Why are people so gullible?
Here's a post that makes an estimate:
https://www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01-20-cc-impact/
> So, if I wanted to analogize the energy usage of my use of coding agents, it’s something like running the dishwasher an extra time each day, keeping an extra refrigerator, or skipping one drive to the grocery store in favor of biking there. To me, this is very different than, in Benjamin Todd’s words, “a terrible reason to avoid” this level of AI use. These are the sorts of things that would make me think twice.
Still... AC still feels like magic. I know how it works and understand the over-unity factor. But it feels like it ought to take enormous energy for it to work at all.
This tool has its own recent substack post. See the comments too, especially the one by Chris Preist that contextualizes the energy usage of streaming video (a topic that has also been discussed on HN before).
My parents for example sweat the small stuff and go around the house turning LED driven lights off to "save electricity" even though it would barely make a dent in their bill.
Granted, they come from a time of incadescants burning 60-100w at a time so I can see why that habit might be deeply ingrained.
For instance: The cost section, wherein 1kWh in the US is figured as having a cost of 9.7 cents.
In reality, it's not that way at all. Unless we're fortunate enough to live in an area where we can walk over to the neighborhood generating station and carry home buckets of freshly-baked electricity to use at home, then we must also pay for delivery.
On average, in 2025, electricity was 17.3 cents per kiloWatt-hour -- delivered -- for residential customers in the US.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
That seems low...
This source[0] says
> One Bitcoin now requires 854,400 kilowatt-hours of electricity to produce. For comparison, the average U.S. home consumes about 10,500 kWh per year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, April 2025, meaning that mining a single Bitcoin in 2026 uses as much electricity as 81.37 years of residential energy use.
- Anything even even halfway approaching a toaster or something with a heater in it is essentially impossible (yes, I know about that one video).
- A vacuum cleaner can be run for about 30 seconds every couple minutes.
- LED lights are really good, you can charge up the caps for a minute and then get some minutes of light without pedaling.
- Maybe I could keep pace with a fridge, but not for a whole day.
- I can do a 3D printer with the heated bed turned off, but you have to keep pedaling for the entire print duration, so you probably wouldn't want to do a 4 hour print. I have a benchy made on 100% human power.
- A laptop and a medium sized floor fan is what I typically run most days.
- A modern laptop alone, with the battery removed and playing a video is "too easy", as is a few LED bulbs or a CFL. An incandescent isn't difficult but why would you?
- A cellphone you could probably run in your sleep
Also gives a good perspective on how much better power plants are at this than me. All I've made in 4 years could be made by my local one in about 10 seconds, and cost a few dollars.
When you look at people's energy usage, quite a lot of it ends up being the embodied energy in the stuff they buy. For quite a lot of people, it's probably the largest category of energy consumption. I once had a very rough go at calculating this here: https://www.robinlinacre.com/energy_usage/
And yes, that seems to be the undercurrent here. Complete with linking to themselves to validate the data they used to make their estimates.
Either these companies need to build these massive data centers that consume massive amounts of electricity OR these LLMs don't use a lot of electricity.
You don't get both. If LLMs don't require a lot of electricity, then why are we building so much more capacity? If all of that capacity is required, then what is the real cost of sending a query to these LLMs?
That said, and hot take: people shouldn't worry about energy independent of what they pay for it. The whole point of a price is to fold a complicated manifold of scarcity-allocation into a set of scalars anyone can rank against each other. Appealing to people's sense of justice or duty to get them to use less energy than they'd otherwise be willing to buy is just asking them to lead a less utility-filled life than they can because you think you can allocate scarcity better than the market. I can't, and you can't either. Nobody can.
If you claim that people should listen to moralized pleadings and not the market because prices don't internalize certain externalities, duty is on you to get those externalities accounted so they can properly factor into prices, not apply ad-hoc patches on top of markets by manipulating people's emotions.
As for getting externalities internalized: as a society, we call the procedure for updating rules "politics", and it's as open to you as to anyone else. If you propose policy X and you can't get X enacted, perhaps it's because X is a bad idea, not because the system is broken.
