> In 2018, California's energy consumption was second-highest among the states, but its per capita energy consumption was the fourth-lowest due in part to its mild climate and its energy efficiency programs.
Source: https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=CA#tabs-4
This is an achievement to be proud of.
I mean I'm all for reducing power consumption, but is having a mild climate an achievement to be proud of? I'd guess that California's main population centers have fewer degree days away from 72 F than any other state in the country. By default, you'd expect their power consumption to be the very lowest.
(The other states close to CA in consumption per capita have much worse climates, but their people live in denser urban centers and have smaller, likely more efficient dwellings.)
I had one tell me that everywhere should put street signs on the roadway itself. Had no concept of what snow was apparently.
Of course, we do also have overhead signs as a backup and for longer-range visibility. But it's more likely that the overhead signs are useless due to a setting sun than that the on-road ones are due to snow. The streets with on-road signs are very high priorities to plow, so the on-road signs are going to be visible unless it's a very bad storm where you probably shouldn't be on the road, and if you are you're probably going home and already know which lanes to be in.
I'm not saying this should be done for every road; it works best for roads known by a number (I-71; US-23; OH-315, etc.) where you don't have to read a long name. But it's not an daft as idea as it might sound.
I'd be very interested in state-to-state comparisons that exclude internal climate control usage.
If southern states spike their watt hours due to aircon, we could say the cause is poor construction/architecture. The poorer the insulation (southern homes' insulation is crap compared to northern) the more you need to pump the aircon. And when homes are not designed for optimal environmental efficiency or passive temp regulation, you can't cool the home well except with more aircon.
(All this also assumes that aircon is some sort of human right. We could learn how to deal with heat without power, the way we had to for the past 300,000 years)
That's not so say they should be discounted, only that each segment of energy consumption should be compared like to like.
By all means, embrace food as eaten by out ancestors, if that's what someone really wants, but they should understand that such diets resulted in malnutrition and stunted growth, and we're "embraced" by our ancestors living on the brink of starvation & lack of choice.
In the long term, humans deal with everything by dying. It's rather inefficient and denotes a tendency to run away from any problem that can't be solved within the ~55 years of an educated human period of productivity. Maybe with a little more grit and resolve to avoid such cowardly tactics as death we would undertake longer term projects.
But as long as humans insist on dying, that is going to be a nearly impossible challenge. It is hard to get a person motivated to take on a high-stakes challenge when they plan on dying before the consequences of inaction impact them.
I propose that all humans make the sensible choice to not die, at least for a century or so longer than their current predilections in this area, to demonstrate their commitment to truly advancing the cause of human kind.
Well, sure, except that the way we dealt with the climate of the American South before air conditioning was by not living there. That is a major reason the South, and not the North, had so many slaves.
We heat with wood and propane but air condition with electricity. Our electricity bill is much higher in the summer.
Insulation can only do so much when the outdoor temperature doesn't drop below 80F for weeks at a time.
I also don't think the world's temperate zones are large enough to facilitate everyone living in climates that have minimal requirements for heating & cooling. Also many areas that require a lot of energy for heating also require very little for cooling, and vice versa: another reason why consumption details are important when evaluating these things.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/science/just-how-much-pow...
That cannot possibly be true. I would love to know how they calculated that.
In New Zealand only about 20% of home electricity is used on electronics. And in the USA it appears to be even lower.
https://www.nzcompare.com/n/power/average-household-electric...
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/what-uses-the-most-energy-h...
Dryers, fridges, heating and lighting are the vast majority of power and they don't use much idle power.
They did ten case studies, and in one they found the highest idle load device was a water recirculation pump and the second was a halogen light being left on 24/7 because no one cared.
If they studied my home they would consider my fish tanks as "idle load," because they are designed to run continuously.
This is not a study of devices in sleep mode. This is a study primarily measuring devices left on, or devices designed to always be on.
