Origin of this book In 1998 the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
(ETH) initiated the 2000 Watt Society, a University-wide research
program meant to help Switzerland realize a dramatic reduction in its
future energy use. A project within the initiative "Sustainability in
the ETH domain," the 2000 Watt per capita Society sought to promote "the
gradual introduction of a way of living and working that requires only
one-third of current energy consumption but 1 2 still delivers an
improved quality of life. " Two thousand watts is roughly the current
world average per capita energy consumption; it was the average level in
Switzerland in the 1950s; it is some three times less than current 3
Swiss usage; and reducing to that level again (in concert with other
industrialized nations) would greatly facilitate stabilization of
atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO )levels in the long-term, given
projections about world 2 population growth and exploitable energy
resources [Imboden 1999]. 1 http: //www. novatlantis. ch/frames_e.
html. 2 A watt is a power term equivalent to 1 joule/second.
Non-engineers generally prefer to think of 2000 watts per capita in
terms of energy use per unit time such as joules/second or
kilowatt-hours/hour. For Switzerland, 2000 watts per capita is
equivalent to a primary annual energy consumption of about 65 gigajoules
(65 billion joules) per capita. Although less generally communicative,
the 2000 watt name is clean and trim, and since it has stuck we will use
it throughout the book.