A cool new interactive project by journalism students at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill not only breaks down each state's energy consumption by fuel type, it also allows you to play local energy manager by balancing your energy needs with the need to reduce carbon emissions.

Produced by the UNC journalism incubator, Powering a Nation, a project wedding new media models with traditional journalism, The Energy Cocktail interactive makes it easy for anyone fiddling around with the fuel type sliders to quickly see how difficult it will actually be to scale up clean energy and reach carbon emissions reduction targets. Because of the interactive nature and instantaneous feedback, it seems that these online tools would make great educational platforms for kids. For that matter, it would make an excellent too for anyone who thinks changing over to a clean energy economy is going to be easy.