Not everyone anyone claims is an externality is, in fact, a cost we must account. We should have a prior that costs are accounted and need evidence to rebut it --- and any such rebuttal must involve numbers, not emotional appeals. What specific costs are unaccounted? How large are these costs? Through what specific mechanism are they escaping existing accounting mechanisms? "I feel like we're using too many electrons for X" is not a valid argument for the existence of an unaccounted externality.
That is, unless there's some specific reason to believe otherwise, we should believe market get it right, especially with fungible commodities like kWh.
My (admittedly old) gpu+CPU idles around 50-75w.
They literally had record profits the last few years, rather than being forced to lay down solar. I think power should be a global endeavor, not some local for profit business with complete regulatory capture that makes competition illegal.
Yes I'm angry, because I pay more in electric than most anywhere in the world. If I charge my care with LEVEL 2 using city provided charges, during the day, it's more expensive than gas.
https://velo.outsideonline.com/road/road-racing/tour-de-fran...
You're going to have to make a stronger case that this data is biased towards LLM than that.
Freedom is Slavery,
Facts are Whitewashing.
It is also not really true that they are huge, it is a misconception driven by biased reporting about facilities that really aren't very remarkable compared to material distribution warehouses, beverage bottling plants, and suchlike.
(With caveats like heat pumps are much less effective in extreme cold)
https://hackaday.io/project/191731-practical-power-cycling
and is also a few years out of date
https://ourworldindata.org/funding
[1] https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/reflections-on-substack
You would have to figure out where the grant money comes from for their department, but doesn't scream compromised to me.
On the costs tab, for the United States: It says that this has a cost of $0.97.
97 cents ÷ 10kWh = 9.7 cents per kWh
(I didn't look further than that. Perhaps I should have.)
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edit: I now see a note at the very bottom stating that it is using an assumed "$0.17 for electricity".
$0.17 per kWh is plenty close enough for rough figurin', so I'd like to take this opportunity to retract my previous complaint.
I'm not sure how many queries is equivalent to an hour of Claude code use, but maybe 5 seconds, which means an hour of continuous use = 216 Wh, or ~50x less than an electric car.
OP has a longer article about LLM energy usage: https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/ai-footprint-august-202...
Ok so I do need to worry about energy so that I can identify these unaddressed externalities and work towards updating the rules. You can to care before you can get involved in this stuff. You can't tell me not to worry about it and then also say that it's basically my fault for not getting involved if the price is wrong.
> any such rebuttal must involve numbers, not emotional appeals
Who are you arguing with? You're commenting about a website that has strictly numbers and nothing else.
Imagine a world where the only energy you do is use was generated by a stationary bike you had to ride yourself. You would, generally speaking, use that energy differently than energy you would pay for--you would generally reserve your effort for worthwhile things, and would be averse to farming energy yourself just to power frivolity or vice. How you determine what to put your energy into would explicitly be a moral question.
Instead in our world we an abstractions conceals the source of the energy. But if the moral concerns from the first world had any weight, they haven't lost it now; if energy is anything short of completely free we should by the same logic be averse to expending energy on worthless work or vice. The human being is not a utility monster, but something very different, and moral questions of this sort are central to how it navigates the world, they should not be dismissed.
A small number times a large number is often a large number. Have you heard of the concept called "per capita"? In any case, electricity is going towards data centers in proportion to the degree to which these data centers do useful work. AI companies buy the electricity fairly on an open market, sometimes even subsidizing this market by funding new generating capacity.
If all these people and companies are making electricity allocation decisions that make sense to them with their own money, who are you to stop in and say that their voluntary transactions are incorrect? Who died and made you the king?
And given that right now they are clearly not, what’s your plan until then?
- first, those queries are mostly useless and we could totally do without them, so it's still a net pollution
- they are being integrated everywhere, so soon enough, just browsing the web for a few hours is going to general 100k+ such equivalent "small queries" (in the background, by the processes analyzing what the user is doing, or summarizing the page, etc). At that time, the added pollution is no longer negligible. And most of this will be done just to sell more ads
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_gallon_equivalent#Gas...
Assuming 33.41 kWh/gallon it takes about 0.3 gallons to get 10 kWh, which costs $0.97 at a pump price of $3.23 per gallon.
And by the look of it, that'll be the norm pretty much forever - unless something fundamental about how models can be trained/updated, an "older" model loses value as it's knowledge becomes out of date, even if we no longer get improvements from other sources or techniques.
