Great news! We’ve got the perfect metric for the job, the #FirstGigawattDown. A Gigawatt Year (GWyr) of energy delivered, anchored to the ground game (one “First Down” at a time).  Now all we (collectively) need to do is adopt the metric, map out the endgames and decarbonized line of scrimmage (#DLOS) for every state.* And, of course, get experts to reconcile the data (is NJ decarbonized endgame closer to 20 GWyr or 30GWyr? Different estimates out there to be reconciled).

Here’s a handy infographic to explain that one weird metric, the #FirstGigawattDown

A video to walk you through this poster coming soon.

About the cliffhanger at the end of the poster, “Hey can we develop metrics for other fields of play…” - here’s that poster, below.

In the meantime, here’s an early video on the “First Gigawatt Down” concept to walk you through from GWyr to Ground Game (#GroundGame). So you can truly see the implications of our collective energy choices and the scale in any given state.

It seems so obvious, yet so few people know how to measure - or communicate - how far we are on the road to zero carbon in our energy supply. Surprisingly, many journalists and activists have little idea, even roughly, of how much energy we’re using and how many power plants we have to swap out for what. And hardly anyone asks where all this infrastructure is going to go, or what the true NIMBY Coefficient is and how it changes as solutions scale.

At present, most people are stuck in an abstract conversation, general handwaving about “lots of” solar or wind, and some “transmission” obstacles. No clear idea of where exactly we are, what our full spread of options is, or what the ground game is really about.

It’s almost as if it’s a conversation we’re avoiding.

*The State scale is the sweet spot for aggregating data and organizing a 50 state race to zero carbon. Of course, you are free to scale up to country level or down to city, county, business and household level.