Despite more gadgets, power demand from U.S. homes is falling

American homes are more cluttered than ever with devices, and they all need power: cellphones and iPads that have to be charged, DVRs that run all hours, TVs that light up in high definition.

But something shocking is happening to demand for electricity in the age of the gadget: It's leveling off.
Over the next decade, experts expect residential power use to fall, reversing an upward trend that has been almost uninterrupted since Thomas Edison invented the modern light bulb.

In part it's because Edison's light bulb is being replaced by more efficient types of lighting, and electric devices are getting much more efficient. But there are other factors.

New homes are being built to use less juice, and government subsidies for home energy savings programs are helping older homes use less power. In the short term, the tough economy and a weak housing market are prompting people to cut their use.

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Some Golf Courses Cleaning Up Their Act

In an age of fast-declining water supplies, the average U.S. course uses 312,000 gallons of water a day, or the equivalent of what a family of four gets through in four years (some courses use as many as one million gallons). And, many courses use huge quantities of chemicals, as they try to live up to an ideal of a bright-green, perfectly presented course. A mid-1990s estimate by the Neighborhood Network, a Long Island environmental group, found that U.S. courses used an annual 65 million pounds of dry bulk pesticides, and 2.9 million pounds of liquid pesticides.
Some good news is emerging, the game has been cleaning up a little in recent years. While there are still many environmentally damaging courses, there are hundreds having zero--or even a positive--impact, and several influential programs that are cajoling owners and superintendents to manage their turf differently.

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Verenium's Plan To Clean Up The Fracking Industry--While Still Fracking

There's no denying that hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") is a dirty business. The process can pollute groundwater with toxic chemicals, potentially cause earthquakes, and release methane (a potent greenhouse gas) into the atmosphere. But fracking isn't going anywhere in the near-term; natural gas is just too cheap and abundant for the energy industry to abandon the practice just because of a few piddling environmental and health considerations. So an industrial enzyme company, Verenium, is aiming to clean up the fracking process.

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