But other things likely change based on "lifetimes" and usage patterns too - e.g. a large battery for an electric car may have a higher upfront energy cost in manufacturing than a small ICE + fuel tank, but presumably there's a mileage that the improved per-mile efficiency overcomes that, and then continues to gain with each additional mile.
Wouldn't your argument also compel us to use steel as if it were gold? Salt as if it were saffron?
The owners surely think, or at least want us to think that it is very useful indeed, otherwise we'd see no point in burning through piles of investors cash to buy overpriced ram, storage, gpus, cpus, nics, secure the power to run it and then subsidise the users to use it.
I do think that transaction is wrong and it's going to bite them in the ass in the long term, but I don't have the money to outbid them for the power. I do get to see them crash and burn when the investors get impatient.
"A lot of energy used for cooling": hyperscale data centers use the least cooling per unit of compute capacity, 2-3x less than small data centers and 10-100x less than a home computer.
"Water consumption is enormous": America withdraws roughly 300 billion gallons of fresh water daily, of which IT loads are expected to grow to 35-50 billion gallons annually by 2028. Data center water demands are less than a rounding error.
"distributed and does not suffer from the same problems": technically correct I guess but distributed consumption has its own problems that are arguably more severe than centralized power consumption.
There's a good reason so many sprawling civilizations of the past involve leveraging wind-power for transport.
The problem with gas is not that burning it doesn’t maximally capture all energy, but that there are externalities to doing so.
They’re not even saying they shouldn’t do it or that they’re not useful or not worth it but you Cannot logically say both “these things do not use a lot of power” and “we need to build more power plants to handle these things”
Edited to answer: The question has also been addressed by the same author as the article: USA spent a quarter century not building generators and that negligence has finally caught up to us, despite objectively heroic efficiency efforts on the part of the IT sector.
From a pure energy efficiency perspective you can't beat economies of scale. A stationary power plant (even ones that are just big gasoline engines) run at a constant load and RPM so they can be optimized for pure efficiency, they rarely have to start, warm up, and shut down, and they can use larger and more expensive exhaust aftertreatment systems. Most energy conversions grow more efficient with scale and this is no different. The locomotive powertrain works for a handful of reasons but one of them is you can build much more efficient engines that are optimized for a single constant speed and load. But most of the advancements in internal combustion engines over the last 20-30 years don't increase peak efficiency but increase the conditions in which they're efficient. Variable valve timing and lift are probably the most underrated and overpowered technologies that have transformed engines from having one narrow regime of high efficiency to running well over a huge range of the map. But turbocharging, variable intake geometries, 7+ speed transmissions, and mild hybrid systems like belt-starter-generators get honorable mentions here. However we're not talking about anything close to EV-levels of efficiency. I think the cutting edge research engines are running in the mid to high 40s for thermal efficiency (percentage of fuel energy captured as useful work), most passenger car engines probably peak in the mid 30s.
So while there is some efficiency to be gained by a more locomotive-style system it's not as much as you would hope. In the industry that's called a series hybrid system, vs a parallel hybrid system where either ICE or EV power can go to the wheels. The benefits of a series system are more emissions and product features. You can get the full torque and power of an EV, you can start and stop the IC engine in a more emissions optimized way, and and you can filter load spikes to use a small engine that meets average not peak load.
From a more pragmatic perspective, with the energy density of gasoline and other liquid fuels it's probably best to use it in applications for which you just can't use full electrification. Planes are currently the best example of this. It's also worth noting that passenger cars benefit massively from strong hybridization because of the uneven load cycles so that's a technology where you can deploy a gasoline engine but then claw back a lot of the efficiency losses with hybrids. That's not always true, for example boats don't really have a regen cycle so hybridization just doesn't get much.
Measured in terms of mass * distance, trains with steel wheels will beat anything with rubber pneumatic tires.
Part of the magic of hybrid trains is that you can have multiple generation units that can be turned on or off as needed.
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Efficiency is just one consideration for a power plant.
Historically, reliability has been more important than efficiency, especially for industrial applications like locomotives. In other words, locomotives are probably not as efficient as they could be. For instance, you could use a lower viscosity engine oil for lubrication, but that would reduce reliability as engines fail due to friction.
https://www.nissan-global.com/EN/INNOVATION/TECHNOLOGY/ARCHI...
