Tuesday, September 25, 2007

More on Clotheslines

Today's Oregonian says that clothes driers use 6% of U.S. electricity usage. The U.S. uses on average 3.3 Tera Watts, so that's 200 billion Watts just for clothes driers, or an incredible 650 Watts/person. Or 480 kW-hr/month.

If electricity costs 10 cents per kiloWatt-hour, as it does here in Portland, that's $48/month. Per person. Yikes.

That is to say, it's as if each and every one of us were constantly and continually burning six-and-a-half 100 Watt light bulbs just to keep our clothes dry. Every single minute of every day.

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By the way, this same Wikipedia article says that in 1999 computers used 13% of total U.S. electricity consumption, expected to grow to 35-50% by 2020.

UPDATE/CORRECTION: Someone pointed out in the comments that the 6% number for electricity use by clothes dryers is probably of total residential consumption, and that seems to be the case. Here is some EIA data from 2001: 107 million households in that year consumed 1.140 billion kW-hr, or 130 billion Watts, or 0.13 TW. Or only ~5% of total US electricity consumption. That sounds low, but that's what I get. Air-conditioning and refrigeration each accounted for 14% of the US total. Electric clothes dryers consumed 66 B Kw-hr, or 5.8% of total residential usage.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The 6% figure is probably referring to 6% of household consumption. So it's not quite as bad as all that. Still a huge amount of electricity and pollution.