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Some people here seem to be confusing electricity usage and energy usage.
As the Wikipedia article highlights, the average Swiss uses about 5kW (that's 5kWh per hour), of which only about 10% are electricity.
Similarly, about 10% are car usage, or about 0.5kW. If we take the average car to develop on average 50kW, and assume an efficiency of 1 (for the sake of the argument), then they use a car around 1% of the time or about 15 minutes a day (less if efficiency is <1, as it is).
ETA some more reference points:
A human eats around 10,000kJ per day = 86400 seconds, let's call it 100,000s, so 10,000kJ/100ks = 100J/s = 100W, about as much as a bright lightbulb (the old fashioned ones, not LED).
The sun gives us about 1kW of power per square meter. Say photovoltaic cells have an efficiency of 10%, and the sun shines 6 hours a day (=25%), then we are talking around 25W/m².
So, the average Swiss uses the energy corresponding to about 50 people working for him or 200m² of PV, the average US citizen of 120 people or 480m² (5000 sq feet), and the goal here is to push it down to 20 people or 80m² PV.
Great reference: the books by Vaclav Smil, eg. How the World Really Works.
Related to this, one of the most brilliant insights about "how the world works" is the term: energy slave.
A good question to ask people is: How much work do you think can be done using the energy in a barrel of oil? As in, how much equivalent labour can you get out of it? Think of lifting heavy objects, pumping water, that kind of thing where it can be done by either a person or a machine fueled by oil.
Most people will say something like "a few days of work" or somesuch. The reality is closer to a fit adult male doing backbreaking labour all day every day like a slave for a full year.
Using up a barrel of oil is the same as having a slave toiling away for you for a year! One barrel = one energy slave for a year.
Put in those terms, a few things start to make sense:
At about $100-$150 per barrel, energy slaves are fantastically cheap, undercutting even the most impoverished human labourers in the most economically disadvantaged countries. Even some of the poorest people on Earth make about $300 annually. This means that having and using oil is an incredible boost to an economy, as each barrel burnt is effectively a very-nearly-free labourer adding to the output of the workforce. This is why many countries are so obsessed about controlling their supply of oil. The United States, of course, but also many western countries.
People in the US use an average of about 20 barrels of oil annually, which is the equivalent of having 20 slaves, each! That's not even counting coal, nuclear, and natural gas. Effectively, each person in the United States is about as wealthy as a very rich person in Ancient Rome. Think senator, or similar. But this makes sense: a typical person in the US can travel internationally on a whim, and enjoy fantastic luxuries that Romans couldn't even dream of.
Take the oil away, and the wealth goes away. Of course, other energy slaves can be substituted, but the point is the same -- our wealth is largely due to this "uncomplaining" workforce that is cheaper than the cheapest human labour.
15 kWh of electricity for 100 km of car transportation is realistic for a defensively driven modest electric car. At 500W, that's about 80 km of car use per day. In an electric Hummer or similar, your car energy budget would be gone in 35 km. In a fossil fuel Hummer, getting to the bakery 10 km away might be possible, but only one way.
A good EV will get about 3 miles per kWhr. So 20kwh recharged over night will get you 60 miles per day. IMHO EVs need MUCH larger batteries to facilitate longer range driving or deviations from a daily routine, but that doesn't change the typical energy usage much.
[Ignore me, I misread. Original comment below.]
> 5kW (that's 5kWh per hour)
It's 5kW for an hour - but I think you understand that, and implicitly mean something like 'per hour continuously/on average over time' (where the 'over time' makes us dimensionally ok again).
A "normalized" person eats about 2000 kilocalories per day, so that's ~95W. Math checks out.
Great breakdown!
Comments here seem to be missing a key detail
>including embodied energy
Which is
>Embodied energy is the sum of all the energy required to produce any goods or services, considered as if that energy was incorporated or 'embodied' in the product itself.
I'm far below the 2k limit on mains energy usage, but I suspect after factoring in above it'll be comically far off. Making all this plastic stuff can't be energy cheap...
If this chart is accurate, it seems like there are bigger problems than plastic. It's bad, but I'm guessing a lot of people don't even see some of their biggest resource intensive purchases as an issue, while feeling guilty or criticizing stuff that isn't as bad as they think.
