Pick on Wyoming day

You all know that I have a middling obsession with electricity usage. For the past two years, I’ve been whacking away at daily use in this house, more recently trying to reach the seemingly unreachable goal of using a modest 4 kilowatt hours of electricity each day. When I first began seriously tracking electricity use in this house, the lad lived here full time and neither of us was particularly careful or thoughtful about what we used. Twenty-six kilowatt hours was our daily average in a 900 square foot house. It was at about that point when electricity rates began rising and the monthly bills started to sting a little. In the beginning, that was my primary goal...cut the monthly bill.

Funny thing happened though. As I read more about saving electricity, I also read more about the other costs of profligate energy use, along with the prospects of an energy starved future. Our natural non-renewable resources are finite. Once they’re gone, they’re gone for good. And then, there was the matter of global climate change. For those of us who aren’t using renewable resources (or nuclear) for electricity, we’re guilty of putting 1.5 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere with every kilowatt hour that we use. At 26 kilowatt hours per day, we dumped 39 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere each day and 14,235 pounds each year. That’s about 7 tons for two people living in a teeny tiny house. And that didn’t begin to address car use and heating.

It took time to whittle away the waste. My first act was to replace all the incandescent bulbs in the house with compact fluorescent bulbs. The immediate effect dropped our average daily use down to 20 kilowatt hours per day. A good start, but not nearly enough. And so, over the last two years, we retrained ourselves to shut things off when we weren’t using them. The television was shut off instead of providing background noise 12 hours a day. Etc. My goal was not to make life into an exercise in ascetic living.

Before the lad left home, we’d managed to cut electricity use to an average of 15 kilowatt hours per day, a savings of about 16.5 pounds of CO2 each day. And, of course, the monthly bill looked a lot better, too. Except for the two months of air conditioning in the summer.

After the lad left home, I decided to see if 4 kilowatt hours per day was a reachable goal. I’m pleased to say that yes, it is. For the last week, the electricity meter says that’s what I’ve been using each day. And still, my daily life is not even close to what I’d call ascetic. But, I was surprised at how much electricity is used each day for trifles that I’d never considered before. Everything plugged into an outlet uses energy. Everything. Much of it uses very little, but taken as a whole, the little bits add up. The standby modes on many appliances are among the worst offenders. And then there are things like the digital clocks on the microwave and the coffee maker and the VCR. And the cordless phone charger bases, which only need to be on when the phones need charging. Or the computer which doesn’t need to be on 24/7. Or the modem and router which only need to be on when the computer is on. The rest of the time, they’re all eating electricity for no purpose. Little things that, taken as a whole, added about 2-3 kilowatt hours each day. Using 4 kilowatt hours each day made me feel pretty good, especially considering where I started.

A couple of days ago, I was curious to see what the national average for residential electricity use is. These four sites gave me the information I was looking for: The Energy Information Administration’s World Energy Use and CO2 Emissions, The California Energy Commission’s breakdown of US Per Capita Electricity Use By State in 2003, and the Energy Information Administration’s Individual State Electric Profiles. I also learned, from the Energy Information Administration’s Energy Kid’s Page, that 71% of our electricity generation comes from coal (51%), natural gas (17%), and petroleum (3%). The other 29% comes from nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, and biomass. In my state, Massachusetts, it’s mostly natural gas.

In any case, the figures I wanted were most simply presented on the California Energy Commission’s web page, with the figures backed up by the Energy Information Administration’s state profiles.

The average yearly per capita (residential use per person) electricity use in the United States was 11,997 kilowatt hours per year in 2003. It has gone up since. That is an average of 32.8 kilowatt hours PER PERSON per day. The highest consuming state is Wyoming at 26,407 kilowatt hours (annually) per person. The lowest is California at 6,732 kilowatt hours (annually) per person.

I need to travel to Wyoming some time. The state must be lit up like a Christmas tree. Let’s think about that. At 26,407 kilowatt hours annually per person, that translates to a little more than 72 kilowatt hours per person per day. Say...a family of four would come in at an average of 289 kilowatt hours of electricity use PER DAY. In terms of CO2, that’s 108 pounds per person per day or 19.8 tons per person per year or 79 tons per year for a family of four. How in heaven’s name is that possible? Wyoming has the third lowest electric rates in the nation, but still. What do you have to have plugged in every day to use that much electricity? My mind just can’t parse it out in a logical fashion. Even taking into account that some of their use surely involves winter heating, that’s still an astonishing (boggling) amount of electricity. And 80% of it is produced with coal, which is the dirtiest electricity in this country.

That makes my 4 kilowatt hours per day kind of beside the point. A pixel on a comma, to borrow a meme. I mean, really. That’s just wicked depressing.