Average residential usage?!

(first posted Friday, September 26, 2008)

So I ran across this little tidbit on the Energy Information Administration website, which posts official energy statistics from the U. S. Government:

Average Residential Monthly Use 920 kwh (kilowatthour)
Average Residential Monthly Bill $95.66

Dude! 920 KWh per month on AVERAGE?! That’s 11,040 kwh/year! We sit at 1670 kwh/year, down by nearly a factor of 7! And we even live in a place that gets hot in the summer! (But we can do better. I bet we can get down to 1100 kwh/year, 1/10 the average. I’m making that my goal!)

We have TV. We still have central air. We still have lights, and laptops, and cell phones, and electric guitars, and a Wii. We have a nice big refrigerator, and an electric clothes dryer and an electric range and a coffee maker. I don’t think we’re deprived. What are all these people DOING with all that electricity?

Imagine. A world in which everyone used 1/10 the electricity they do now. Wow. That’s the same as imagining a world in which we generate electricity without a) coal (49% of electricity generation), b) nuclear (19.4%), c) oil (1.6%), and d) natural gas (20%). We could get by on Hydro (7%), and Other (3.1%). Even if we only cut down to 1/7, we’d just need to add back a little bit of natural gas (say about 1/4 of what we use now), while we ramped up ‘Other’ to double the current ‘Other’ generation.

All of the sudden, this seems like a totally reasonable goal. I would dearly love to eat fish again without thinking of methylmercury. Anybody else out there feel the same way? Anybody else willing to cut down to 1100 kwh/month? You’ll save money... I promise!

All they’d have to do is live like we do at nerd central. Hmmm... that might be too much to ask.