If 5% of us bought a new refrigerator, then would 5% of all existing refrigerators go to the landfill?

The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy is a shill for Big Therma. Everyone knows this.

How much energy would it take to produce 15 million new refrigerators?

Here in BC, Canada, our local power concern just recently had this promo going where you call them up, they take away your old fridge for free, and give you a cheque for fifty bucks.

They routinely run ads saying how you should use less power and go green... They have tips on their website for installing weather stripping and saving on power in other ways...

I can't help but think things would be different if our power company were a private for-profit company, rather than a socialistic government entity.

More people eating a vegetarian/vegan diet might help as well-- we're not wasting all sorts of oven time cooking meatloaf, etc. Of course, that wouldn't require people to BUY anything....

Ooooh -- good point!!

This occurred to me on Sunday as I was roasting my chicken in a 425F grill outdoors in 39F weather. But the chicken was delicious.

Actually, this does kind of irk me. Do they only consider solutions that involve further consumption? What happens if 10% of Americans just turn down the refrigerator thermostat by 2 degrees?

Maytag and Emerson are among the many corporate contributors to ACEEE.

It's possible that the refrigerators which have already been produced and are currently sitting in warehouses and stores are efficient enough to satisfy the requirement.

I wonder if one can tie energy use to subsidized corn production. Archer Daniels Midland—accessed "corn priced 27% below its cost from 1997-2005.” As a result, producers booked a cool $2.2 billion in savings between 1997 and 2005 http://www.grist.org/article/Farm-subsidies-bitter-and-sweet/
Note that much of cattle feed in the U.S. is from corn products, and meat production is much more energy intensive than produce. Let corn (and beef, etc) return to "natural" unsubsidized prices, and energy use for food overall should also fall. That's my hypothesis, anyway.

@foobar

>> How much energy would it take to produce 15 million
>> new refrigerators?

For a start, the number of households in America is about 100 million. So your figure of 15 million should probably be closer to 5 million (particularly if people were to ditch their second fridge entirely before upgrading).

Given that a fridge is on 24/7 for years, the cost of manufacturing one fridge is almost certainly inconsequential when compared with the long term energy savings.

Nice thought provoker, but it brings in mind: if everyone does a little bit to save the planet...we'll save a little bit of the planet. I suppose even the longest journeys start with a single step though, right? If we get everyone thinking along the right lines, progress should be easier, right?

On another note, this post enlightened me as to the presence of BTUs. Holy hole inna doughnut, why would anyone use such an unwieldy unit?! Are SI units not good enough for you guys over the pond? What's wrong with Joules? I'd probably not mind as much, but why are they called 'British' thermal units? Got to say, I've never heard of them before this, although I'd like to think of myself as someone who might come across all sorts of wierd and wonderful measurements working in a lab in the UK.

Not in my name, BoingBoing, not in my name.

/rant over

+1 for logical thinking.

I can't find how much energy it takes to make a fridge, but it takes ROUGHLY 4000kW*h (1.37*10^7 BTU)to make a car**

Making a big fat assumption that making 1 car is like making 10 fridges I estimate making 15 million fridges will cost about 1.5*(4000kWh) ~ 20 trillion BTU

**(two ways to reckon this:
http://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=170745&page=2
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/09/uk_automakers_c.html)

Making energy usage data more accessible would increase awareness about which activities are more wasteful. There has been a lot of interest recently in energy monitoring. The DIY Tweet-a-Watt kit lets you gather data from various zones in your house. Google is attempting to set up online monitoring of your electrical meter.

The Free Speech Movement Cafe on the UC Berkeley campus recently installed a project to increase energy usage visibility. It's a floor-to-ceiling color coded LED stacked bargraph that indicates how much power is currently used by cooking, coffee machines, etc. The data is also available live online. I had a hand in the development of the device (mainly, providing the LED modules). Here's some more information and pics/video: http://www.macetech.com/blog/node/91

I'll bring up something some people overlook: choosing food that requires the least amount of energy, fossil fuel, water, and land input. Translate that to mean choosing vegetable based diet over a meat-based one. Commercial US Meat production takes 7-10 times as much land to produce a pound of food compared to vegetable sources (since livestock need such a vast amount of grain). About 70% of the grain grown in the US is not to feed people; it's thrown into livestock. And in the US, livestock feed is heavily fertilized (fossil fuels) and heavily treated with herbicides and pesticides (fossil fuels or toxins).

A pound of steak can take thousands of gallons to produce, when you take into account the vast amount of irrigation livestock grain requires + the 20-30 gallons of fresh water each steer requires every day. In a country where clean fresh drinking water is so scarce, water is rationed and energy is used to desalinate ocean water, does this make sense?

Before the food even gets to your fridge, if you're worried about sustainability, the first actions need to be at your grocery store or restaurant: just removing the meat out of a few meals a week can make a difference.

There are plenty of things people can do.