Hybrids work for trains because they are so large and don't need big swings of acceleration or to climb steep grades. They can run the diesel generators at maximum efficiency.
Battery power would be better, because you can build even larger power plants running at higher heats and not have to haul them with you, but the costs of sufficient battery is too large, so far. That is changing.
All energy consumption values in this tool are measured in watt-hours (Wh), which is the amount of energy consumed over time. The basic formula for calculating energy consumption is:
Energy (Wh) = Power (Watts) × Time (Hours)
For example, a 100-watt light bulb used for 2 hours would consume 200 watt-hours of energy.
Most products on this list are electrical, but energy use for non-electric products (such as petrol car or gas heating) are converted into watt-hour equivalents.
Energy costs are available for a small selection of countries based on their national energy prices (electricity, gas and petrol). This price data is sourced from Eurostat, Ofgem, and the US EIA (based on prices for 2025 or early 2026, depending on availability). Costs reflect average household prices, and don't reflect dynamic, off-peak or smart tariffs.
Below, I list the assumptions and sources for each product or activity. Again, the actual level of energy consumption will depend on factors such as the specific efficiency of the product, user settings, and climate so these should be interpreted as approximations to give a sense of magnitude.
Traditional incandescent bulbs typically range from 25 to 100 watts, with 60 watts being relatively standard for a household bulb. One hour of use would consume 60 Watt-hours (Wh).
LED bulbs use around 80% less energy than incandescent bulbs for the same amount of light output. A standard LED bulb has an energy rating of around 10 W. Using it for one hour would consume 10 Wh.
Modern smartphones have battery capacities of 3,000-5,000 mAh at approximately 3.7-4.2V, resulting in batteries around 15-20 watt-hours. If we assume there is around 10% to 20% loss due to charging efficiencies, a full charge likely requires around 20 Wh.
Medium-efficiency TVs (for example, 40-50 inch LED TVs) consume approximately 60 watts during active viewing.
Larger modern TVs (55-60 inches with 4K capability) typically consume 80-100 watts. I've gone with 90 watts as a reasonable average.
The power consumption of Apple MacBooks vary depending on the model and what applications users are running.
When doing everyday tasks such as writing emails, word documents, or browsing the internet, they consume around 5 to 15 watts. Streaming video is more like 15 to 20 watts. When doing intensive tasks such as editing photos or video, or gaming a MacBook Pro can reach 80 to 100 watts.
Here I have assumed an average of 20 watts.
Desktop computers vary widely, but more efficient models consume approximately 50 watts. When doing light tasks, this can be a bit lower. Gaming computers can use far more, especially during peak usage (often several hundred watts).
The power consumption of game consoles can vary a lot, depending on the model. The Xbox Series S typically consumes around 70 watts during active gameplay. The Xbox Series X consumes around twice as much: 150 watts.
Game consoles use much less when streaming TV or film, or when in menu mode.
The marginal increase in energy consumption for one hour of streaming is around 0.2 Wh. This comprises of just 0.028 Wh from Netflix's servers themselves, and another 0.18 Wh from transmission and distribution.
To stream video, you need an internet connection, hence a bar for the electricity consumption for Home WiFi is also shown. Note that, for most people, this isn't actually the marginal increase in energy use for streaming. Most people have their internet running 24/7 regardless; the increase in energy use for streaming is very small by comparison. However, it is shown for completeness.
This does not include the electricity usage of the device (the laptop or TV itself). To get the total for that hour of viewing, combine it with the power usage of whatever device you're watching it on.
h/t to Chris Preist (University of Bristol) for guidance on this.
YouTube figures are likely similar to Netflix (see above), although they may be slightly higher due to typical streaming patterns and ad delivery. Again, you need to add the power consumption of the device you're watching on, separately.
WiFi routers typically consume between 10 and 20 watts continuously. Here I've assumed 15 watts as a reasonable average.
Recent research estimates that the median ChatGPT query using GPT-4o consumes approximately 0.3 watt-hours of electricity.
Actual electricity consumption varies a lot depending on the length of query and response. More detailed queries — such as Deep Research — will consume more (but there is insufficient public data to confirm how much).