Disposable stuff in general is a big issue, but lots of natural fiber clothes get landfilled too without much thought.
https://www.eupedia.com/ecology/carbon_footprint_consumer_pr...
Absolutely. I've just done a naïve calculation, and Apple's self-reported 33kg CO2 emissions for a new Apple Watch Series 8 45mm Aluminium, at an equivalent power level of "0.85 pounds of CO2 emissions per kWh" from my first result on Google, suggests 85.6 kWh embedded energy, or 9.772 W if the device only lasts one year before replacement (divide according to expected lifetime).
Absolutely. For many (perhaps most) people in the rich world, embodied energy in the stuff we buy is our greatest source of energy consumption.
Very rough breakdown here: https://www.robinlinacre.com/energy-usage/
Making plastic stuff is energy cheap, relatively, that’s why plastic is cheap. Plastic packaging uses a lot less energy (to produce, ship, and dispose of) than metal, wood, etc. Though of course with cheapness comes increased usage, so the net effect is probably difficult to determine
>Making all this plastic stuff can't be energy cheap...
Plastic is relatively cheap, energy-wise. Your embodied energy usage is dominated by semiconductors.
Edit: Google tells me that a laptop takes 4500MJ to manufacture. If you were living in a 2kW society, you'd have to save up 1250kWh, or about a month, to get your laptop.
Obviously personal car ownership is right of the question.
You can get a rough estimate based on cost (not perfect but it can be usable) and then own the thing long enough that the energy cost to make drops to negligible. A made in USA toolset from USA sourced materials is unlikely to cost less than the energy needed to make it.
Or you can “cheat” by insisting used items don’t carry the energy cost because those were already borne by the original owner.
The "embodied energy" calculation is always going to be somewhat arbitrary based on what one wants to include. With more or less relevance.
E.g: human rest power is ca 100W at ca 20% efficiency. The agricultural production is at best 2% efficient. That's already 25kW, just to survive. * Edit: partially wrong, see comments below. *
But it is perhaps relevant to exclude all non-CO2 energy sources? Thus putting the agricultural efficiency much higher since the sunlight would be "0".
In the (2008) Swiss example, the 2kW are already spend on public infrastructure, food and consumer discretionary alone. So even somebody living in an unheated cottage without electricity, using only public transportation, would exceed the 2kW as long as they otherwise eat and spend like the average Swiss.
(though I would assume public infrastructure to use less energy now, with the efficiency improvements in lighting)
This is absolutely doable, I've been off-grid for almost 3 years now with a very minimal setup and for the most part I have no complaints outside of a couple weeks in the dead of winter, and the one week that gets really really hot in the summer. I'm not sure how to calculate my total embodied energy but in terms of electricity I have never used more than 7kWh in a single day, which works out 300W and includes all of my computing needs as well as refrigeration, lighting, minor heating/cooling, some small amount of cooking and at least a couple lattes every day.
On the worst day in winter my consumption is usually ~1kWh, limited by solar production.
My partner and I have been living "off grid" using PV + battery for electricity for the last 5 years in the Appalachian mountains. We track energy use meticulously. We try to use mostly wood heat in winter, but also have a buried propane tank for supplemental heat and hot water in winter. So that is arguably not fully off grid? We have a 2,400-sq. ft. A-frame house with R-52 insulation in most walls (closed-cell + batt) and low-e glass windows (but, alas, lots of windows). We mostly cook with electric or the woodstove in winter. Our woodstove is a massive, pretty efficient soapstone masonry stove central in the house by design. South-facing windows are backed by local stone floors that capture and radiate heat in winter. The house is angled to allow sun to enter windows in winter and block sun in summer for passive heating/cooling.
The two of us use just under 5kWh / day average electricity. Our big energy use is heat in winter though! Here is the breakdown:
5kWh/day electric * 365 days = 1825 kWh/year electrons
2.5 cords wood (mostly oak) = 17584 kWh/year wood heat
300 gal. liquid propane = 8400 kWh/year propane heat
That's a total of ~27800 kWh/year for the two of us including heat. That's about 76 kWh/day or 38 kWh/day per person on average. *This includes charging my e-bike for my work commute--but we also have a gas car so not nearly all transportation energy costs.[edited to add this]
I can't see any way to go much lower than that without freezing in the winter. 2 kWh/day seems crazy low to me.
