A group of Riverwest residents are making a statement this week.
They’re staging Power Down Week 2010.
Starting today until next Sunday, participants plan to live with as little power as possible.
WUWM environmental reporter Susan Bence met one of the organizers, who is a Bay View resident. He’s been honing his sustainability skills for years. Click supplemental audio (left) to hear a related January 2010 story.
Tom Brandstetter always considered himself environmentally conscious, but says his awareness ramped up dramatically two years ago.
“I went to the Midwest Renewable Energy Festival in June of 2008, the MREA, which is the largest in the country. I usually go there to learn about wind and solar,” Brandstetter says.
He wandered in on a talk about peak oil. It’s a term used to describe the moment petroleum production around the world maxes out and begins to decline.
Brandstetter calls the speech on that summer’s day “his epiphany.”
“There I understood what’s going to happen when this oil starts to run out. That was a galvanizing point for me. I decided, I’m going to do something. And when we go inside, I canl show you my energy bill. Within three months I just decided to do something about it,” Brandstetter says.
He started with his 1922 Bay View bungalow. Brandstetter rents out the first floor and lives in the smaller second floor loft space
“On the exterior you’ll see a stack up there and that’s a wood-burning stove,” Brandstetter says.
That’s how Brandstetter heats his living quarters. He also added insulation to the walls and ceiling.
“That and buying an energy star refrigerator, that’s pretty much it. The rest are all really lifestyle changes,” Brandstetter says.
Brandstetter shut off his water heater and shares a clothes washer with his tenants.
"I haven’t used a dryer in two years,” Brandstetter says.
Clothes lines crisscross his flat during the winter.
The 54 year old tries to think about every drop of water he uses. He point up to a rubbery looking sack laying on the ledge outside his gabled window.
“There’s a bag up there. All that is is a two-and-a-half gallon container,” Brandstetter says.
It's a portable camping shower.
“Sun hits in the morning and that heat heats up my bathing. The average American uses like 20 gallons of fossil fuel hot water to take a shower. You can easily take a very pleasant shower with two gallons,” Brandstetter says.
Brandstetter admits though, after he made that lifestyle change, he’d bicycle to work and take a long hot shower.
He’s weaned himself from that practice, but says he struggles with other weaknesses – like the supersized flat screen TV in his living room.
“But I still manage to get by with 1 ½ kilowatt hours a day by being very, very selective. I don’t just turn it on and have it running hours on end,” Brandstetter says.
Yet, Brandstetter would be the last person to call himself a power down purist. Especially with a garage brimming with various modes of transportation –bicycles, an electric motorcycle and small biodiesel car.
“Honestly, I haven’t taken my power down seriously enough to get rid of my car, but I make my own fuel. The fuel that I make has one-tenth of the footprint of petroleum,” Brandstetter says.
And he does plan to get rid of his prize K75 BMW motorcycle.
“I love very much, but since I had my epiphany I’ve probably only ridden it five times in two years,” Brandstetter says.
Brandstetter has already modified his lifestyle dramatically from the days he lived miles away in the suburbs and commuted into the city to work. Fastforward to his epiphany – Brandstetter slashed his electric use by 80 percent and gas by 65. His average utility bill is $30 a month.
These days, Brandstetter calls himself “grid minimal.”
I ask why he feels it’s important to make that point.
“Because people want to put people in categories. You’re either totally connected to the grid and there’s no problems in the world. And then there’s the off-grid people that have totally taken themselves out of society, ran for the hills and there’s no real in between. So I’m trying to help define what that in between means,” Brandstetter says.
Brandstetter says he’s in a comfortable position to reduce his carbon footprint. The straight gray-haired, bespectacled clinical pharmacist lives alone, has a good income and could live pretty much anywhere.
“I could just move to an Ashram in India and I’d be living on one-fifteenth of the energy, but it would not do the world any good for me to silently go off and do that. You’ve got to stay here where we’re the ones using the most energy of any culture,” Brandstetter says.
Brandstetter says he’s trying to live by his convictions and put his money where his mouth is.
For example, he heard a congregation in downtown Milwaukee was having trouble raising funds to install a solar panel system.
“So I just wrote a check for that to happen, but my check was conditional on pursuing conservation measures. It’s a sense of faith that if you start doing this, other people are going to start doing the same thing and not waiting for the rest of the country to catch up,” Brandstetter says.
Brandstetter and his fellow organizers hope Power Down Week will get more people thinking about living with a tad more reflection.
Click to Listen
Share / Email
Print
Download
This story is part of a group. Click for more.
Email a Friend
Facebook
Del.icio.us
Stumble Upon
Digg
Newsvine
