New York uses a lot of energy (remember that time during the heat wave when we used a trillion watts?!) and with Con Edison charging us twice the national average for us to use it, maybe it's time we became a little more self-aware of how and where all this power's being used?
Enter Vijay Modi, a professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University, and graduate student Bianca Howard, who've put together an incredible interactive map (see below) of Gotham's appetite for energy. Using estimates based on city data by zip code, the map allows you to zoom in on every building on every block in the city and see just how much energy is being used.
"Midtown Manhattan has more energy use than the whole country of Kenya, and New York state uses more energy than all of sub-Saharan Africa," Modi told Metropolis. "There is just this intense use of energy in cities like New York."
Most of the city's energy comes from peoples' homes, and a lot of it from "domestic hot water -- laundry, showers, dishes," but Modi says that judging from the map, commercial real estate is using power at far higher rates than residential buildings. Note the difference, for example, of the power appetites of the office canyons in midtown and more residential areas on Staten Island: