The Golden Ring: 2,000 Watts

We can’t reduce energy consumption to zero, so how small is small enough?

Swiss researchers have put a number on it: 2,000 watts a day, and they have created a society, the 2000-Watt Society, to advocate for a specific, sustainable level of energy use.  Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker explains their goal:

One way to think about the 2,000-Watt Society is in terms of light bulbs. Let’s say you turn on twenty lamps, each with a hundred-watt bulb. Together, the lamps will draw two thousand watts of power. Left on for a day, they will consume forty-eight kilowatt-hours of energy; left on for a year, they will consume seventeen thousand five hundred and twenty kilowatt-hours. A person living a two-thousand-watt life would consume in all his activities—working, eating, travelling—the same amount of energy as those twenty bulbs, or seventeen thousand five hundred and twenty kilowatt-hours annually.

It may come as a surprise that the Society’s goal would mean increased energy use by much of the world’s population.  Per capita energy use in developing nations, such as Bangladesh, India, and China, is less than 2,000 watts, but is increasing as their populations gain access to technology.  Meanwhile, Western nations use as much as five to six times the target, with the US way ahead of the pack, as you can see in this graph:

A step down from 11,400 watts to 2,000 in the US would mean major changes in every aspect of our lives.  But the Society believes we can do it without significantly curbing our lifestyles. The director of the project, Roland Stulz, told Kolbert:

It is not what we call Gürtel enger schnallen [belt tightening]. It’s not starving, it’s not having less comfort or fun. It’s a creative approach to the future.

Perhaps it’s a matter of semantics, but “belt-tightening” is exactly what would be needed.  Kolbert can find only one person in the Swiss green community who is living on 2,000 watts a day, and he neither owns a car nor travels by air.  Stulz, when asked about his own wattage consumption, says “I’m pretty close, except for this stupid air travel” and when she presses for a number, he asks her to “skip that question.”

In his defense, the goal can only be reached by joint action between the individual and his or her government.  In order for Switzerland to become a 2,000-watt nation, the public infrastructure would have to be significantly overhauled for greater efficiency.

Which gets us to what is perhaps the principle criticism of the Society’s goal.  Energy is not created equal — 2,000 watts drawn from a coal-burning power plant does more harm to the environment than 5,000 watts generated from wind or solar power — and the Society’s goal doesn’t take this into account.

The value of the Society, though, is that it puts a number on sustainable energy consumption, a golden ring to reach for as we go round and round on this warming planet, and encourages us to think about the changes we would make to achieve that goal.

For more information check out Word Changing and Green Daily.