The Electric Horseman

For the past three years, Jeff Barrie has been changing the world one light bulb, “EXIT” sign and duct-tape strip at a time. Back in 2004, Barrie didn’t need a wake-up call about the nation’s insatiable appetite for energy. He just had to look out his back door in Bordeaux, near the banks of the Cumberland, to see the country selling its resources down the river. “I saw the coal passing by every day on Ingram barges,” Barrie says. “I saw the coal trucks going to Vanderbilt.”

Three years later, Barrie has become a kind of Johnny Appleseed of energy conservation, spreading the word through a homemade video called Kilowatt Ours. Produced by Barrie, an independent filmmaker, on a shoestring budget, the film made an instant splash when the writer-director-host began showing it at local screenings. Today, it’s the center of a movement that is making a national leap—starting with a newly beefed-up edition that makes its world premiere Thursday night at the Belcourt.

Just what the world needs, you say: another doom-and-gloom doc preaching a gospel of ecological terror. That’s not Kilowatt Ours, which has won people over by adopting a less confrontational approach. Activist climate-change docs such as An Inconvenient Truth and The 11th Hour have had some success scaring audiences into action, risking an outlook so pessimistic it can leave viewers feeling more hopeless than motivated.

Barrie, by contrast, has a message any Dave Ramsey follower can get behind. You, too, can shave serious dollars off your monthly and yearly electric bill—and if you just so happen to reduce our dependence on coal, decrease pollutants, avoid environmental catastrophe and save the planet, so much the better. More breezy motivational piece than fiery Book of Revelation, Kilowatt Ours shows the boyish Barrie and his amused wife Heather implementing simple steps at home to save money: stocking the light fixtures with compact fluorescent bulbs, sealing cracks in their ductwork.

“It takes a little elbow grease and cost,” says Barrie, who arrived in Nashville in 2000 while biking 4,600 miles from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., for a documentary project. “But even something like sealing the leaks in your ductwork can save 20 or 30 percent of your heating and cooling bill. That could be $200 to $300 a year in savings.”

That’s not to say Kilowatt Ours doesn’t have larger goals in mind. The first half of the film attacks America’s snowballing energy consumption, leading with Vice President Dick Cheney’s call for 1,900 new power plants within the next 20 years—a move needed to feed a yearly coal habit, as the film explains in an animated graphic, that would fill a train circling the globe three times. Traveling from his home state of Tennessee through Kentucky and West Virginia, Barrie charts the impact of strip mining and mountaintop removal on the environment and the economy.

The evidence is grim, starting with the burial of more than 1,500 miles of Appalachian streams and the loss of large, biologically diverse forest space that helped absorb carbon dioxide emissions. Barrie includes damning footage of the disastrous spill that poured 300 million gallons of coal slurry into Kentucky’s Big Sandy River—a catastrophe 30 times the size of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, yet which went scarcely reported in the heat of the 2000 presidential elections.

But by focusing on the little things people can do now to save money in the long haul, Barrie may have given a rallying point and an outlet to a nationwide yearning for change. In the two years since Kilowatt Ours started touring regional festivals and playing to community groups, Barrie says he’s noticed a tremendous upsurge of interest.

“I’ve had a chance to travel the country,” Barrie says, “and I see how hungry people are to make a difference.” Toward that end, he’s turned the kilowattours.org website into a nonprofit forum for energy conservation. The site now receives several hundred emails each day, with thousands of requests to show the film.

He’s also added almost 20 minutes of new footage broadening Kilowatt Ours’ scope across the country. The film now touts success stories such as the city of Birmingham’s conversion to low-power LED traffic signals—a move that saved $220,000 in energy costs—and the $3 million saved by the state of Kentucky just by switching to LED “EXIT” signs.

Barrie’s ultimate goal is to make Nashville “the most energy-efficient city in the South.” He hopes to persuade incoming Mayor Karl Dean and the new Metro Council to consider energy-saving measures, noting the $5,000 a month the Sumner County school system began to save by using geothermal heating and cooling in a new school.