If improved data becomes available on more complex queries, image generation and video, I would like to add them.
E-readers like the Kindle use e-ink displays that consume power primarily when refreshing the page. A typical Kindle device has a battery of around 1000–1700 mAh at ~3.7 V, which is 3.7 to 6 Wh. People report it lasting weeks on a full charge with moderate (30 minute per day) reading frequency.
That works out to less than 1 Wh per hour. Here I've been conservative and have rounded it up to 1 Wh.
Electric kettles typically have power rating between 1500 and 2000 watts. Boiling a full kettle (1.5-1.7 litres) takes around 3 to 4 minutes.
A 2000-watt kettle that takes 3 minutes to boil will consume around 100 watt-hours.
Microwaves typically have a power rating between 800 and 1,200 watts. If we assume 1000 watts, five minutes of use would consume 83 Wh (1000 * 0.08).
Electric ovens can have a power rating ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 watts. A typical one is around 2500 watts.
Once an oven is on and has reached the desired temperature, it typically cycles and runs at around 50% to 60% capacity. I've therefore calculated energy consumption as [2,500W × time × 0.55].
Gas ovens consume natural gas for heating but also use electricity for ignition and controls (approximately 300-400 watts). When converting the thermal energy from gas combustion to electrical equivalents for comparison purposes, gas ovens typically use slightly more total energy than electric ovens due to combustion inefficiency.
Similar to electric ovens, I have assumed that gas ovens cycle on and off once they've reached the desired temperature.
Small air fryers typically operate at 800W to 1500W. Larger models (especially with two trays) can be as much as 2500W. I've assumed 1500 watts in these calculations. Once an air fryer is on, it typically cycles and only runs at around 50% to 60% of capacity. Averaged over a cycle, 1000W is likely more realistic.
Ten minutes of use would consume 167 Wh (1000W * 0.17 hours = 167 Wh).
Induction hobs are efficient, and tend to have a power rating of 1,000W to 2,000W per ring. I've assumed 1,500 watts in these calculations. Like air fryers, they're often not operating at maximum power draw for the full cooking session. 50% is more typical. That means the average power usage is closer to 750W.
Most cooking activities take less time; typically 5 to 10 minutes, which reduces electricity consumption.
Gas hobs convert natural gas to heat. They tend to consume 2 to 2.5-times as much energy as induction hobs to achieve the same heat output. This is because they typically operate at around 40% efficiency, compared to 85% for an electric hob.
If an induction hob has an average rating of 750W over a cooking cycle, the useful heat delivered is 638W (750W * 85% efficiency). To get that useful heat from a gas hob with 40% efficiency would need 1595W (638W / 0.4). Here I've assumed an equivalent power input of 1600W.
A small-to-medium refrigerator (around 130 litres) typically consumes around 100 kWh per year, which equals approximately 275 Wh per day on average.
Standard refrigerator-freezer combinations consume anywhere between 200 and 500 kWh per year. Some very efficient models can achieve less than 200 kWh. Here, I have assumed one consumes 300 kWh per year. That is approximately 822 Wh per day.
Vacuum cleaners typically use 500W to over 1,500W. Popular models in the UK use around 620W or 750W. Here, I have assumed a power rating of 750W. Ten minutes of usage would consume 125 Wh.
Washing machine energy usage varies a lot depending on load size, cycle type and water temperature. An average load in an efficient, modern machine might use 600 Wh to 1,000 Wh per cycle. A large load could be use than 1,500 Wh. Here I have assumed 800 Wh, which is typical for a medium load.
Electric tumble dryers are among the highest energy consumers in the home. Heat pump models are much more efficient than condenser or vented models. A condenser or vented model might consume between 4000 and 5000 Wh per cycle. A heat pump model, around half as much.
Here, I have assumed 4500 Wh for condenser or vented cycles, and 2000 Wh for a heat pump cycle. Actual energy consumption will depend on factors such as load size and user settings.
Most energy in a dishwasher is used for heating the water. They typically use between 1,000 and 1,500 Wh per cycle. Very efficient models can use closer to 500 Wh per cycle. Operating on eco modes will also consume less than 1,000 Wh.
Here, I have assumed 1,250 Wh per cycle, which is fairly average for most users.
