How I Give
It was my birthday a couple of days ago, and it made me reflect on “giving.”Terrawatt was created to help. It helps save energy, it helps people be more comfortable in their homes, it helps solve air quality/home performance problems, and it helps the earth.We are all connected. We live on the same planet, even though sometimes it seems like Ithaca’s its own world. Because we’re all connected, we share the air that we breathe, the water we drink, and the energy we consume.
Do it right, or do it over
I helped some people out recently. Here’s the story. New establishment, freshly built in the not-too-distant past. Designed by an architect, engineered by engineers, and built by probably-not-the-low-bidder. But definitely not the highest bidder.It’s a nice place, but businesses are in business to make money, and decisions start getting made. The client wants a thing, the builder wants the business, the client wants to spend less money, the builder does what they can to meet the needs of the client.
Global Weirding
Lately it seems like nobody knows what’s going on with the world.We agree on climate change, though, right? Let’s not re-hash that. That’s a global thing. Locally, what does it mean?I moved here nine years ago from the mid-Atlantic. Everybody told me, “oooohhh, it’s cold up there. You’re going to be really cold. Hope you like the cold, ha ha!” But you know what happened? Right after I left, DC started getting hammered, every winter, with extreme snowfall.
Terra-what?
We’re going to save a trillion watt-hours of energy.Not by myself, oh no…that would be hard. We’re going to do it together. We’re already up to 44 billion (44,000,000,000) watt-hours (Wh), so we’ve already met almost 5% of our goal.How are we going to do it? Math tricks. You pay your electricity bill, and you pay for kilowatt-hours. A watt-hour is one-thousandth of a kilowatt-hour. See? I made it easier. We’re saving smaller units of energy, but a thousand times more of them. Math tricks.
