After playing around with the simulators within our energy system on National Academics: What You Need To Know About Energy, I am actually quite shocked. Within their page, there are multiple different walkthroughs of how to conserve wasted energy at home and even on the road. When I first started going through the pages, the first one that popped up stuck out to me.

The picture above is one of the simulators on their website that shows you our energy system. Each category of energy is on the left side and it shows you where it goes to. What blew my mind was in the end, there were 38.4 Quads of useful energy, but there were 59.4 Quads of unused energy. Keep in mind “quads” is really quadrillion BTU. This is more than the used energy! I also liked how within this visualization, each category had a different color so you could see exactly where it goes to. For example, Natural Gas which is the color green goes to Industrial, commercial, and residential.

Another part of this website that I thought was beneficial, was the ways to conserve energy at home and on the road. Within the at-home section, you could choose between television, lightbulbs, and washing machines. I decided to play around with the washing machines page, which I thought was really cool. Washing machines were reported to use 36% of the original energy. You can turn the dial to either one load of laundry or 1 week of laundry. You could do the same with 1 month, and 1 year. You can see on each one how much energy you use, how much coal burns, and the CO2 vented between Top-loading and front-loading. This website is definitely beneficial to someone who could be looking to learn more about ways to conserve energy and interact with different pages of useful information.