Street Smart Sustainability

7Energy—Using Renewable Energy,Energy Audits, andConservation

This chapter covers the basics of the sustainable use of energy, discusses the various forms of renewable energy, explains how to perform an energy audit, and provides recommendations for energy conservation.

Almost everything that moves and breathes on this planet does so because of energy it captures from the sun.¹ The energy it takes for you to move and breathe comes from the stored energy in the plant you ate or in the animal you ate, which ate a plant, which originally stored the sun’s energy. When you burn a piece of wood, you are releasing the solar energy that the chloroplasts in the plant captured and that was converted to sugar and then polymerized into cellulose and lignin. ...