Americans Are No Longer Gluttons for Electricity—Thank the LED Bulb

After increasing 10-fold between 1950 and 2010, average residential consumption dipped

By Jo Craven McGinty of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"In 2017, Americans spent $178 billion on residential electricity, the EIA data show. That works out to about 10% less per household, after accounting for inflation, than residential customers spent in 2010.

The year-to-year changes in consumption aren’t large, and the individual numbers bounce around a bit, but the overall trend is clear: By 2017, electricity use was as low as it had been since the turn of the millennium with an average residence consuming 10.4 megawatt-hours of electricity annually, down from a peak of 11.5 megawatt-hours in 2010."

"None of this means that Americans are turning off their lights.

At the most basic level, the recent decreases were caused by the same thing that led to the past increases: changes in technology."

"But today’s appliances and electronics are more efficient. New homes are tighter and better insulated. And most important, light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, have replaced traditional incandescent lightbulbs.

“No other change is so dramatic,” Dr. Davis said. “When you take an incandescent bulb out and screw in an LED, consumption goes down 80%. Imagine you could get a car that uses 80% less gasoline. That would be amazing.”

With the transition to LEDs, the amount of electricity used for lighting dropped 26% from 2015 to 2017. In raw numbers, that meant consumption slipped from 129.7 million megawatt-hours a year nationwide to 95.5 million megawatt-hours."