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Right now less than one-half of one percent of America’s electricity is generated from "green" sources like wind and solar.
Photo by National Renewable Energy Laboratory

by Tom Valtin
Film Festival: Kilowatt Ours

Fired Up

Well, I’m energized. To use less energy, and make more of what I do use "green."

I just watched Kilowatt Ours, a documentary by young Nashville filmmaker Jeff Barrie, about how our electricity is generated, what the consequences are of producing that electricity, and what each of us can do to consume less of it—and minimize our impact on the air, land, and water.

I try to follow a conservation ethic at home, putting on an extra layer instead of turning up the heat, keeping water use to a minimum, recycling or reusing stuff—it takes nearly a year for us to go through a box of zip-lock bags, even with a son in the first grade, because we wash and reuse ‘em. But Barrie’s film shows that there’s a whole lot more we—and just about anybody—can do, and save money in the long run.

In the film, Barrie asks several "people on the street" if they know where the electricity comes from when they flick on a light switch at home. Pretty much everyone draws a blank; as one woman put it, "it’s just there."

The answer is that the lion’s share of electricity in this country comes from burning coal, and that has myriad environmental consequences—from air pollution that exacerbates asthma, to water pollution that poisons fish and pregnant mothers and their fetuses with mercury, to the decimation of landscapes through mountaintop removal to get the coal. The more we can wean ourselves away from coal—through conserving and by getting more of our electricity from "green" sources—the more we can ameliorate these ill effects.

Right now less than one-half of one percent of America’s electricity is generated from "green" sources like wind and solar. But Barrie is confident that the more consumers demand Green Power, the more sources for providing it will get built. Right on our electricity bill, most of us can request that a portion of the electricity we consume come from green sources. We can replace incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent ones, and upgrade energy-inefficient refrigerators and clothes-washers to Energy Star products that consume a fraction as much electricity. A "Top 10" list of measures we all can all take to save electricity can be found at www.KilowattOurs.org.

Barrie personalizes this in his film by demonstrating how he and his wife, on a limited budget, took these steps themselves. Barrie is modest, but the savings realized from just a few energy-saving measures are anything but: the average home can save more than 8,000 pounds of coal per year, and save $600 for themselves on energy costs.

Barrie does not yet have major distribution for Kilowatt Ours, which was filmed on a shoestring over the course of two years. But it has screened at film festivals, and he’s hoping that the film will be shown in schools and other public places, and at private house parties. One man at the Summit screening said the film had opened more doors for the Sierra Club in his home state of Delaware than any other single thing he knows of. Copies of the film can be ordered at www.KilowattOurs.org.

-- 09/10/2005 Sat
10am