So easy enough if building a new small house or a cabin.
The US has many many houses with 4000+ square feet, and no good way to heat it cool outside if AC and a furnace. Are we going to bulldoze all existing houses to meet this goal? What’s the impact of that to the environment?
Sounds interesting, are you writing down what you are doing somewhere?
If you're off-grid, it's generally because you have to, and you reducing energy consumption is a must.
That said, I have an off-grid office (w/ ~5kw of storage and 1.5kw of solar) and it has definitely changed the way I use energy at home, and what my expectations for my next home will be.
Aiming at the wrong goal. A "10kw society" on solar or nuclear is better than "2kw society" on coal.
This seems very misguided. The problem isn't energy usage its the side effects of the energy production. If everyone was using a megawatt but this was in the form of some factory on the moon being incredibly inefficient as they make the new Must Have MoonRockTM that gets teleported to your living room this would actually be just fine.
I had a non-optional experience along this axis living thru the 2021 Texas grid crisis.
Being in the gulf coast region automatically makes it nearly impossible to fit a 2kW budget during the summer (unless you live in a large walk-in freezer), but during the winter I was able to get down to 800 watts continuous for a period of a few days. This included my computer, fridge, some lights and central furnace blower. The furnace is kind of cheating though - replacing the natural gas with a heat pump would instantly blow my 2kW budget all on its own. That said, you could probably get really close if you tried to hit the target with a modern heat pump and good insulation throughout.
The only reason I voluntarily subjected myself to this was because I was being billed $9/kWH thru Griddy (a wholesale, real-time rate provider) during the entire, multi-day incident. I did run a one-off load of laundry that probably cost me ~$50.
Requiring use of variable rate energy providers and forcing consumers to adapt habits to the available resources seems like one way to get people to pay attention to how much energy various things consume. It also seems like an effective way to mitigate one-off generation shortfalls.
Its not about the watts - it is about the composition of those watts.
You could use 2000Wh of electricity in Texas, but that would still only be 29% zero carbon.
You could use 5000Wh of electricity in Norway, but 99% of that would be zero carbon. This is superior to the 2000Wh approach.
This wouldn’t really be necessary if we had cleaner power generation.
Watt could be used as kind of universal physically based, end-game-level currency, sounds better than crypto or fiat IMHO.
It's staggering how old these topics were. Club of Rome: 72, never heard of it until few years ago. 2kW society .. 1998, first time I hear the name, even with all the fuss about climate change, it didn't hit my radar. So strange.
I can't help but feel like this is an ass-backwards approach to the problem, we should be trying to add a zero to the (greenly produced) energy available for each person instead of bean-counting. Imagine if this was our approach to internet bandwidth? "No you don't need more bandwidth, just compress your geocites webpages by an extra 5x - that's the future of the internet we want to see!"
We could produce far more energy than we could ever save by cutting. It is not an accident that the historical chart of quality of life vs. energy consumption per capita is up and to the right.
Nah. Sorry but I don't like it at all.
Let's have a 20,000-Watt society, not a 2,000-Watt one.
But, let's make sure that the production, storage and distribution of energy, in all its forms, is sustainable, and available to every country.
The trend is already here: cheaper than ever solar and wind energy, cheaper and cheaper energy storage, new energy breakthroughs, promising ones like nuclear, etc.
It means the world will be able to soon produce much more energy, using only sustainable sources.
Let's make energy available to everyone, at an affordable rate. That's my dream. Not a communist-like starvation of sorts.
Unless someone breaks thermodynamics, there is really no way to reduce to 2000W without reducing consumption of goods by a factor of 10 in the west. That means a new phone every 20 years instead of 2 (global mobile device supply chain is huge), getting new shoes every 10 years instead of 1, getting a new car every 50 years instead of 5, etc.
I'm living/working remotely off grid with a solar panels, batteries, and a 2000w inverter. It's comfortable. I usually have a few lights, the wifi router, a monitor, laptop charger, and a fridge plugged in. This comes out between 100w and 300w, so I have room to spare for bigger items like power tools.
