by National Building Museum curator Susan Piedmont-Palladino
“I wish that I knew what I know now when I was younger...” The catchy tune sticks in your head, bringing along a bit of wistful regret. The Faces recorded that song, titled Ooh La La, back in 1972 when it seems we knew nothing. By the end of the decade all of a sudden we wanted—we needed—to know everything.
That’s where the white arrow in the infographic above begins, in 1980, when the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Energy Information Administration (EIA) started asking us about our energy consumption with the Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS). (Initialism... it’s the language of government.) You can check on the results through 2005 on the EIA’s website. While you’re there take a look at the very first one, a PDF scanned from a 45-page typewritten original. The questions are detailed and exhaustive, with notes instructing the interviewer to sketch rudimentary floor plans and note room sizes. It’s hard to imagine that many respondents knew exactly how much and what kind of insulation was in their walls or attics—do you?-- but they knew their appliances. The list includes the familiar kitchen and environmental appliances, even the then-rare microwave oven. But it’s the list of entertainment appliances that is striking: “Black-and-white television set: yes or no.” “Color television set: yes or no.” “If yes, how many?” That’s it. There were no home computers, pads or pods, no music hero toys, no xyz boxes, no cellphone chargers, faxes, or scans.
We all lived in such dumb homes then. Our homes today can be so much smarter, and so can we. A new generation of electric meters can suggest the most energy- saving time to do laundry. You can call your house on your way home from the subway station and switch on the heat for just-in-time warmth. We have access to more technology and information now than any generation before, but we have to be able to act on it. See how easy it is for you to peruse the information that the EIA has been collecting? Had you wanted to know in 1987 the “Residential Space-Heating Site Energy Consumption by Main Heating Fuel” you would have had to possess the research savvy of a grad student or the persistence of an investigative journalist. Now we just look for the underlined royal blue text and we “click” it. The information is out there. Yes, that means that we can go get it: it’s out there. But it also means that it’s out there, away from us in some objective abstract space. If we want to become smarter about how and where we live we need that information to get in here, close to where we make our decisions. And perhaps more importantly, we need to begin making connections between those rows and columns on the spreadsheets.
Now, follow the line in the infographic that shows per capita energy consumption, the jagged one rising along with the roof pitch. There’s a little hanging valley just after 1980, again, right where the white arrow of cost takes off, signifying that maybe we had learned something from the oil shocks of ‘73 and ‘79. It’s no coincidence that the EIA started collecting energy use information when it did. We came out of that decade with more than catchy tunes and platform shoes. We entered the 80’s sobered by our dependence on oil—and someone else’s oil at that—and how little we really knew about how we were using all that energy. The Residential Energy Consumption Survey started when we decided to pay attention. But, that dip in the line shows how long that 70’s hangover lasted—not very long at all. It starts to climb again, if not as steeply. Our heating and cooling systems have become much more efficient, but our homes have ballooned in size even as household population has shrunk offsetting all of that efficiency. Did we stop paying attention?
The information that told this 30-year story has been out there all this time. It was right there, but we couldn’t really see the correlations among energy use, house size, and household size. Seeing the information moves it from out there to in here, under our collective skin where it can nudge us to change. That’s what we’re hoping to do with the Intelligent Cities initiative. Let’s see what we want to know now, before we get older.
