Automatic For The People

Why are light bulbs dumb, fridges set in their ways and televisions turned on all of the time?

Despite being a species capable of reaching the Moon, we seem helpless to stop street lights and office lights being left on, when nobody is around… incapable of installing fridges that can be switched off during periods of peak demand, when electricity is expensive… and unable to ensure that televisions can be turned off without losing all of their settings.

Perhaps this dismal state of affairs was understandable when energy was cheap, everyone felt rich and climate change seemed more of a distant threat.

Now, however, in a world where energy is expensive, carbon emissions are known to be harmful and money is scarce, we really should be making every energy saving available to us.

The good news is that almost every household appliance can use 50% - 90% less energy than now, both cheaply and easily.

One of the best solutions available to us could be automate energy saving, so that we don’t have to remember to turn things off or to find the time to install extra gadgets.

Already lights can be programmed to switch off when no motion is detected, fridges can be made to stop chilling when this isn't necessary and every non-essential gadget in a house can be turned off, via a single switch, when you leave for work.

Yet these technologies are not being used.

Somehow simple ideas that work and could really help us, barely get a mention in the press whilst vastly expensive, unreliable and long-term prospects such as fusion reactors, which mimic the conditions of the Sun, endlessly fascinate and dazzle us at enormous expense.

I’m not sure why we imagine simple and effective solutions, which haven’t been implemented for the past 30 years, will somehow happen on their own overnight or why we get so excited about the virtually impossible approaches, which haven’t a hope of working within 50 years, but our muddled, impractical and careless thinking absolutely has to change.

One simple step our leaders could make would be to ensure that the A-G energy labels on fridges are recalibrated on the basis of the best technologies available right now, rather than those that were being made 10-30 years ago.

As things stand the big manufacturers of household appliances look like being allowed to add new categories of energy performance such as A1, A2, and A3 to the existing A-G scale and to leave less impressive sounding categories, such D, E, F and G as empty reminders of obsolete technologies.

I don’t know if we’ll ever find the mundane, yet effective, interesting but if you would like to help support a revolution based on the well-known and effective solutions, rather than the unreliable, radical and expensive flights of fancy please consider joining this Facebook group.

[This Green Thing guest blog is by Ban the Bulb and E-Day's Dr. Matt Prescott who tweets here].

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