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Americans are spending more time indoors and saving energy in the process.
Ellen Crupi lives in Bethesda, Maryland, but works for a startup company in Minnesota. She does everything online from sales pitches to video conferences. Working at home means she doesn’t have to dress up, wear makeup, buy new work clothes or go out to lunch. When she’s not working, she also shops online, and streams movies and concerts. “Not having to drive or get on an airplane saves me über amounts of time, and that lets me spend it doing more important things,” she said.
Crupi, 52, is one of a growing number of Americans embracing the great indoors. While the rise of streaming video services and online shopping is driving down movie theater attendance and hurting retail stores, there is an upside: America’s couch potatoes are putting a serious dent in energy use outside the home.
“We had no idea that the energy savings were going to be so enormous,” said Ashok Sekar, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin and lead author of a new paper that looks at the link between staying home and energy use outside the home. “It shows the profound influence that technology has had on our lifestyles and how environmental good can come out it.
” The authors, including Eric Williams and Roger Chen, sustainability researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology, published their findings in the journal Joule.At at time when climate change demands societies use less energy, “the notion of spending more time at home never before really entered the conversation, but I think now it will assume more importance as we recognize the impact it has on energy savings,” Sekar said. “However, we also will need to practice more energy efficiency in the home.”
Energy efficiency has become an important player in the fight against climate change. For decades, people have burned fossil fuels to generate power, pumping millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, heating the Earth while wreaking havoc on nature and threatening human health. Measures to slow these damaging effects include energy conservation and the increasing use of clean renewable energy, such as wind and solar.
Researchers analyzed a decade of American Time Use Surveys conducted by the U.S. Department of Labor and found that Americans spent about eight extra days at home in 2012, compared to 2003, including one day less in travel and one week less in…
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