[Erax]

To get back to energy conservation...

Brazil went through a power shortage in 2001-2002. I won't get into the causes here but the fact is that the government should have seen it coming and didn't. To their credit, once they got going they handled things quite well. One of the measures was a residential energy quota of 200 kWh per house per month, with a BIG surcharge on any power spent over that amount.

At the time, we were spending way over that, which makes no sense since it's only two people in the house. My wife went completely paranoid with the light bulbs and such, but those don't use up that much power (neither does a computer, BTW). So we took a hard look at all our appliances and discovered the following :

- We had two refrigerators but we really only used one. Pulling the plug on one of them saved us around 40 kWh/month.

- My wife drinks coffee around the clock. She had an electric percolator which she kept on all day to keep the coffe warm. Doing it the old way - heating water on the gas stove and putting the coffee in a thermos bottle - saved us 130 kWh/month.

So it turns out we were just throwing a lot of power away, every month, day in and day out, without even noticing it. And the worst thing is, we weren't using it to make our lives better in any significant way.

So am I in favor of conservation ? Sure, if you do it rationally, the sacrifice involved is minimal.