Mr. Joe Conforte is the proud owner of a brothel in Reno, Nevada. He is also an energetic energy conserver, for he has ordered his girls to wear nightgowns instead of bikinis while waiting to sell their goods; this will enable him to turn down the establishment's thermostat by five degrees. Almost equally determined is a Colorado housewife who is willing to bring the supreme sacrifice in the face of the energy crisis: She has vowed to disconnect her second TV set. Alas, neither will go down in history as the conqueror of the energy crunch. For while citizens are being urged to throw out their electric toothbrushes (15W) and to do without a lighted Christmas tree (60W or less), some of the monumental energy squanderers have gone without notice. One of the worst of these is the failure to synchronize traffic lights in a city's main thoroughfares. A batch of 20 typical American cars traveling at 30 mph has a considerable kinetic energy, which is turned into useless heat of the brake linings when the light goes red; and when it goes green again, five times that amount (in view of the efficiency of the internal combustion engine) is then needed to bring the batch up to its former speed until the next red light, where this monumental waste is repeated all over again. A little arithmetic Grill show that if the lights were synchronized, the sasings would amount to some 30,000 BTU per traffic light per cycle, enough to let Mr. Conforte's girls go back to Bikinis, with some excess left for schools and hospitals. Synchronizing traffic lights does not necessarily require the latest IBM computer; a competent traffic engineer and a crew of technicians can do a good job in a matter of days.
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Vol. 1, No. 4
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Volume 1 Issue/No.: Vol. 1, No. 4 Date: December 01, 1973 11:38 AM Title: Let them grovel
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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