I do cheat by using a propane range for cooking and wood for heat. At some point I'd like to move to an electric induction stove, but I need to do some research how efficient they are.
Wow, I just calculated my direct energy usage. Now I live in Texas where it is hot so I only required heating 2-3 months of the year, and have one electric and one gas car.
* Electricity - 13,000 kWh * Natural Gas - 7,000 kWh * Gasoline - 14,000 kWh
Burning stuff is just so wildly inefficient. A heat pump to replace my furnace and water heater; and only using the electric car would cut my direct energy usage in half.
India experienced a massive heat wave last summer. My electricity consumption exceeded the average US per month figures for the first time (>900 KWh/month). Bulk of it went to airconditioning. Needless to say I am deeply concerned about the times ahead. I am pretty sure increase in electricity consumption is only going to aggravate things further.
Huh. We're absolutely crushing this at our house. We averaged 486 watts per person in the worst month this year so far. I cheat and charge the car at work, but even when I commute every day (40 miles round trip, half-mile elevation change), it's only half our energy consumption, so we're easily below 1kw per person. I'm not including embodied carbon of stuff we buy, but still...
We did buy energy efficient everything: Induction range, hybrid heat pump water heater, spent extra on insulation, heat pump furnace, LED lights, medium-wattage desktop computer, high MPGe EV, etc.
However, we live in a normal US house with few compromises (though we don't need air conditioning or heating most days, due to the local climate).
It makes me wonder how the average US household is at 12KW. That's roughly two of our house's air conditioners running full blast, per person, 24 hours a day.
48kWh per person per day? That seems like a huge amount. I live in an a place where we have to run the AC almost all day and we use less than this along with all the other electric appliances.
>which pictures the average citizen of energy poor countries reducing their overall average primary energy usage rate to no more than 2,000 watts
Why the distinction? Why not all citizens?
I live in Sweden. I have a large house. It consumes 14 MWh/year. I have not sacrificed anything. I use a heat pump (using energy from the ground).
Oh, this is not a Michael Jackson reference ...
A Tesla Model 3, the most efficient EV, uses 240 Wh/mile. You could not drive more than 8.3 miles without exceeding the 2 kWh/h.
It's a bit hard condensate the concept in an HN comment but I'll try:
- the "Green" new deal, originally have imagined (with a classic managerial fallacy) a world made up by single-family homes in places with enough Sun for p.v., BEVs, a little need to move and no industries. Perhaps because this is the way some manager's live and they call it sobriety respect of others who do differently. Than they discover people's in crowd then to behave in stupid ways, like Le Bon describe in his masterpiece BUT not that stupid so grid-connected p.v. without stationary and/or on-wheel storage because cutting electricity bill with p.v. for a significant amount of locations on earth pay back, the rest do not. As a result electricity grids are more and more unstable. Keeping the frequency is always hard and we have chosen to made "large enough" grids to have a "slowly changing mean load" slow enough that big power plants can keep up the frequency; when p.v/eolic start to be big enough the power peaks they produce make's the grid frequency skyrocket or fall too fast for large power plants to lower/step up their generator power. Not counting the fact that most people do not live in single-family homes where a p.v. system and an on-wheel battery can live with;
- some politicians who have blindly follow the initial vague dream have decided the answer is "reduce energy consumption" and have even invented ways to reduce it who actually increase the amount of consumed energy like regulating "how many hour to run the heating" vs "let the system run quietly 24/7;
- since most people DO NOT live on nor have p.v. anyway most home appliance are NOT designed to maximize self consumption witch means run full power as quick as possible when energy from the Sun is available vs try to spread the load as much as possible to keep the grid load as stable as possible. As a result most p.v. systems instead of target maximizing self-consumption target to produce as many kWh as possible. As a result p.v. systems are LESS interesting and the grid is more strained.