We can veggies, fruit and meat. Not only does it save on freezer space, you don't get freezer burn, it tastes better and you don't have thaw it out.
Cold rooms (for those who have basements and the right climate) are also a great use of ambient temperature as opposed to just chucking things in the fridge.

You guys are still the ones using "Imperial" units, aren't you (engineers excluded, given that most I know use metric)? Sure, you call it "United States customary system" but does anyone believe that?

Our old (15+ year old) fridge used 5kw per day. Our new fridge uses 1kw per day. I very much doubt turning the thermostat down would accomplish nearly as much savings.

Care to cite these facts?

Hey, here's an idea that I don't think anyone has mentioned. Why don't all you carnivores stop eating meat, and instead eat vegetables which take a lot less energy to produce. Also why don't you start walking the five miles to work, and stop taking hot showers, stop using the internet, never fly anywhere, live in a yurt, wear hand carved clogs, and make your own clothes out of bark. In fact why don't you just kill yourself, then you won't use any energy! (be sure to ask for a burial not a cremation).

British Thermal Units!?

Let the UK save their own units!
True patriots save American Thermal Units!!

My fridge uses about 530 kWh/year. That's roughly $30/year in electricity costs for me. If I were to buy a $1,000 fridge that consumed half as much energy, it would take about 67 years for me to break even. Even if my fridge used 5 times as much energy, the time to break-even would be pretty far in the future.1000

From #3:
"I can't help but think things would be different if our power company were a private for-profit company, rather than a socialistic government entity."

oh, it's not too much different....you get the same annoyances at a higher rate, more junk mail with more confusing "rate plans" designed to keep you in long term contracts, and the same nagging about energy savings, just packaged up to try and convince you that a higher-than-it-should-be electric bill is all your fault because you aren't buying enough $9 light bulbs or didn't sign a two year contract. Once you do all of that and get your energy usage down, you pay a $10 extra fee every month because your energy use was below the contracted "estimate" of 1000kWh usage every month. Don't be so quick to run into the waiting arms of private for-profit industry

"Of that...32%, is the energy involved in household food storage and cooking."
[This works out to 3.2% of total energy consumption - note: storage AND cooking. Now see below.]

"But if just 5% of American households got a more efficient refrigerator, we'd save 54 trillion BTU."
[Note: that 5% of the refrigerators. Not 5% of storage costs. Arrrgghhh!]

Mixing units and comparative figures in the same sentence? Bad Maggie!

So, what do those 54 trillion BTUs work out to? 0.05% or total energy consumption? Do I have to google the numbers to find out? Bad Maggie!

For people who are interested, according the U.S. Department of Energy - Monthly Energy Review, December 2008, the total US consumption of energy from all sources for 2007 was 101,436 trillion BTUs. So, that 54 trillion works out to ... 1/1878 of total energy requirements, or 0.0532%. My first guess was pretty close.

Does it include reduced air-conditioning costs, because the AC doesn't have to vent the refrigerators' heat out?
Speaking of which, how much cheaper would refrigeration be if the refrigerators were better insulated? Or if houses in warmer climes were designed to vent the extracted heat to the outside?

I live in Canada, Nov. - Feb. temps outside are below freezing (4 months, or 25% of the year).

If I could, I'd run a pipe to the outdoors with a fan regulated by a thermal switch. Use the cold air to cool the fridge.

WHY ISN'T THIS THE STANDARD PROCEDURE IN WINTER!!!

The percentages don't actually affect how much energy would be saved by getting more efficient refrigerators, so the post is a little confusing.

Doing the math, though, if we take Anonymous #17's savings of 4kW by trading in his new fridge, and assuming 100 million households, if 5% of households gained this savings we'd see:

(5 million * 4kW years) in btus = 5.98 × 10^14 btus per year

(Man, I love Google)

Which would actually equate to 598 trillion BTUs.

Assuming the average savings is only 1kW, we'd still see a savings of 150 trillion BTUs per year.

Is a 1kW increase in efficiency likely? I don't know how much energy fridges normally consume.

NB: Assuming the conservative figure of a 100 trillion BTUs/year savings, and Wikipedia's estimated 100 quadrillion BTUs/year total energy usage in the United States, this would amount to a 0.1% savings.

Nothing to sneeze at.

The biggest positive change we can do is to stop eating meat and milk. That's the production that contains the far greatest energy and climate gas problems. Trying to keep those at root environmentally destructive (not to say inherently cruel) industries and then tweaking the details of them a bit under the flag of energy saving is just greenwashing, plain and simple. If you care about the right to life of your fellow humans, if you know that those rights are threatened by our climate gas emissions, then you should take the strongest action available. That involves cutting out meat and milk.

I think the telling ratio is how many calories of energy is used to produce deliver and keep 1 calorie of food. I have a book about permaculture that claims it's about 10:1, but I don't know. Naturally in pre-industrial societies where human and animal labour was the energy that produced the food, the ratio had to be weighted the other way around. Indeed, civilisation was built on surplus labour. We can't go on the way we are.