Clothes irons typically have an energy rating between 1500W and 3000W. Steam irons are towards the higher end of the range. Here, I have assumed 2500W, which is fairly standard for a steam iron.
Using one for 10 minutes would consume 417 Wh of power.
Dehumidifiers can range from as small as a few 100 watts, up to several thousand for large whole-house units.
Here I've assumed a medium, portable one with an energy rating of 500W. And a large unit of 1000W.
In humid conditions, or if they're being used to dry clothes, they will be running at or close to maximum power draw for a long period of time. In fairly low-humidity conditions, they might cycle on and off after a few hours, meaning their energy use drops to 50% to 70% of the maximum.
Hairdryers typically range from 1,000 to 2,000 watts. I have assumed a power rating of 1,750W. Five minutes of use would consume 146 Wh.
Electric showers are high-power appliances, rated between 7,500W to 11,500W. Specific models of 7.2 kW, 7.5 kW, 8.5 kW, 9.5 kW, 10.5 kW, and 11.5 kW are typical.
I have assumed a 9,500W model here. A 10-minute shower at 9,500 watts would consume 1,583 Wh.
An electric shower with hot water sourced from a heat pump will use less electricity.
If we assume a heat pump with a Coefficient of Performance (COP) of 3, producing the same heat output would use around 3,000 Wh per hour. Some very efficient models can achieve less than this; often closer to 2,000 Wh.
If we take the gas equivalent of an electric shower (rated at 9500W) and assume a boiler efficiency of 90%, we get around 10,500W in energy input equivalents. A 10-minute shower would consume 1,759 Wh.
Standard fans typically use 30-75 watts, with 50 watts being a reasonable average.
Small portable electric heaters typically range from 400 to 1,000 watts. Here I've assumed a wattage of 750W. Using this for one hour would consume 750 Wh.
A medium space heater typically operates at around 1,500 watts (ranging from 1,000 to as much as 3,000 for large ones). That means using one for an hour would consume 1,500 Wh.
Modern air-source heat pumps for single rooms (mini-splits) typically consume 600 to 1000 watts of electricity per hour of heating. This would be converted into around 1,800 to 3,000 Wh of heat.
Here we are assuming a Coefficient of Performance (CoP) value of around 3, which means 3 units of heat are generated per unit of electricity input.
These calculations are very sensitive to weather conditions, temperature settings, and the insulation of the house. These values might be typical for a moderate climate (such as the UK) in winter. In slightly warmer conditions, energy usage will be lower. In colder conditions, it would be higher.
The power draw can also be a bit lower than this once the heat pump is running.
Here, I've assumed they consume 800Wh of electricity per hour. That would supply 2,400Wh of heat.
We will assume our gas heating needs to supply the same amount of heat as our heat pump: 2,400 Wh.
A gas boiler is around 90% efficient, so the energy input needed would be 2,700 Wh (2,400 * 90%).
Again, this is very sensitive to the specific boiler system, climate and heating requirements.
We can't get a whole house figure by simply multiplying by the number of rooms. Energy consumption will depend a lot on the heat loss and fabric of the house.
In the UK, a 3-bedroom house has an area of around 90m². A building of this size might have a heat loss of around 50 to 100 W/m². We'll say 75 W/m². That would mean 6,750W of heat is required (90m² * 75 W/m²).
Getting this from a heat pump with a CoP of 3 would consume 2,250Wh of electricity per hour (6750 / 3). This is what I've assumed in our calculations. In reality, the consumption is probably lower as energy draw reduces once the heat pump is up and running.
We'll use the same assumptions as above for a heat pump. We need to supply 6,750W of heat for the house.
Getting this from a 90% efficient boiler would consume 7,500Wh of gas per hour.
The average household in the UK uses around 31,000Wh of gas per day. That's equivalent to 4–5 hours of heating (a bit less if their daily total includes a gas shower etc.). In winter, these heating hours will likely be higher, and during the summer, close to zero.
I think 7,500Wh of gas per hour therefore seems reasonable (but very sensitive to a specific household's circumstances).
Air conditioning units for single rooms typically use 800 to 1,500 watts. I've assumed 1,000W in these calculations.
The actual energy usage will be very sensitive to climate conditions. Warmer, and especially humid climates make AC units much less efficient. Running one in a moderate, drier climate would use much less.
