How much electricity am I using?
The annual United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 28)1 has just finished and it produced better results than expected, considering that it was hosted by a major fossil-fuel producer, the United Arab Emirates. The event’s president was the head of an oil company, which got lots of attention in the press, but without vital context: COP meetings had never explicitly stated that fossil fuels were the problem. And this year, they did, or at least came close, by agreeing - FOR THE FIRST TIME - that the world needs to transition away from fossil fuels.
I thought we all knew that. I think we did know it. But finally it’s been agreed publicly by the nearly 200 countries represented at the meeting.
The way most people in Western countries think of the transition away from fossil fuels is the transition to electricity, especially electric cars (instead of petrol) and heat pumps (instead of oil or natural gas). But nearly 2/3 of the world’s electricity is now generated with fossil fuels, so this isn’t as simple as one might think. Here’s an excellent overview of energy source data, with really helpful visuals.
Scientists and industry are making great strides in renewable energy, but this isn’t an easy fix. In fact, it is a hugely expensive fix, even if we get to the point where the energy itself is being generated efficiently. We still have the problem of the “grid” - the system that stores and then delivers electricity to us. And it makes the price of electricity supply an increasing worry for many.
“There’s a massive range in people’s footprints,” said Dr Anne Owen, a carbon footprint expert at the University of Leeds. “For aviation, it’s massive. The richest in society are flying many, many times more than the poorest. Also, restaurants, hotels – luxury consumption – and other services, which could be anything from theatre to financial services.”
Owen said the government’s levies on home energy bills to raise money for net zero policies showed the problem of ignoring the great carbon divide: “You could not pick a worse product to place a carbon tax or levy on.”
Owen’s research shows that the lowest-income households spend 10% of their income on heating and powering their homes, while the highest spend less than 1.5%. So the increase in prices hits the poor disproportionately, despite their much lower carbon footprints.
“Instead, the levies could be put on air travel – then you would end up getting the richest in society paying far more,” she said. “Or you could just put it on income tax, which is already designed to work with people’s levels of income.” The latter option would cut energy bills for 65% of households. Read more.
Which Household Appliances Are Running Up My Electric Bill?
“I was away filming for six weeks and I still came back to a $500 electricity bill!” my friend said.
She explained how she’d gone around the house unplugging everything in sight, “Everything! TVs, sound systems, you name it. I turned everything off.”
When she got the bill she called the electricity company to demand an explanation of just what had used $500 of power in an empty house. If you’ve ever tried this, you’ll know that the answer is simple: “We just read the meter.”
My house has two meters, as you can see. They are accessible, but I’ve never paid much attention to them because that’s not really the point, is it? What we need to know is exactly what is moving those dials.
What’s frustrating is not to know why bills suddenly spike, and why they fluctuate so much. I don’t know what my friend had running in her empty house. She may have had a security system that takes a lot of power, or an old freezer. She may have made the mistake I made one summer, forgetting about the little electric heater I’d had on in the basement to keep the pipes from freezing - that ran to an extra $100 a month.
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As we hear more about energy transitions, we are hammered with new offerings by mail, email, and phone. I’ve even had a few salespeople come to the door. I’ll get into the question of how to decide about switching services in another letter, but I want to focus here on the basics of electricity usage and monitoring.
First, you need to distinguish between those that run all the time (and thus need thermostats or other monitors) and those which can simply be used at will (or not used). Equipment that goes on standby is what you need to think about. Here’s a list of the most important things to look at:
Cable Boxes
Televisions
Game Consoles
Computers
Audio/Video Devices
AV equipment like soundbars and home theater speakers use vampire power to run clocks and wait for signals from remote controls. In the NRDC study, AV equipment averaged 7.5 watts in standby mode. That works out to 60 kWh/year of wasted energy and $10 a year on your electric bill. Read more.
Unplugging is the simplest thing you can do, and there are now power strips that make it easy to turn off a group of electronics (screen + speakers, for example) at once.
