The Wall Street Journal’s Cynthia Crossen wrote one of those look how much electricity Americans are using articles claiming that, “Compared to your grandparents, you, personally, are an electricity hog. Just look around your house.” To which I have to say, you’re damn right!
Crossen notes how little our grandparents used (and I assume by the time frame she means the grandparents of baby boomers), but newsflash — compared to us, the generation she’s talking about lived in abject poverty and conditions which are hard to imagine (I still don’t understand how people coped without cordless phones, much less without dish washers).
My house is like an energy black hole, sucking in any electricity bold enough to come close. According to MSNBC, the average Michigan resident pays $600/year for electricity. Are they serious? That wouldn’t even get me through the winter. Last January we came just a few kilowatt hours short of topping the 2,000 kw mark. Even in the summer months, when we’re not at home as much, we’re still up there above 1,000 kw hours a month.
And to be honest, I like it that way. Crossen cites a study claiming that “a 180-gallon coral-reef aquarium might need more electricity than a central-heating system and refrigerator combined.” Yeah, but have you ever tried to fit tropical fish into the door of a refrigerator?
The problem with the “Americans use too much electricity” argument is that it assumes that I really care about how much electricity I’m using. I don’t. As Robert Bradley pointed out a few years ago in the wonderful Three Cheers for Christmas Lights!, the main scarce resource I’m worried about conserving is my time.
Obviously there is a diminishing return once the cost of electricity starts to require too much time to pay for, but that’s the beauty of energy efficiency. I don’t want an energy efficient appliance to reduce my total energy usage, but rather to extend what I can do with my existing energy usage. For example, I’d prefer lights in my living room that would be so efficient it would never pay to turn them off, even at night. But generally, the initial investment in such energy saving devices rarely pays off in the long run unless you have a huge economy of scale (i.e. you’re a large corporation buying thousands of efficient light bulbs).
All other things being equal, the more energy used the better, and a more reasonable approach would be to expand the supply of energy to make it cheaper and look for realistic alternative energy sources (I don’t want solar panels on my house, I want almost free energy from a fusion reactor like I was promised by all of those scifi novels).