to 100 watts while providing same amount of lumens of light. This savings of 450 to 900 watts gets multiplied by 9 times producing enormous savings at the source. This is the power of conservation.

Our Federal and State governments should open up WMD (weapon of mass development) funds that would loan the money to people to purchase new lighting technology and pay back the loan amount at zero % interest. Imagine what impact it would make in five years. How many million barrels not bought to produce power to light up our homes and buildings?

Would this dream come true? If Gandhi was alive today, He would ask consumers to wake up and take a pledge not to support the use of conventional oil which benefits and funds very violent cultures and people who are killing innocent people everyday. With switch to alternative sources of energy and focus on what we can do at each home, we can make a big impact.

Ram