I can't even figure out what you mean by "Mixing units and comparative figures in the same sentence." She said "if just 5% of American households got a more efficient refrigerator, we'd save 54 trillion BTU." which seems reasonable to me. Do you expect her to measure households in BTU? Or energy savings in percentages?

I would be curious to know what represents an "efficient" refrigerator. Mine is about 7 years old and was in the house when I moved in. How can I tell if it's up to modern specs?

Dear #22:

Running the fridge in winter keeps the house warm as a byproduct.

I am apparently not the only one confused by the math and logic in this article. It is the 'farm to fork' bit that adds the confusion as the writer goes on to DIS-qualify the 10% (i.e. it is not farm to fork but 'farm to refrigerator door. Put simply it is poorly written and mixes math 'metaphores'.

Translated:

100 = all of American power use
10 = power used in food production and delivery to fridge
3.2 = Storage and secondary processing (cooking) costs

Where it is not made clear is that these figures also include items that do not need refrigeration or cooking OR food that is pre-processed prior to arrival at the home (dried, canned, preserved etc.) OR multiple trans-shipments. Similarly, buying fresh, local, produce is different to buying fresh produce sourced globally or buying produce that would normally be out of season wherever you live (e.g. strawberries in Maryland in January.

The single, most effective, thing that people can do IS to not eat meat. Recycling? Waste of time and energy (a Dutch study confirms this). Re-usage and re-purposing are different altogether.

Unless the meat is local, grass fed, processed locally. In that case since the feed is grass which "eats" sunshine there are in fact fewer inputs than row crops. My local meat and local produce diet is far more energy efficient than a raw food vegan diet that relies on produce shipped in from the four corners of the earth.

Jebus H. Krickey. Let me waste whatever energy I want to, and leave me the F alone. I wish we HAD a warmer planet, I could use an added degree or two.

Farkin nanny state we live in!

Did anyone else see the double meaning in that Audi Eco commercial during the Superbowl?

ft88 - imho your comment embodies a common tragedy

@dculberson: I think the confusion that PaulR was referring to was the disconnect between the percentages listed in the beginning of the post and the concrete energy savings noted at the end.

The one didn't actually produce the other. The BTUs weren't calculated by looking at the percentage of energy used for food, and the percentage of that used for storage, and the percentage of that wasted in inefficiency.

It's a minor point, but it meant that the post was a bit of a garden path. One might have thought that Maggie would end with "...and so Americans waste 0.5% of the total energy used on inefficient refrigerators" or something, but instead the final calculation actually came out of nowhere.

I didn the calculation myself a few posts up, and calculated a much higher amount saved, but I may have been overestimating how much energy can be saved by switching refrigerators. With a 1kW increase in refrigerator efficiency in 5% of American households, however, we would save over 0.1% of the total energy used per year in the country.

Maggie --

I really enjoy your contributions here (as mentioned previously), but I think that more green cynicism would really heighten the value of posts like this one. Recall the gas-saving tips post, and the post about the greenwashing "watchdog" group that was actually launched, funded, and chaired by big dairy. I highly doubt you're too green to see the green that too often funds the green movement, and I'd love to get more inside insight from that perspective.

Nice try on that calc, but you're off by a few orders of magnitude. It's more like 6*10^11 BTUs.

Residential refrigerators aren't 4kW (or even 1kW). They're 1-4 kilowatt-hours per day. If you use 1kWh/day, that about 42 watts average continuous power consumption.

My old fridge used 5.25 kWh/day, about 220 watts.
My new fridge uses 1.01 kWh/day, about 42 watts. (And it's more than 50% bigger and has an ice maker.)
It's saving me $350/year on electricity.

Eating less meat on average is a good step - and so is changing the way we feed livestock (cattle don't have digestive systems equipped to handle large doses of grain).

But even large scale organic farming uses a lot of energy, and a lot of land in North America isn't suitable for growing vegetable crops. And vegetable fields displace wildlife and native species.

Cattle, sheep and wildlife are able to convert native grasses to usable protein from land that will never produce a head of broccoli.

No matter what we eat - there's an impact on the environment.

By "Mixing units and comparative figures in the same sentence", I mean stuff like this:
"In 2008, lobster catches were down 5.2% from the previous year, while in 2009 they totalled 350,000 kgs."

OK, so were the lobster catches in 2009 higher or lower than in 2008?

As far as testing your refrigerator, it's a pretty good bet that a modern refrigerator would save you money. The two largest consumers of electricity in your house are the hot water tank and the refrigerator (um, unless you live in Canada).

But you'd need a watt-consumption meter (say, the Watts-up or the Kill-a-Watt) to really tell. As dalesd noted, replacing his/her refrigerator resulted in $350/year savings. If your refrigerator breaks down, it's definitely better to replace it rather than repair it.