How to monitor individual appliances and equipment
You can get inexpensive monitors for individual electrical items and test them one by one: plug one side into the wall and then plug in the equipment you want to check on. (Wouldn’t it be great if every piece of equipment had a monitor in its display? But the cost would probably be prohibitive and companies wouldn’t consider it a good sales feature.)
Or you can also do the math: multiply voltage by time in use. This guide from the US Department of Energy is quite comprehensive: “Estimating Appliance and Home Electronic Energy Use.” I found this tricky with, for example, a de-icer for my garden pond. I didn’t want to warm the water, just to keep the ice from freezing solid for long periods because the frogs at the bottom still need oxygen. I first had a 300w float, and then switched to 100w. They have very short cords so I needed an extension cord, and it seemed that every time a storm came and they were really needed, the power would go out. And they were supposedly on only when it was cold enough, but I had no way to test this because they were floating out in the pond.
No, I can’t just take an axe to the ice: frogs are hibernating in the mud. But I felt there should be a better, more sustainable approach. After all, these are creatures that survive without human intervention. The only problem is that my pond is small and not very deep. So this year I am trying something simple: floating a ball. One article suggested a tennis ball but I like the effect of the red playground ball. (It’s only December, but there has been solid ice for a few days. When it melts, I’ve seen the occasional frog, swimming in the depths. One day was warm enough that one of them climbed out onto a mossy rock.)
This is just one example of the kind of experimentation we can all do. I do a lot of baking in a “toaster” oven and run the big oven only when I need to. I dry some clothes on indoor racks close to the washer and dryer, and I’m no absolutist: if I’m in a hurry, I just use the dryer.
To me, this is a lot easier than trying to figure out just how much electricity drying a load of clothes uses. And I try to make sure equipment that drains power even when it’s turned off gets disconnected from the power supply.
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If you’re a Smart House person, you may want to install a whole house monitor. They are not exorbitantly expensive, and my friend who travels for long periods to film should probably invest the few hundred dollars.
In a study by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, “50 homes were equipped with whole-home energy monitors (aka home energy monitoring systems, or HEMS, in the industry terminology). The conclusion was that investing in three smart technologies should produce the lion’s share of annual energy savings; smart thermostats were named as the most impactful by far, followed by smart outlets or plugs and smart LED light bulbs or light switches.” Read more.
But the research shows that most people lose interest in watching monitors, so the key is to make changes that are simple enough to stick.
A Requiem for the [Old] Meter
You may have read about the old-fashioned English gas meters that had to be fed with shillings, not unlike the payphones that even in the late 1980s had to be fed with 2p or 10p coins. Now a wholesale replacement of existing meters is underway, a change so universal and drastic that the UK’s Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, was asked to write a poem about the old meters.2
The new UK meters will be “smart,” enabling people to reduce their carbon footprint (and presumably save money) by turning off lights and turning down their heating. Isn’t it amazing to think that this can be done across an entire country? In America, everything is done piecemeal and patchwork fashion. But turning to smart monitoring does create some new headaches and expenses, as the smart meters have to keep up with mobile network protocols. “Why 7 million UK smart meters will stop working and what it will mean.”
Duffy says, “I hope people enjoy the poem and film and take a moment to think about the boxes under the stairs and in hallway cupboards, which have been silently recording household life for so long." Here is the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra performing “A Requiem for the Meter” on instruments made entirely from household meters.
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COP 28 stands for the 28th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Poet Laureates have to be adaptable. She was more in her element at a London Library Eliot Summer School event in 2018. I saw that she’d been blocked into a corner by some of the T S Eliot scholars the minute she walked in. I mouthed a question, tipped my head to the bar, and then fetched her a glass of wine. That’s not the only time I’ve found myself playing host at a public event. I once made a congressman happy by sliding him a tumbler of bourbon on the rocks - he too was hemmed in by a crowd. Tip: let your speakers eat and drink!