They can also consume less energy once they're up-and-running, so they're not always going at maximum power draw.
Electric bicycles typically consume between 10 to 30 watt-hours per mile depending on speed, the cycling conditions, and how high the level of electric assist is. For light assist on flat terrain, it's around 8 to 12 Wh; for moderate, around 12 to 18 Wh; and for heavy assist on hilly terrain it can reach 30 Wh per mile.
I've assumed a value of 15 Wh per mile.
Electric scooters typically consume 15-30 watt-hours per mile depending on the model and conditions. Here, I've assumed a usage of 25 Wh per mile.
Electric motorbikes typically consume 100 to 250 watt-hours per mile depending on the model, driver weight and conditions. Real-world tests of motorbike efficiency find efficiencies of around 100 Wh per mile for moderate urban driving. People report higher usage when driving at higher speeds or motorway driving.
Here I've assumed around 150 Wh per mile.
Petrol motorbikes can consume between 50 and 100 miles per gallon. Let's take an average of 75mpg. A gallon is around 4.5 litres, so 75mpg is equivalent to 0.06 litres per mile.
The energy content of petrol is around 32 MJ per litre (or 8.9 kWh per litre). That equates to 0.53 kWh per mile (8.9kWh per litre * 0.06 litres per mile). Driving one mile uses around 530 Wh per mile.
In terms of energy inputs, this means an electric motorbike is 3 to 4 times as efficient as a petrol one.
Electric vehicles average approximately 0.3 kWh (300 Wh) per mile. However, this can range from 200 to 400 Wh per mile depending on the type of vehicle, driving conditions and speed.
Petrol cars average around 40 miles per gallon (ranging from around 25 to 50).
Taking an energy density of ~40 kWh per UK gallon for petrol, there are around 40.5 kWh in a UK gallon (there are 4.546 litres in a gallon * 8.9kWh per litre).
This means a petrol car uses around 1kWh (1,000 Wh) per mile. This means an electric car is around 3 to 4 times more efficient, since it has far less energy losses from the engine, heat production, and braking.
Most corded electric lawnmowers have an energy rating between 1000W and 2000W. Here I have assumed 1500W.
Petrol lawnmowers are much less efficient than their electric equivalents, as much less input energy is converted into turning the blades.
A standard petrol lawnmower uses around 1 litre of petrol an hour (slightly less in more efficient models). Since the energy content of petrol is 8.9kWh per litre, they therefore use 8,000 to 10,000 Wh per hour. Here I have assumed 9,000 Wh.
Standard power strimmers range from around 250 watts to 700 watts. Smaller models will only be suitable for short grass.
Here I've assumed 500 watts.
Gas power strimmers are less efficient than electric models.
Data on this was hard to find, but a standard one probably consumes around 0.4 litres of petrol per hour. Since the energy content of petrol is 8.9kWh per litre, they therefore use around 3,500 Wh per hour in energy equivalents.
Pressure washers typically have a power rating between 1,500 and 3,000 watts. For this tool, I've assumed 2,000 watts as standard.
Per hour, they will use 2,000 Wh when used continuously. Most people will take breaks and pauses during this time, so you should take that into account. If you break half the time, and use one for an hour, then the energy use is equivalent to half an hour (1,000 Wh).
I appreciate all of the feedback and comments from users. I continue to implement fixes and updates based on these suggestions.
Here is a log of changes and improvements.
Maybe building overhead power lines for rail infrastructure should be the "hip" thing right now instead of AI. Maybe building oodles of solar power farms and batteries should be "hip"
We built electrical infrastructure to the most remote residences just because we could and because it was an investment in our people. We directly funded our massive and formerly world class rail network because we could, and because it would pay off. We built a world class road network half as a make-work project, and it still pays dividends. We purchased Alaska, with no obvious reason. We built a space program to have slightly better nuclear weapons, and it's part of the reason we were so dominant in computer chips for so long.
We have spent something like 40 trillion dollars over the past 25 years, and almost none of it on anything of real value. More than a little of that debt is just handouts to already rich people.
We can build new electric transmission lines and I'm so tired of things that we absolutely 100% can do if we just demand it be done being somehow treated as a problem. America can afford infrastructure.