> Per research and analysis conducted by the Stanford Sustainable Systems Labs, idle load was 218 watts on average across the 70,000 homes in PG&E’s service territory. We estimated the always-on share of this idle load to be 164 watts.
Then they go on to say:
> ALWAYS-ON, 23% Continuous loads
> ACTIVE, 77% Variable loads, including heating and cooling, lighting, and actively used appliances
So their definition of idle load includes things like heating/cooling, wtf? Then they guesstimate that 23% of that is always-on load (continuous load) where do they get than number from?
[0] https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/home-idle-load-IP.p...
Turns out, a LOT of people live in CA.
Even then, it was at most a few weeks total. Annoying as hell, but probably not enough to really move the needle. Wish we could have had autonomous solar (but while renting, that wasn’t an option). Best I could do was a portable panel to recharge phones/power banks for the evening.
California's energy mix tends to be low due to a lack of both a heavy heating (northern climates) and cooling (southern / south-eastern) load. Housing stock has been notoriously inefficient in insulation, though newer construction gains on that.
Major usage has been in transportation. Sprawl'll do that to ya.
LLNL has historical energy usage charts, and began breaking that out by state sometime since the 1990s (possibly only in the 2000s / 2010s). History since 2010 is readily available here there's also an archive though you've got to hunt for it:
https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/commodities/energy
US EIA have 2019 data, but no trend-over-time. The map clearly shows that high per-capita energy usage is concentrated in states with either weather extremes, a large rural population, or both:
https://www.eia.gov/state/rankings/#/series/12
Intersting, New York is directly after California in per-capita usage. Rhode Island just edges out both.
A 2013 NRDC report shows that CA's per-capita usage has been flat since roughly 1980, whilst the rest of the US has increased. I suspect much of that growth is due to population increases in the South, with growing cooling load.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130714131300/http://www.nrdc.o...
Charts here: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/California-Is-P...
There may well be a case to be made that California's accomplished significant progress in energy efficiency. But I've a strong suspicion that what we're looking at instead is credit-claiming where not particularly due, based on dominant other factors. That's unfortunately rather common in this space, in both senses of the word.
Percent industrial and transportation use in the low states:
Rhode Island is 42.7%
California: 62.5%
New York: 41.4%
Florida: 50.9%
And the high states:
Wyoming: 79.4%
Louisiana: 86.5%
North Dakota: 73.7%
Alaska: 82.9%
Iowa: 72.5%
Texas: 76.1%
You're basing that on this https://www.eia.gov/state/seds/data.php?incfile=/state/seds/...
Also, much of the industrial use seems likely to be energy-industry related. I'm presuming: Wyoming (coal), Louisiana (oil), North Dakota (fracked natural gas), Alaska (oil), Texas (oil and gas).
Or it may be electric power. These states' energy use is dominated by coal, and see Table 26 which bundles "industrial" and "power generation": https://www.eia.gov/coal/annual/pdf/table26.pdf
Texas is the only high-population state listed.
Note that small states have lower per-capita efficiencies across the board, though yes, those specific states have high industrial/transport usage. Note that per-capita variance in smaller states tends to be higher than large ones regardless (more of them, smaller populations, more opportunity for outliers).
How can we know how far California has come when the citation only has a single point in time referenced? What was the per capita consumption before 2018?
When I visited Hawaii long ago, typical homes were not even sealed. There'd be a large gap between the top of the walls and the roof. The idea was to let the breeze blow through. The air temperature never varied enough to make it worth installing an HVAC system.
Or, put differently, rates are high exactly because California per-capita usage is low -- fewer kWh across which to amortize costs.
Importantly, while California rates are relatively high, customer's bills are not -- because the customers use less electricity.
Also, net metering and widespread consumer generation (largely solar) means that the fixed infrastructure costs are actually amortized not across the low total energy usage, but across a fraction of the total, already low, usage.
Clearly you have never dealt with SDG&E, home of the highest residential electricity rates in the country. And yes that translates to astronomical electricity bills for households