A simple example: most hot-water systems try to run few minutes every hours instead of all at once on input. To keep a grid load stable running few minutes every hours and have small quantity of water to heat is IDEAL, you consume less energy and keep the load stable on average. On p.v. it's the exact opposite. Since the Sun shine for limited period of time but when it do it offer much energy what it count is heating as much as possible large amount of water to have enough hot water for the rest of the day, possible for more than one day. Essentially NO system on sale offer such simple regulation, while some offer "grid-backed" regulations like grid energy meters who told "run" or "do not run" depending on current grid load but in ways that are hard to be used on p.v. even if they are very similar. Another example: most appliance start to consume from 0 to max in a snap. For the grid is not an issue, the single appliance consume a very small fraction of power of a power plant and on average that's just noise. Small p.v. inverters on contrary have issues keeping up such peaks, who happen to be big at micro-grid scale. As a result many appliance like ovens who try to use peaks to reduce the total amount of kWh consumed they run very bad on p.v. in self-consumption and inverter stress terms. Again: some appliance try to run for longer time to reduce the amount of peak power usage, while on p.v. it's better run quickly to run an appliance after the other in the limited amount of time the Sun shine and so on.
Long story short if some really want a new deal:
- ALL BEVs MUST have an open standard data port (no matter if canbus or something else) to talk to any p.v. inverter on sale allowing to do the same stationary battery inverters and batteries do: charge ONLY from p.v., offering power from battery to the home to a maximum DOD if the grid do work, another threshold if case of grid blackout and parameters to tell the car ensuring a minimum SOC for a certain point in time allowing to charge from the grid if needed;
- BEV need to cost equally of their correspondent ICE not pushing up ICE and fuel price to makes EV convenient;
- incentive de-urbanization in the sense from a multi-apartments building (sorry I do not know how to name such buildings in English) to a single family home if you live there for a certain amount of years;
- impose a simple and cheap communication mode to power-hungry home appliances like simple modbus to allow their control from a central home system, like a home server/a p.v. inverter etc and allowing communication to tell how much power they going to need to run, in the next few seconds etc to allow inverters compensate peaks less hardly;
- incentives the design of systems targeting maximizing self-consumption instead of grid-tied "metering" like "I give X kWh, get back Y and so...".
Asking for "sobriety" is like asking do not panic on a sinking ship, the rebound effect is higher then else.
I want a personal cold fusion reactor and to be a 2000 MW person, not this unviable milquetoast degrowth.
> ... (i.e. 2 kWh per hour or 48 kWh per day) ...
That's just over 1400 kWh per month. As a reference of personal and immediate consumption, most central- and north European apartment dwellers consume around 2000 kWh per year.
Anecdote: my household - two adults, two terrible cats, dishwasher, washing machine and tumble dryer, no TV, two bicycles and feet instead of a car - have consumed 160-170 kWh per month steadily, around the year, for as long as I can recall.
I don't see how this is possible with modern technology, unless you limit people to low power laptops or chrome books.
If the average person has a modern desktop there's a good chance it has 400w power supply. Run a 400w power supply for 8 hours and you have used 3.2 kwh [1]. That's already 1.2kwh over, without accounting for anything else.
I see the solution as providing renewable electricity at low cost, rather than reducing the amount of electricity.
Everybody move to the tropics, get used to the heat and ride motor scooters just like India and Bangladesh. Cold climates that require a lot of energy just to live in are going to empty out in the next decades.
I predict a massive wave of immigration from Europe, Australia, and Canada to Latin America. There are already a ton of people from these countries showing up in Mexico because of Covid restrictions, easy immigration for first-worlders, and a lower cost of living. I suspect the upcoming winter of deprivation and economic crisis in Europe and other cold regions will send a bunch more economic/cold refugees that way.
Currently averaging about 9.75kWh per day during spring/summer/fall. However, come winter the max average will probably be 50kWh per day.
My latitude is about 60 (59.9139) degrees north and electric heating panels don’t seem to be the most efficient when it is below freezing.
With improved insulation and a modern heat pump, I’d be curious to see how much energy we would consume.
There's more to this than just energy, we're all about to get a very strong lesson in the fact that fertilizers require fossil fuels as chemical feedstock. The Ukraine conflict has already lead to a steep drop off in the availability of fertilizers for many countries across the globe. Those will result in greatly reduced harvests and food scarcity.
The next few years are to be very rough, and nothing can be done to fix it. Deglobalization will make things even worse for countries that can't produce or purchase enough fuel, food or fertilizers.