When I awoke with a start last Thanksgiving, I had a clear vision about becoming carbon neutral and telling everyone all about it. But, I've got to admit, I didn't have a specific conservation goal or action plan in mind.

All the recent talk about our Town and County governments' resolution to specifically reduce electricity and fossil fuel consumption 10% each by December 31, 2010 got me thinking–so, too, did yesterday's community discussion about how to reduce Teton County's per capita energy use and garbage generation by 10% by 12.31.10.

Just how much actual energy conservation have Alisan and I accomplished since the first of the year?

The easiest tool for comparison, of course, is our Lower Valley Energy bill. Comparing year-to-date billing with the same period last year (actual use mid-December through mid-March) shows our electrical use is up 19% and our use of natural gas is down 60%. Since electrical use is expressed in kilowatt hours, and natural gas use in expressed in therms, I used Chuck Wright's Energy and Power Conversion Calculator to convert therms to kilowatt hours.

The good news: energy use to eat, heat and light our home is down 4.8% this year! And that's over a period of time that was much colder in 2007 than 2006.

The goal/challenge is to get that number to 10%.

Future stats posts will examine how we're doing on reducing our fuel use (a little harder number to pin down, since our travel is variable) as well as what we're doing to reduce our generation of trash (even harder to quantify, since we don't weigh our trash or have a baseline comparison number from last year).

Stay tuned.

Carbon Neutral Journal's stats are brought to you by Blue Spruce Cleaners.

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