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energy literacy

hey guys - thanks for reading, subscribing, and giving me continuous feedback. this one might be more interesting - I’ve learned so much writing this one and it’s truly enlightening. I hope you enjoy this one and start questioning how much energy all your devices use - the world is so interesting when you start breaking it down into different ways.

over the past couple of weeks, what I’ve been thinking about is what I call energy literacy. what do I mean by this? Let’s check if you know your units: do you know what a watt is? What it measures? How about a kilowatt? Kilowatt hour (kWh)? How much of whatever a kWh measures actually is? If you do know, some equivalencies below might boggle your mind like it did for mine, or skip to the psyop section.

If you don’t know what it is, you might be thinking - chev, why should I learn this random ass thing I see when exercising? why is it important?

Answer: as a society, we hear so much about being energy conscious and (in my opinion) tiktok psyops about how much energy you’re using with certain things, but you never hear about your hot water energy usage or your car’s energy usage. It’s a tricky subject to tackle, but remember my prior post about you learning anything. I’ll try to be that perfect explanation here. Let’s check out what these compare to, how your electric car can power your house for two days, and more.

what’s a watt?

A watt (W) is a unit of energy transfer (joule per second). Whenever you’re doing anything that has movement - running, doomscrolling, driving - you’re using energy, or joules. To help you quantify a watt:

  • your resting heart
  • The heat given off by one fingernail (thermal energy transfer).
  • using your TV remote

Now, let’s up this. 100 watts - your TV, you walking. 1000 watts - 1 kilowatt (kW). Clearly, this is a lot. Let’s make some equivalencies:

  • your typical microwave
  • a window AC unit (now think of a whole house..)
  • you sprinting at maximum effort (roughly)
  • ~1.5 instances of chatGPT running at once
  • 66 new lightbulbs

what I want you to know is relatively how little energy one watt is and how much energy 1 kilowatt is. some appliances you have use much more:

  • central air conditioner: 3.5 kw (231 lightbulbs - double or triple if you have a big house…)
  • water boiler: 3 kw (ever realize how long water takes to boil? WITH A FIRE?)
  • dishwasher: 2 kw (125 lightbulbs)

now, imagine running your microwave for one hour. that’s a kilowatt for an hour, or kilowatt-hour (kWh). this unit of measurement is actually how you get charged for electricity and fluctuates drastically by location (on average, the US pays ~15 cents per kwh, NYC pays like 35 cents, germany 50 cents… RIP), depending on how hard it is for that country / city / etc. to make energy. you’ll find that in general, there is a correlation with more expensive energy places being more energy conscious (notice why A/C is so prevalent in Miami, but not NYC?)

so next thoughts - adding all this up… how much energy do I use? if I keep my AC on all day - 3.5 kwh * 24 hours - that’s 70 kWh, which is $10.50 / day, plus showering (an average 10 min shower uses 2 kwh), using a dishwasher, washing your clothes, etc. - no way, right? The average house in South Florida uses 40 kWh per day (check yours), which equates to ~$180/mo. do the math and think about how much you pay for electricity and how much you use vs. the South Florida average.

how much your car uses - and how you’ve been psyop’d

now that you’re more energy literate, let’s use that to breakdown some psyops. as our generation continues to doomscroll (myself included), we get fed so much bullshit every day, trying to mold our brain slowly over time. one of these ridiculous claims is how you’re destroying the environment with chatGPT. it’s destroying the world! (as the person who posted this took a 30 minute shower on the weekend… 6 kwh - remember this one)

if you have an electric car - the battery is actually measured in kWh as well, so it’s easy to compare. The Model Y comes with a battery pack of 75 kWh. SEVENTY FIVE KWH. Remember how the average house uses 40 kWh per day? Yeah - the Tesla has almost double the electricity. No - Teslas don’t suck - they’re actually pretty efficient, and an electric car is much more efficient than a gasoline car (now try to think how much more kWh that is…). 4 miles per kWh for a Tesla.

chatGPT has two facets of energy usage - training a model and actually using the model. All in all, it’s around 1000 watts everytime you use a query, training energy included, multiplied by seconds that it takes. If the average query takes 10 seconds, and 10 seconds is .003 of an hour, it’s .003 kWh used per query, or 333 queries per kWh. imagine me trading 1 Tesla mile for 83 chatGPT searches. good thing Pao and I average 7-12 kWh / day in NYC (doubles in the summer with AC…) I fell for the tiktok trap too, where I even stopped using chatGPT for a day, cold washing and hang drying my clothes until I realized - wait, how much energy do I actually use with my questions?

the point is - let’s be more energy literate. let’s not fall for the traps. let’s take accountability for ourselves. wash your clothes in cold water, save 90% of your energy - hang dry your clothes - take a cold shower once a week / make them shorter - get the electric car (or move to NYC and don’t use a car!) - cut off the gaming earlier - go for the vegetarian option once in a while - take the flight with less emissions per google flights (this is a lot of emissions) - run your AC a little less. there are soooo many things you can do to change your energy usage for the better; as you’ve read, drive a mile less and spend that energy guilt-free on 80 Claude searches.

lmk what you thought

I hope you enjoyed it, that it wasn’t that nerdy, and that you read through it all. let me know if it was actually good! if not, also please let me know so I can get better! thanks guys for all of the messages - it means a lot and I’m happy everyone’s been enjoying what random things I think about.