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Comment by jtc331 | Hacker News Reader

If the average home was using 10kW constant it be using 240 kWh a day, which is enormously high.

In terms of average usage an average sized home in the US is much closer to 50kWh a day, so roughly 2kW average demand. That would mean 1 MW is enough for 500 homes on average. The one thing that doesn’t is peak demand load, say when everyone gets home from work and turns everything on at the same time or a particularly cold or hot day.

Edit: the average US home uses just shy of 1000 kWh a month, or just over 30 kWh a day.

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I’m really surprised by this data. In Poland, it’s around 2000 kWh/year, which is 6kWh/day - 5 times less!

The USA includes many places where air conditioning uses electricity, and some places where heating uses electricity.

They also have huge and inefficient appliances, but that's probably a smaller impact on the figures.

Ok, but what do you actually use? I have a very small 3-bed house in the UK, and over the last few months we've been averaging 1100-1200kWh of electricity per month(and we heat using gas, although we do have an electric car).

It's not me, I'm talking about average for Polish houselhold

Air conditioning makes up a big part of that, made worse by worse insulation and larger houses.

Of course Poland needs heating, but that doesn't show up in Electricity usage as most people heat with natural gas or oil.

Actually, most people would heat with coal. Natural gas and oil are far less popular.

According to to stat.gov.pl [1] the average Polish household uses ~24.6 GJ of energy annually per 1 inhabitant. That's 6800 kWh annually per 1 inhabitant.

According to eia.gov [2][3] the average US household uses annually 56.6 million BTUs of natural gas and 10500 kWh of electricity. 56.6 million BTUs is 16600 kWh. That would bring the total to 27100 kWh.

But wait...the Polish data is per inhabitant. The average number of people per household in the US is 2.6. Dividing 27100 by 2.6 gives 10400 kWh. Alternatively, the average Polish household is 2.47 people, which would give Polish per household usage of 16800 kWh.

The US does appear to use more energy per household (total or per inhabitant) than Poland, but by a factor of about 1.6, not 5.

[1] https://stat.gov.pl/en/topics/environment-energy/energy/ener...

[2] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=57321

[3] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricit...

Thanks for breaking this down cleanly and providing sources! Greatly appreciated!

Finland is probably like 15000 kWh/year/house (for a new house more like 10000 kWh/year). All the heating of the house & water is done by electricity, though.

8.2 kwh/day for a household in Lithuania, neighbours Poland. Sounds about right.

2022 stats: 3.289 TWh during 2022 consumed, 1.1M households, do the math...

Source: https://www.lrt.lt/naujienos/verslas/4/1887046/litgrid-60-pr...

Last month I used 1402 kwh in Washington State, which is high for me.

2600 sq ft home kept at 71f, electric heat pump, & heat pump water heater, but I had a few holes in the walls for several days due to repairs during the coldest month of the winter so far which messed up my average using electric heaters to backfill the gap.

Obviously, the holes were covered over when not being worked on but it wasn't as air tight as compared to buttoned up and fully insulated as usual.

My power consumption is usually 30 to ~75% of that depending on weather and activity.

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